IM Roadmap

Here’s one for you:

2005 article from Mortgage Banker magazine: Desktop video conferencing as a marketing tool for mortgage lenders.

OK, no it didn’t “cause” the meltdown.  Still, brings a chuckle…

Interesting to note the negative unintended consequences of social networking technology like Twitter.  In this case Twitter is being criticized for encouraging poorly informed but rapid transmission of information.  And interesting parallel of thought viruses tracking biological viruses.

Cheers,
Eric

Admittedly, I’m still a bit of a snob when it comes to persistent, text-based, group chat.  Text is still the most functional.  And since I haven’t ranted on it in a while …

• My usual gripes are that you can’t conference with as many people as you can on telephone, or especially on group chat.  So, for group collaboration it’s inferior. Group text chat, in particular, has the advantage of not allowing for “blocking effects” that you can get on video, phone or even in person.
• It doesn’t capture, in a machine searchable way, the contents of a meeting.  So, you have to have a scribe/minute-taker.  So, it’s inferior and more expensive than group chat, news groups and email.
• And ok, yeah, so you can see the other person, and gauge their body language and other non-verbal cues.  If the video is of sufficient resolution and frame-rate.  And yes, research shows that during in-person conversations most communications are non-verbal anyway.  I’ve seen the research and I’ll buy it.   BUT…. what’s the fidelity of that non-verbal comms?  It would be interesting to see a study done on how much non-verbal communications actually gets transmitted faithfully over a video conference link.  There’s got to be some threshold (frame rate, resolution) at which non-verbal cue quality drops off.

For example ….  If video quality is 18 frames per second, resolution is VGA or worse,  and the other person’s face is poorly lit and taking up only 1/4-1/3 of the frame – are you even capturing all the sidelong glances and other expressions that we think we’re getting?

Cheers,
Eric

No, not “right” as in conservative vs. liberal.  “Right” as in “inalienable right.”  The Freedom to Hive.  I was thumbing through the new copy of Wired Magazine which just arrived today.  There’s an article on how game designers are working to foil the “wisdom of crowds.”  I flipped past the page, as I am not a big gamer.  But, something caught me and I turned back.  It started a train of thought.  I confess to not having read the article yet – I need to get this down uncontaminated.  Follow me here for a moment ….

I presume the author is referring to the practice of many gamers to subvert in-game challenges by soliciting help, both indirect (“how do I defeat the monster on level 9?”) and direct (multiple players collaborating in-game to solve a problem).

This is an extension of what people use the internet for every day.  Earlier today I googled how to fix something on my old car, and found newgroup postings from others with similar questions.  Elsewhere, the business models of folks like Amazon, Ask.com and especially Google are all built on the wisdom of crowds.

To old farts like me there is still a tinge of novelty to this.  “Ooo!  I’m not the only one trying to keep a 10 year old beater like mine still going!  Wow, that guy’s even has the same velour seats!”.  In all seriousness, though, think of our kids, and our future grand-kids for a moment.  They will know nothing different.  Pervasive collaboration, coordination and information sharing will be enmeshed in their learning, in their play, and ultimately in their work.   Collaboration to the point where it ceases to be a conscious choice.   Two thoughts follow:

1. Collaboration will be pervasive to the point where it is no longer value-add, but assumed.  Like freedom of choice or freedom of association.   What would we call this?  Freedom to Hive?  Sounds silly.  But, collaboration already is essentially frictionless today.  That will continue as technology improves and costs decline.  Take education.  With collaboration so pervasive outside school, will it become an expectation within the school?  Education is still fundamentally based on individual performance.  Working together on a test today is (usually) considered cheating.  In the future will it instead be unjust to grade on individual merit?
2. Paradoxically, in the future individual success will be achieved through the use of the collective.  In a way this has, of course, always been true.  But the pace and granularity of and emphasis on such collaborations are shifting.  More collaborations are happening.  They are more frequent.  And each collaborative transaction will be smaller and smaller (witness the evolution from blogs to microblogs like Twitter).

Additional Reading:

• Steven Johnson touches on the flipside of this toward the end of his book Emergence.  After living with games like The Sims, WoW, etc. how will the future’s adults approach, and influence, complex systems?  Good book – time to reread it.
• The new science of networks is relevant, and probably more than just at the edges.  Decent primer:  Duncan Watts’ Six Degrees.

Maybe this old classic was wrong after all, and the kids do need to be playing games to get their competitive edge.

Cheers,
Eric

For some reason, it just occurred to me that the difficulty in collaborating when “not in person” is a bit like five year olds at play.  My son doesn’t like talking with his friends on the phone.  Of course not, he’s only five after all.  To play effectively he feels he must be over at his playmate’s house, the friend at our house, both at the park, etc.  For five year olds, playing is no fun unless you’re in the sandbox together.

For too many adults, collaboration is not practical when you’re not in the conference room together.

Replace “house” with “office”, “playmate” with “colleague” and you get the picture ….  What’s worse is that we make these decisions unconciously.  To collaborate effectively at a distance requires deliberate, conscious decisions to do so, and constant effort.

Patent #7,512,655, aka “System and method for managing information and collaborating” was  granted by the US Patent Office on March 31.  Congradulations to all my former colleagues.  My part in that effort was small, but it was a huge honor to work with such an amazing team of technologists.

It took almost 10 years, but it finally came through.  Congrats guys.

Cheers,
Eric

You know – for all the advances in collaboration technology over the years, it’s still a d*mn challenge to collaborate at a distance.  Even worse than physical distance, are distant timezones.  And the competition for those scant overlapping time slots.  When you are separated by distance, you miss out on watercooler conversations, quick “FYI’s” from colleagues about the someone’s mood or an interesting/important visitor.  You miss out on the general vibe, color and mood of the workplace.

When you are separated by timezones, there is fierce competition for those few hours when “your” timezone and “their” timezone overlap.  It’s no coincidence that Outlook calendars around global businesses are booked solid daily from 8 am to noon New York time (1pm to 5pm London).  So… you need to get through to that important stakeholder in London – but you are booked solid during those time slots?   And they are booked solid during those time slots?  They’re free at that time in two weeks, but that’s too far out.  You need to speak with them sooner.  What to do?  The inevitable:  Your day inches earlier another half hour to catch an open timeslot.  Then maybe another hour.  Then folks in your time zone start doing the same thing.  Then folks across the pond start suggesting earlier and earlier meeting times because they see you’re willing to meet then, and because it’s the only time slot.  It’s like an arms race.

Recall my earlier musings the use of chat for the remote worker… well …. just to show that that’s not the only dead horse I beat, here’s another, non-chat/IM suggestion for when working from home/remote. Get yourself a mimio whiteboard capture tool. No need to buy the $1000 fancy new ones at retail. You can get an old serial-based model on ebay for $50 and they still work just fine. Put yourself a regular ol’ whiteboard in your home office. Attach the mimio and calibrate it. Aim a webcam also at the whiteboard. Lassoo the whiteboard session in the mimio software with VNC or LiveMeeting, and then “broadcast” your whiteboarding session to your colleagues/customers across the net. Oh – and a speaker phone, which I’m assuming most everyone has these days now anyway.

The mimio gives excellent high-resolution fidelity of your drawing, and captures it digitally. LiveMeeting makes it possible for others to see it in real time. The webcam session, which you’re also broadcasting in parallel, adds an important spatial dimension. You can point to areas on the whiteboard, gesture, etc. and your audience is right there with you. For under $100 you’ve just built a very inexpensive and effective collaboration/presentation solution.

Cheers,
Eric

We’ve all seen these articles before ….. The perils, pitfalls, pros and cons of working from home or working from the office. The temptations cited by some commentators, such as sleeping in or slacking off in front of the TV, I would say are not <ahem> location-oriented problems. Rather those are personnel-oriented problems.

In all seriousness, the important discussion is on the unique tools required to ensure maximum productivity and optimum customer service whether from the office, home, or otherwise remote from your constituencies. Consistent with the subject of this weblog, persistent group chat (PGC) is a powerful adhesive for remote and far flung teams. PGC enables members to communicate as a team would – in a forum. Vanilla IM (such as consumer apps for the unwashed masses) only lets you do 1:1’s or trivially small groups. Imagine the power of having your entire department, plus internal customers, in 4 cities across 3 time zones all online. Collaborating. With, oh yeah, a free transcript of the session captured automatically and with zero effort (where your EIM/chat client supports logging).

I’ve seen this take a major leap of faith for some people. And it can take adjustment – taking what was previously verbal and tacit and taking the small extra effort to type it up. But group chat is a huge productivity multiplier, and worth the shift.

Cheers,
Eric