IM Roadmap

Peter Kirwan over at Wired has put up a great little piece discussing Facebook’s potential corporate trajectory, and comparing it both to Google today and Microsoft of the 1990′s.  He opens with an observation about social “nudging” and the pervasiveness of logging in to random website xyz using your FaceBook account.  But Kirwan contends that those are more cynical insights into how Facebook views its users.  A couple of key quotes:

• “On the ad-funded web, it’s essential that users behave in a way that’s lucrative.”
• “Does Mark Zuckerberg understand that his company’s future increasingly depends not so much on its ability to churn out killer code, but on its ability to treat users right?”

Short, but thought-provoking article.  Check it out.

Cheers,
Eric

Noticed something interesting … a couple of days ago I posted about an upcoming collaboration conference in November.   They’ll be doing a pecha kucha (pronounced pa-chuch-ka) session on Enteprise 2.0 solutions (see middle of here).  If you have never seen a pecha kucha session, I highly recommend it.  No dreary PowerPoint presentations, no boring sales drones.  It’ll open your eyes to a whole new type of presenting.    There are some examples up on YouTube, and open-mic-style presentations in many cities.  Check ‘em out.

Cheers,
Eric

Head-on over to Mashable’s quick update on the new Twitter web UI changes.  Long-story short, the UI is getting incrementally more like Facebook.  For good or bad.  Twitter appears to be trying to drive more traffic to their real-estate, and thus get more eyeballs in front of advertising.  This is consistent with stuff we’re seeing separately with various formerly free mobile Twitter clients now being for purchase only.  Twitter is getting more aggressive about revenue generation, which is good.

NB:  check out the video above too.  Nice use of the visual bird mnemonic.

Cheers,
Eroc

Interesting event coming up for folks in the Santa Clara area, hosted by the good folks at TechWeb:  “Use Collaboration to Drive Business Value: Invite HR, Sales and Marketing.”  Agenda includes:

• Business Tools and Technology Decisions: Learn about the latest in social and collaborative applications and communications technologies, and how to deal with complex challenges around integration, performance, security and compliance.
• Community Development and Management: Seasoned practitioners explore both the tactical and strategic elements of community development and management both inside your organization and with your extended network of partners and customers.
• HR Technology Strategies: Discuss how to leverage Enterprise 2.0 – your people – and how to realize business value by building on existing technology foundations to transition into a more connected and aware culture and organization.
• Social CRM: Look at how Enterprise 2.0 enables organizations to accelerate organizational performance by responding to critical customer support, innovation, and sales and marketing opportunities.

November 8-11 in Santa Clara.

Cheers,
Eric

One of the early and (formerly) most popular RSS readers is to be shuttered.   The way we consume, and propogate, news continues to evolve under the pressure of social networking tools like FaceBook and Twitter.  Blogline to be closed down 1 October.  If you still love RSS, now’s a good time to migrate your feeds.

Cheers,

Eric

Microsoft has announced that they will no longer be investing in the “Kin” mobile phone platform.  CRN has an excellent analysis of Microsoft’s mistakes and lessons from this.   One take-away I found is the theme that the device success, and hence its design follow the expectations and experiences of users with respect to social media.  Connecting with other users, of course, and also the expectation of myriad and bountiful apps to support all flavors and combinations of said connecting.

Again, we are reminded that the device is merely a vessel for the interactions desired by the users.  Or, extending the logic to the enterprise, the device or application is merely a means to the behaviors and interactions the organization wants to enable and promote.  Note:  This relates to the notion of Collaboration Patterns (aka, Chat Patterns).  More on that to follow.

Cheers,

Eric

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

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

I came across some notes for a course I took once on journalism and the media. A survey course of sorts. Part of the early portion of the class dealt with the obligatory coverage of the history of journalism. One thing that strikes you is that pretty much anyone was a “reporter.”  News was collected and reported by word of mouth (you could make a good argument that web logs and social media bring us that back).

So this got me wondering. Has mass media help change our interpersonal interaction in such a way as to undermine or diminish “self-reporting?” When we as individuals all watch “the news”, are we somehow collectively absolved of a social responsibility to “report” the news ourselves?

Perhaps this is just another way of saying the same old obvious stuff, but technologies like weblogs and, yes, chat/IM, provide an outlet for such “reporting” – whether within an organization or amongst private individuals.

Cheers,
Eric