IM Roadmap

Nearly Half of Americans Use Facebook; Only 7% Use Twitter [STUDY].

I Want My AJZ – Twitter Media.  the Al Jazeera team has demonstrated something remarkable: used in a particular way, Twitter can be a TV distribution platform, too.

Twitter’s Response to WikiLeaks Subpoena Should Be the Industry Standard | Threat Level | Wired.com.

“… the company successfully challenged the gag order in court, and then told the targets that their data was being requested, giving them time to try and quash the order themselves.”

An old friend posted a month or so ago a valid lament – where are all the great new web innovations?  Facebook, Twitter and others are solidly in monetization mode now, and as Nick points out this is probably a pretty good indicator of maturity.  In other words:  kinda boring.

I don’t know what the next new new web thing is going to be, but I can hazard a couple of guesses for things that are coming, given trends social and technological.

1. Highly immersive and natural interfaces. I think we are the on threshold of some very interesting hardware mashups.  Take 3D displays, gesture-based devices, natural user interfaces, and pervasively embedded sensors.  Imagine a Microsoft Kinect-type device, with 3D CAVE-like projections on your walls, seamlessly integrated with high-fidelity video conferencing software.  Example:  Across from you would be your colleagues in a distant office, and to your right a projection of your Shanghai factory floor, and floating in front of all of you a giant, 3D, exploded CAD diagram of a faulty machine in that factory.
2. The Enterprise IT Village. In part, this is the pervasive diffusion of tools and solution development amongst employees of an enterprise.  We’ll all be building apps without even realizing it – dropping gadgets onto Jive pages and embedding training videos inside corporate employee wikis.  But also a fundamental change in the relationship of IT employees to corporate management, to each other, and to the profit center.  We need to move away from thinking that “official” enterprise IT has a monopoly on application development.  Those of us in IT should be helping our fellow IT’ers the way Google, Amazon, Facebook and others vend APIs to their users.
3. Sensors on … everything. I need to dig out the article, but I think it was Communications of the ACM had some statistics a few months ago.  There are going to be billions upon billions of sensor- and telemetry-linked devices and artifacts out in the world.  RFID, Bluetooth, mobile phones, etc etc.   Throw stuff like the Microsoft Tag in there too.   How will the physical and digital blur and interact?  Microsoft Surface only barely scratches the, er, surface.
4. Pervasive, low-cost 3D printing. Think of what this will do for collaborative prototyping, and trinket delivery.  Any other parents out there with Silly Bandz all over the house?.  ‘nuf said.
5. Augmented Reality.  If you haven’t seen it before, check out how McDonalds created an augmented reality game based on the film Avatar.   I played with it – it was a little rough, but decidedly promising.   Standardized tools and protocols could enable a rash of development.  Use it for training, product assembly instructions, remote troubleshooting, ….

OK – I guess I broke somewhat with Nick’s original thesis.  These aren’t purely new web things.  But, there are two themes from these.

• First, our digital lives will interact more fluidly (and invasively) with our physical lives, and vice versa.  Start imagining how some of the above technologies could be integrated….
• Second, the next step change in enterprise innovation will come when we are developing, sharing and trading tools, widgets and data for our peers in an ad-hoc, collaborative fashion for the good of the employee community.

Cheers,
Eric

Technorati Tags: Collaboration, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Video Conferencing, twitter, facebook

This news is a few days old, but have been meaning to put this up online.  A recent study, discussed over at Wired, has shown that seven out of every 10 tweets elicit absolutely no reaction in the twitterverse.  From anyone.  Anywhere.  This was written about in other forums as well, and you could imagine the collective gasps from the twitter fan-boys and fan-girls.  “What?  Twitter is ignored?  It can’t be?!  It might be, wait, no, not that, not …. irrelevant?!?!?!?!”  OK – I’m exaggerating.   But you can get the impression from some of the reporting that there is an element of shock and dismay over the low signal-to-noise ratio of content on Twitter.  However, I think there are some important things to consider:

• Just because it wasn’t retweeted doesn’t mean it wasn’t read.

 

• How much of anything is ignored?  Most of it, undoubtedly.  Let’s face it – most things are just noise to most people.  We only pay close attention to our own favorite sports teams.  I’m not an accountant, so I don’t read accounting blogs.   We only listen to politicians we already agree with.  Etc etc.

 

So, the portion of tweets that are read, but not retweeted, is probably higher.  And it’s not clear how much it actually matters.  For example, is retweet frequency correlated with a stickier twitter experience, thus driving more ad revenue?  I think we should be more impressed that almost 1/3 of tweets are retweeted, etc. – that’s an impressive rate of information dissemination.  Could CNN, FOX News, or the BBC similarly claim that 30% of the news you watch you go and tell your friends and family about right afterwards?  Probably not.  I suspect most media outlets would kill for that rate of free retransmission.

Now – think on this. … What would the retweet/forwarding rate would be for an internal enterprise social hub – such as something built with Jive or Yammer.  Better?  Worse?  What information would you, as enterprise management, want to disseminate that way.  What would be the stochastic models for the likely audience penetration?

Something to noodle on.

Cheers,
Eric

PS – video from the Wired article above – illustrating the retweet behavior.  Explanation at the Wired article – but check it out first and see if anything jumps out at you.

Technorati tags:social media, Twitter

We have another study out, this time from Northwestern University, dispelling some of the common thinking about Twitter.  Conventional wisdom has been that celebrity tweeters can have a disproportionally high impact on the volume and sentiment of trending topics.  NU’s new research shows that celebrities only have an acretive impact on Twitter trends when the subject is something about which they have expertise.  So, Ashton Kutcher is only influential about acting, Hollywood, etc.

If you dig in to their website, Pulse of the Tweeters, you can see live analysis of trending Twitter topics, who the most influential users are, and the general Positive/Negative/Neutral sentiment within that trend.  I had the opportunity to do some work with text mining and sentiment analysis about ten years ago – very interesting stuff. There remained an element of subjectivity and context assumption in the examples of that time.  It would be interesting to see how much the algorithms have improved over the last decade.

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

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