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

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

Livestreaming of TEDx Charlotte

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

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