My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 112108

November 22, 2008 by 3 Comments

From the home office in Manila, Philippines…

#1: “If a mind is always open, it never finishes anything. If it’s always closed, it never starts.” – Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation

#2: @pico On FriendFeed? Attention on FriendFeed (for non A-Listers) is driven by: being interactive + decent-to-great content.

#3: Observation: E2.0 crowd is much more active on Twitter than FriendFeed: (1) established connections, (2) conversations, (3) broadcast.

#4: @pico It’s kind of a parallel to enterprise 2.0 in general. E2.0 tracks what happens in Web 2.0, with a 2 year delay. Web 2.0 is the filter.

#5: Just showed my colleague how I’ve got my FriendFeed Enterprise 2.0 List up on my monitor via real-time. His reaction? “Gotta show me how!”

#6: Reading: Why doesn’t anyone care about HP? http://bit.ly/16dEB

#7: @jeffmann The Gartner MQ for social software available in full without registration here: http://bit.ly/gs6dH

#8: Preso best practice = mostly pix, few words. Great for in-person presentations. But Slideshare versions lose context w/ single word slides.

#9: Wow, now my LinkedIn profile is pimped out with my blog posts and Slideshare. Really, really cool what LinkedIn is doing.

#10: RT @THE_REAL_SHAQ Sittin next to steve nash, tryna get hi to join twitter >> Twitter’s viral nature is everywhere…

*****

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Follow Everything by a Select Few, Select Content by Everyone

November 17, 2008 by 9 Comments

Item #1: Fred Wilson tweet:

@timoreilly i want to follow less people and more keywords in my twitter timeline. can’t wait for summize to get integrated into twitter

Item #2: Adam Lasnik FriendFeed post:

I switched over to reading mostly a ‘subgroup’ (“Favorites”) on FF, and was missing the serendipity of new voices. One way I’ve remedied that is to do searches on some of my favorite things (“a cappella”, “lindy hop”, etc.) and see who and what comes up.

Item #3: Steve Gillmor blog post:

A small number of Follows combined with Track produces a high degree of coverage on a daily basis.

The three items above share a common theme…limit the number of people you follow. At first, this sounds obvious. Isn’t that what people normally would do? Well no, it’s not. In social networks, there’s a dynamic whereby people tend to return the favor when someone follows them. This build up your follows over time.  As Louis Gray noted in a recent post:

While you might be following thousands of people and making new “friends” on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, FriendFeed and all the other networks, you would likely hesitate before sending them an open invitation to your home.

“Thousands of people” I’m doing it: following 1,000+ people on FriendFeed, 600+ on Twitter. For seeing a broad range of information and opinion sources, it’s great to track so many people.

But there is a big downside. Much of what I see doesn’t interest me. The greater the number of people you follow, the more content you will see that falls outside your areas of interest. Putting this into attention terms, for any given minute you spend on a site, what is the probability you will see something that interests you?

It’s an odd phenomenon. I actually like that I’m following a lot of people, because it increases the number of instances where something that interests me will go by on my screen. But it affects the rate at which something interesting goes by. As you follow people that stretch outside your core interests, their streams do have a higher percentage of stuff that you don’t care about. And the overall probability of seeing content that interests you declines.

I want to differentiate this idea from Dunbar’s number, which describes limits on people’s ability to maintain inter-personal relationships. I’m not talking inter-personal relationships. I’m talking information foraging.

What Are You Trying to Get from Your Social Media

I enjoy following people that stream content outside my normal range of interests, such as Anna Haro on FriendFeed. It’s important to step outside the things that regularly occupy you, if you want to grow.

But the three items above show there is another rationale for people to participate in social media. Rather than seek content outside their interests, they want a concentrated dose. Personally, I’m finding I need this professionally. The Enterprise 2.0 space (my field) is fluid, and undergoing the stress of the global recession. Tracking the news, ideas, perspectives, trends and relationships is critical. For example, the microblogging trend (e.g. Yammer) is new and I’m interested in seeing how that plays out.

If you can see the point of that social media use case, you can understand the value of this idea:

Follow everything by a select few, select content by everyone

As I noted in my last blog post, I’m tracking everything for a select group of Enterprise 2.0 people, and keywords/tags for everyone.

In terms of the three items with which I started this post, Fred Wilson describes this approach. Adam Lasnik isn’t too far away. His manual searches for “a cappella”, “lindy hop”, etc. could be turned into persistent searches to find new content and people. Steve Gillmor is a little more of the social media whale philosophy, where he only wants to follow a specific set of users and then interact with the @replies on Twitter. But even Steve could add keyword tracking via a FriendFeed Room as a way to improve his daily “coverage”.

Will This Trend Grow?

I’m a fan of this use case. It fits my needs professionally. It’s almost like I have my 9-to-5 social media, and then my nighttime social media.

I suspect this use case will make more and more sense as social media expands its mainstream footprint. Information workers are the ones who will be most interested. The hardest part is figuring out which keyword/tags to follow, what sites to track and what mechanism to use for this tracking. I’d argue FriendFeed with its Rooms and Lists is perfect for this, but certainly there are other ways.

One final thought. If this trend takes hold out in the wider market, I can see people practicing a little SEO on their content. Get those hash tags in your tweets to make sure Fred Wilson will see your content (if he ever reveals what he tracks).

For kicks, I’m curious what you think of this idea. Please take a second to answer the poll below. If you’re reading this via RSS, click out to participate in the poll.

*****

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Workplace Productivity vs. Tracking the “Flow”

November 14, 2008 by 10 Comments

I mentioned in an earlier blog post that at Defrag last week, Stowe Boyd gave a presentation on following a cascade of information, a flow. While I couldn’t attend his presentation, what I heard from others was that Stowe argued that there are no limits on people’s attention. They can get work done and track information in real-time simultaneously. It is all a matter of training.

A common opinion I heard from others was that this was BS. Workers have things to get done, and cannot spend their time watching a ticker of information going by.

I know there are dedicated social media/blogging types who do swim in the cascade of information via apps like Twirl, Tweetdeck and other clients. It makes sense for these folks – they live a life of staying up-to-date on what other social media types are talking about, and engaging others in real-time conversations.

But does that fly inside the workplace? It’s hard to imagine your average worker watching a constant stream of information. (a) They likely don’t care. (b) It seems to imperil their productivity.

Yet should information workers care about what’s happening in their field? And does this flow really affect their productivity?

I’m not one of those with an Adobe Air client feeding me updates from Twitter and FriendFeed. I’m generally resistant to client-based apps, and I don’t feel the need to track the flows so much. But on FriendFeed, I found myself continually going back to the site to check my Enterprise 2.0 List. This list consists of entries from the Enterprise 2.0 Room plus the feeds of a number of people who are active in the space.

Well if I’m going to constantly go back to that List on FriendFeed, why not bring the real-time updates to me? So I’ve been experimenting with running my Enterprise 2.0 List in real-time on my work computer this week.

Getting Work Done and Enjoying the Flow

Here’s a picture of my screen, with a Word document open to the left, and FriendFeed real-time opened in a mini window to the right:

working-while-tracking-the-flow

I have two screens at my desk. A flat screen monitor, and my laptop screen. The graphic above is from the monitor, which is big enough to allow two windows.

Here are a few thoughts about adding flow to my daily work.

I already have an ADD work style: I’m probably not alone in this. Since way back when I was a banker writing client pitches and offering memoranda, I have a hard time writing something straight through over the course of an hour. I just can’t do it. I’ll write something, then a I need a break. I don’t know why that is. If I trudge through the writing without break, the quality suffers.

Thus the real-time updates are a welcome break as I write.

The pace of updates isn’t too fast: Not that FriendFeed real-time couldn’t handle it. There are 33 people in my Enterprise 2.0 List currently (the Enterprise 2.0 Room is one of them). They tweet a lot, rarely interact on FriendFeed, post blogs and share/bookmark articles. The pace of updates seems to average once every couple minutes, with a decent-sized standard deviation.

If I had real-time up for my FriendFeed home page, where I’m tracking over 1,000 people, I imagine the movement in the screen to the right would be constant. That would be too distracting.

I feel more on top of my game: Let’s talk about the reason you’d track the flow. By having this up, I’ve got a really good sense about the ideas, arguments, conferences, information and relationships that are going on out in the Enterprise 2.0 world. Professionally, I’ve never been so aware of the goings-on. A lot of this I feed back internally here at Connectbeam.

I also love seeing the @reply tweets of the people I’m following on real-time. I’m finding more interesting people to follow on Twitter as a result. Some of these folks end up on my Enterprise 2.0 List.

I’m still getting my work done: And this is the crux of the experiment. I’m still getting work done while that real-time window is up.

There Are Limits to Our Attention, But I’m Not Approaching Those

Probably the single biggest factor that’s making this flow thing work for me is that I’m not bombarded with an update every second. I think the Defrag attendees who thought Stowe was talking crazy probably were thinking about one update-per-second type of flows. If that was the case, then yes, it’s a mistake to try this.

But a more limited flow built on a select group of people and a feed of keywords is quite manageable. And actually really beneficial.

*****

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Social Media “Glue” and Gnip’s Co-opetition with FriendFeed

November 12, 2008 by 7 Comments

We believe that enabling web technologies are going through a similar development cycle as enterprise application integration technology did 10+ years ago. Companies are creating tools, applications and platforms to enable more productive and automated uses of resources that have become ubiquitous parts of the online ecosystem. We think about these enabling technologies as the glue that will increasingly hold together that ecosystem.

Seth Levine, Foundry Group

Venture capital firm Foundry Group, which includes partner Brad Feld, described an important investment theme for their firm. Titled Theme: Glue, the thesis is that the growing number of web services and content-generating sites are causing increased complexity, and that there is a need for an infrastructure to handle all this.

This can seem a bit dry (“I know this back end plumbing stuff is boring to most of you”, as Michael Arrington says), but its relevance is can be considered in the context of:

Foundry’s thesis extends beyond server-load management. But its initial investment in Gnip starts on that part of the “Glue” story.

The Problem Gnip Solves

The rise of user generated content has made this problem particularly acute. We’re creating so much content, all over the place. Flickr, Del.icio.us, Digg, YouTube, Twitter, WordPress.com, Google Reader, etc. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff!

It turns out a lot of other sites want to consume this stuff – FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse, Strands, SocialMedian and many, many other sites. And the direction for production and consumption of all this content is only going one way –> up.

The problem that arises is the way consuming services, such as FriendFeed, have had to find out if you’ve got a new tweet, blog post, Digg, etc. The consuming services need to ping every individual user’s account on some site, such as Flickr,  with the query, “got anything new?” For most people, the answer is no. But that query is the cause of a lot of traffic and latency. Imagine all these new web services pinging en masse all the UGC sites. It can be quite a load to handle. In Twitter’s case, it was too much to handle.

Gnip addresses this issue, standing between UGC sites and consuming sites:

gnip-flowThe UGC sites (aka producers) push updates for their various users to Gnip. These updates are either change notifications, or full content for each user. So Gnip becomes the reference layer for anything occurring for a UGC site’s users.

The consuming sites then look to Gnip as a “single throat to choke” in terms of updates. Gnip handles the updates, and gets them out to consuming sites in real-time. Gnip also removes the burden on consuming sites to write and maintain polling scripts for all the various UGC sites of users.

The idea is a good one, as it offloads a lot of the burden for both producers and consumers. Of course, it shines a light on Gnip’s scalability and uptime stats.

Initial consuming sites using Gnip include:

Gnip is off to a nice start. But what about FriendFeed?

FriendFeed’s Ex-Googlers Roll Their Own

FriendFeed is one of those consuming sites. But they’ve not signed on for Gnip so far. Not surprising, considering their Google background. Lots of good knowledge about scalability to be learned from Google.

Rather than sign on to Gnip’s service, Friendfeed has proposed the simple update protocol (SUP). What’s SUP?

SUP (Simple Update Protocol) is a simple and compact “ping feed” that web services can produce in order to alert the consumers of their feeds when a feed has been updated.

The idea is that the UGC sites provide a single point for posting notifications of new user activities. Rather than the consuming sites running the “got anything new?” query for every single user on their platform, they go to a single place to see what’s new. They have a list of the user IDs they want to check, which they run against the SUP location. Much more efficient.

Which does sound a little like Gnip, doesn’t it? Here’s a Q&A between Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb and FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit:

RWW: [Where is this relative to] Gnip? (See our coverage of Gnip, a startup that appears to be aiming to do what SUP will do and more.)

Buchheit: We’re talking with several companies about supporting SUP, but aren’t ready to announce anything.

On the TechCrunch post about Gnip 2.0, commenter Nikolay Kolev writes:

Even if I like Gnip’s concept a lot at this moment, I think it’s just a temporary solution of the real problem. It solves deficiencies of the vast majority of the data producers nowadays, yes, but if more implement XMPP PubSub, FriendFeed SUP and other similar technologies, there will be less incentives for data consumers to make their business rely on a single provider that supposedly aggregates and replicates all of the Web…

On FriendFeed, user Dani Radu writes this in response to Gnip:

pretty interesting, I mean making all this data handling drop dead simple is great – but this means they want to cache and route the direction of interest. Own the process and sell it. Again, perfectly sane – but I’d rather go for the SUP (simple update protocol) which in a way – if adopted widely – does the same but keeps the handling free (as free as the services are anyway) We shall see what future brings tho…

The Gnip vs. SUP question came up on Hacker News, which included this exchange with FriendFeed’s Paul Buchheit:

ryanwaggoner: Isn’t this what Gnip is doing, except that Gnip’s solution is readily available to anyone who wants it? In fact, I believe Gnip uses XMPP to push notifications to data consumers, which seems even more efficient. Am I missing something?

paul: No, Gnip is a complementary service and will likely consume SUP. SUP is intended to make it easier for feed publishers to expose information about which feeds have been updated. Without this information, Gnip can’t know when feeds have updated except by polling all of them. SUP allows them to poll a single URL instead.

ryanwaggoner: Got it. So this is designed to be the piece that allows publishers to easily integrate with intermediate services like Gnip, or with aggregation services like FF, SocialThing, etc.

paul: Exactly

Paul’s right, but the earlier comments are also right. Gnip may want to get updates for its UGC producing sites using SUP. But there’s truth to the idea that if producers offer SUP, some of the value proposition of Gnip is eroded.

Gnip: More Than Real-Time Updates

But Gnip appears to provide a range of services above and beyond simple update notifications. My guess is that those extra services Gnip provides above and beyond providing a single place to get notifications will be their secret sauce.

On the Gnip blog, product head Shane Pearson writes the four use cases on which Gnip is focused:

  1. Eliminate the need for developers to write dozens of pollers for UGC sites, all of which must be maintained and updated
  2. Target business specific applications that need this data. There may be interesting functional or vertical application that SUP won’t cover.
  3. Offload the overhead on UGC producers’ sites (which sounds like SUP). But beyond that, create an alternative channel for their content, provide analytics on the data consumed through Gnip ,and add filters an d target endpoints.
  4. Use Gnip as a source of market research and brand analysis for what consumers are saying about companies.

So what you see here is that the developer world sees SUP competition in the infrastructure part of Gnip. Gnip is looking beyond the developer world in terms of where it delivers value.

I wouldn’t be surprised if other companies enter the mix. “Glue” is an early, interesting space right now.

*****

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Defrag 2008 Notes – Picasso, Information Day Trading, Stowe “The Flow” Boyd

November 7, 2008 by 1 Comment

defrag-logo

One of the most consistently provocative conferences I attended last year — my own Money:Tech 2008 aside, of course — was Eric Norlin’s Defrag conference. Oodles of interesting people, lots of great conversation and all of it aimed at one of my favorite subjects: How we cope with the information tsunami.

Paul Kedrosky, Defrag 2008 Conference

I spent two days out in Denver earlier this week at Defrag 2008 with Connectbeam. As Kedrosky notes above, the conference is dedicated to managing the increasing amount of information we’re all exposed to. Now my conference experience is limited. I’ve been to five of them, all in 2008: Gartner Portals, BEA Participate, TechCrunch50, KMWorld, Defrag.

Defrag was my favorite by far. Both for the subject matter discussed and the attendees. The conference has an intimate feel to it, but a high wattage set of attendees.

In true information overflow style, I wanted to jot down some notes from the conference.

Professor William Duggan: He’s a professor at Columbia Business School. He gave the opening keynote: “Strategic Intuition”, which is the name of his book.  Duggan talked about how studies of the brain showed that we can over-attribute people’s actions as being left-brained or right-brained. Scientists are seeing that both sides of the brain are used in tackling problems.

He then got into the meat of his session – that people innovate by assembling unrelated data from their past experience. For example, he talked about how Picasso’s style emerged. Picasso’s original paintings were not like those for which he became famous. The spark? First, meeting with Henri Matisse, and admiring his style. In that meeting, Picasso happened to become fascinated with a piece of African sculpture. In one of those “aha!” moments, Picasso combined the styles of Matisse and African folk art to create his own distinctive style. He combined two unrelated influences to create his own style.

Duggan also described how all innovation is fundamentally someone “stealing” ideas from others. In “stealing”, he means that people assemble parts of what they’re exposed to. This is opposed to imitating, which to copy something in whole. That’s not innovation.

Re-imagining the metaphors behind collaborative tools: This session examined whether we need need ways of thinking about collaboration inside the enterprise. The premise here is that we need to come up with new metaphors that drive use cases and technology design. I’ll hold off on describing most of what was said. My favorite moment was when Jay Simons of Atlassian rebutted the whole notion of re-imagining the metaphors. He said the ones we have now are fine, e.g. “the water cooler”. What we need is to stop chasing new metaphors, and execute on the ones we have.

Rich Hoeg, Honeywell: Rich is a manager in Honeywell’s corporate IT group (and a Connectbeam customer). He talked about the adoption path of social software inside Honeywell, going from a departmental implementation to much wider implementation, and how his own career path mirrored that transition. He’s also a BarCamp guy. Cool to hear an honest-to-goodness geek making changes in the enterprise world.

Yatman Lai, Cisco: Yatman discussed Cisco’s initiatives around collaboration and tying together their various enterprise 2.0 apps. I think this is something we’ll see more of as time goes along. Companies are putting in place different social software apps, but they’re still siloed. Connecting these social computing apps will become more important in the future.

Stowe “The Flow”: Stowe Boyd apparently gave quite the interesting talk. I didn’t attend it, because Connectbeam had a presentation opposite his. But from what I gather, the most memorable claim Stowe made was that there’s no such thing as attention overload. That we all can be trained to watch a constant flow of information and activities go by, and get our work done. I think there will be a segment of the population that does indeed do this. If you can swing it, you’re going to be well-positioned to be in-the-know about the latest happenings and act on them.

But in talking with various people after the presentation, there was a sense that Stowe was overestimating the general population’s ability and desire to train their minds to handle both the work they need to do for their employers, and to take in the cascade of information flowing by (e.g. Twitter, FriendFeed). Realistically, we’ll asynchronously take in information, not in constant real-time.

We’re Becoming Day Traders in Information: I heard this quote a few times, not sure who said it (maybe someone from Sxipper or Workstreamr). It’s an intriguing idea. Each unit of information has value, and that value varies by person and circumstances. Things like Twitter are the trading platform. Of course, the problem with this analogy is that actual day traders work with stocks, cattle futures, options, etc. Someone has to actually produce something. If all we do is trade in information and conversations, who’s making stuff?

Mark Koenig: Mark is an analyst with Saugatuck Technology. He gave the closing keynote for Day 1, Social Computing and the Enterprise: Closing the Gaps. What are the gaps?

  1. Social network integration
  2. Information relevance
  3. Integration with enterprise applications
  4. The culture shift

Mark also believes in the enterprise market,  externally focused social computing will grow more than internally focused. Why? Easier ROI, more of a sales orientation.

Charlene Li: Former Forrester analyst Charlene Li led off Day 2 with her presentation, Harnessing the Implicit Valkue of the Social Graph. Now running her own strategic consulting firm, Altimeter Group, Charlene focused on how future application will weave “social” into everything they do. It will be a part of the experience, not a distinct, standalone social network thing. As she says, “social networks will be like air”. She ran the gamut of technologies in this presentation. You can see some tweets from the presentation here.

One thing she said was to “prepare for the demise of the org chart”. When I see things like that, I do laugh a bit. The org chart isn’t going anywhere. Enterprises will continue to have reporting structures for the next hundred years and beyond. What will change is the siloed way in which people only work with people within their reporting structures. Tearing down those walls will be an ongoing theme inside companies.

Neeraj Mathur, Sun Micro: Neeraj talked about Sun’s internal initiatives around social computing in his session, “Building Social Capital in an Enterprise”. Sun is pretty advanced in its internal efforts. One particular element stuck with me. It the rating that each employee receives based on their participation in the Sun social software. Called Community Equity, the personal rating is built on these elements (thanks for Lawrence Liu for tweeting them):

Contribution Q + Skills Q + Participation Q + Role Q = Personal Q

Sun’s approach is an implementation of an idea that Harvard Professor Andrew McAfee put out there, Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings? It’s an interesting idea – companies can gain a lot of value from social computing, why not recognize those that do it well? Of course, it’s also got potential for unintended consequences, so it needs to be monitored.

Laura “Pistachio” Fitton: Twitter-ologist Laura Fitton led a panel called “Finding Serendipitous Content Through Context”. The session covered the value of serendipity, and the ways in which it happens. The panel included executives from Aggregate Knowledge and Zemanta, as well as Carla Thompson from Guidewire.

What interested me was the notions of what serendipity really is. For example, Zemanta does text matching on your blog post to find other blog posts that are related. So there’s an element of structured search to bring related articles.

So I asked this question: Does persistent keyword search, delivered as RSS or email, count as “serendipity”? Carla’s response was , no it doesn’t. Serendipity is based on randomness. It’s an interesting topic worth a future blog post potentially.

And of course, Laura encouraged people to tweet during the session, using the hash tag #serendip. The audience tweets are a good read.

Daniela Barbosa, Dow Jones, DataPortability.org: Daniela works for Dow Jones, with coverage of their Synaptica offering. She’s also an ardent supporter of data portability, serving as Chairperson of DataPortability.org. Her session was titled Pulling the Threads on User Data. She’s a librarian by training, but she kicks butt in leading edge thinking about data portability and organization. In her presentation, she says she’s just like you. She then pops up this picture of her computer at work:

daniela-barbosa-laptop-screen

Wow – now that’s some flow. Stowe Boyd would be proud.

Wrapping up: Those are some notes from what I heard there. I couldn’t get to everything, as I had booth duties for Connectbeam. Did plenty of demos for people. And got to meet many people in real life that I have followed and talked with online. Looking forward to Defrag 2009.

*****

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FriendFeed Real-Time: IM Now Means “Instant Microblogging”

October 16, 2008 by 2 Comments

FriendFeed released its Real-Time feature yesterday. This feature is very cool. With real-time, all new content entries and comments to those entries post automatically, in real-time. You get this amazing flow of content and conversation.

In its simplest form, it allows you to passively monitor the river of content. “Passively” might understate one aspect of it. This feature could pretty much kill off productivity if you passively watched the river all day. Here’s a representative exchange. Robert Scoble tweeted about the feature, which got a funny exchange going:

Robert: Now that Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed are giving us “real time” views, I find I’m “Media Snacking” much more. Watching the streams…

Mo Kargas: Robert, do you believe this will adversely affect your productivity ?

Robert: Mo: yes.

The time-suck element of the Real-Time feature is directly proportional to the number of people you follow. If you’re monitoring the activity of more than 100 active users, you’re going to drown in the river.

My sense is that this new feature works best in a couple scenarios:

  • Monitor activities for a limited group of active users, or a large group of relatively inactive users
  • Leverage the feature for group-based microsharing

It’s that second use that is of interest. In fact, that’s the use case that FriendFeeder Casey Muller described in his blog – following the conversation during last night’s Presidential debate.

Group-Based Instant Microblogging

A few weeks back, there was a post on TechCrunch titled Twittermoms Shows Why Twitter Needs Groups. The post described the emergence of Twittermoms, a site for moms who have met on Twitter. Here’s one quote:

At its core, Twittermoms is basically a group for mothers who Twitter. Because of that, it highlights an interesting point: why hasn’t Twitter addressed its need for groups?

The problem for a lot of folks is that the ability to converse with a specific set of users is tough on Twitter. The @replies help, but you can’t @reply to a large group. And tracking the tweets of a specific set of users is challenging.

Instant messaging is pervasive and quite useful. You can converse with others in real-time. As soon as you post, the recipients see the message. It fits quite nicely with the real-time nature of conversation.

But IM is NOT the same as microblogging. See the post I wrote earlier for a table outlining the differences between IM and microblogging. In many ways, microblogging is a superset of IM’s features.

So we’ve had this situation for a while:

  • IM is great for real-time conversations, but lacks many of the valuable features of microblogging
  • Twitter is great for microblogging, but lacks the real-time nature and the ability to focus on a smaller set of users

Enter FriendFeed Real-Time.

FriendFeed Real-Time works with both Rooms and Lists. What does that gain you? Rooms can be set up for people to participate around a specific subject. For instance, there could be a FriendFeedMoms Room. Moms join the room, and they can talk asynchronously (Standard view), or in real-time (Real-Time view). Rooms are searchable, so all the useful information and conversations are findable, and persistent.

Alternatively, one could set up her FriendFeedMoms List. Just tag a bunch of userrs into this list, and voila! You now have the ability to focus on a specific set of users and what they’re saying. Put the List in Real-Time mode and you’ve got Group IM.

In both cases, you can see Likes and threaded comments as well, giving context to the conversations.

Looking at these use cases, you can why FriendFeed Real-Time combines the best of instant messaging and micoblogging…

instant microblogging

The fact that FriendFeed Real-Time Rooms and Lists can be opened as mini-windows, and embedded on other sites makes them particularly useful.

They Built It…Will People Use it?

Personally, I think FriendFeed Real-Time puts even more emphasis on the value of Lists for day-to-day useage. Real-Time Rooms will be great for episodic uses, such as the debates or Apple events. But conversing with a group of friends will be a lot easier with a smaller List of users.

Since WordPress now has this cool poll function, I wanted to see what you think. Take a second to weigh in, and multiple answers are fine.

See you on FriendFeed.

*****

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Would Twitter Have Emerged If Current Pessimistic Attitudes Were Around Last Year?

October 13, 2008 by 2 Comments

Although well-used by many and even relied upon by some, Twitter has yet to turn on a revenue model. It’s not like the company would lose users, if it set up a minor advertising strategy as a test; people want to see the company make some money. Please, Twitter, turn on the revenue before it’s too late.

Rafe Needleman, 11 troubled Web companies: The next Kozmos?

We’re all watching, rather helplessly, what is happening to the global economy right now. It appears we’re in for a chilly period economically. Click here for a Twitter search on recession.

And there’s no shortage of advice on how to handle the upcoming winter. The most talked-about advice came from legendary venture capital firm Sequoia, who put their thoughts into a presentation. This slide describes their advice to their portfolio start-ups:

The above slide is the equivalent of a cold splash of water in the face. The general theme seems to be: cut back on experimentation and things that take a while to mature.

Later on slide 53, Sequoia includes this advice, which I have seen in many other pieces:

Become cash flow positive as soon as possible

Cash flow positive, cash flow positive…always good advice. And here are the two levers affecting cash flow position:

  1. Increase revenues
  2. Cut costs

But that advice seems to be for companies that have a specific profile. I think the approach for entrepreneurs is a little more nuanced.

What a Start-up Needs to Do Depends on Its Maturity

The graph below graphs the two levels affecting cash flow, and considers the distance between a company’s revenues and its costs.

I put this graph together because I think it’s too simplistic to say, “cut costs”. Cutting costs is advice that applies to companies along all levels of maturity in down economic times. But for many companies, that’s not enough. If the distance between sales and costs is too great, there’s no way to cut costs to preserve the company. The focus of the entrepreneurs needs to be on raising equity, not doing more with less. If there’s a good base of revenues and a decent post-financial crisis pipeline, the focus is on closing deals, not cutting costs. “Deals” meaning partner deals in a consumer web app, client deals for an enterprise app.

There are promising companies that do not yet have the topline revenue nailed down right now. Per the Sequoia note, these companies need to cut back on experimentation. Yet, we hear this sort of thing a lot:

The Great Tech Bust of Ought Two gave us 37Signals, Flickr, and del.icio.us

But…aren’t those examples of experimentation? For instance, Flickr didn’t start out life as a social photo sharing service. It was an experimental feature for an online gaming service called Game Neverending by Ludicorp. The “feature” of photo sharing didn’t have a revenue model, and I’m going to guess it wasn’t the core strategy discussed at Ludicorp board meetings.

Not surprisingly, there are plenty of mixed messages out there: “Cut back and focus on what’s core!” “Great innovation emerges from economic downturns!”

Would We Have Twitter If the Economic Slowdown Was in 2007?

I put together a two graphs of Twitter’s traffic, as tracked by Google Trends. The top graph is Twitter’s traffic during 2007. The bottom graph is Twitter’s traffic overall from 2007 until today.

Assume today’s chilled economic outlook was in effect at this time last year. If a VC was making decisions about companies in its portfolio, how would Twitter fare? The 2007 numbers show a service without a real growth trend. And Twitter still doesn’t have a revenue model.

Using Sequoia’s advice…Twitter would be dead.

But look at Twitter’s numbers starting in April 2008. The network effects have kicked in, Twitter is getting press everywhere, CNN is even using it. Per Rafe’s post cited at the top, an ad revenue model certainly seems doable and promising based on its metrics.

However, I’m not convinced Twitter would survive under today’s dire outlook for start-ups. It’d be a  victim of the “throw the baby out with the bath water” mentality we’re seeing right now. And wouldn’t that have been a mistake.

Let’s hope some sense of proportionality and a longer term view kicks in soon.

*****

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Would You Apply a ‘Dislike’ to Your Co-Workers’ Content?

October 10, 2008 by 4 Comments

On Digg, you can apply the “bury” rating to stories. On Amazon.com, you can apply a single star to rate something negatively.

Would you ever do that to the work of your colleagues?

I’m not talking the annual HR exercise of 360 reviews. I’m talking Enterprise 2.0 apps, which incorporate the features we see out in Web 2.0. The ability of people to rate the content they see.

A few social media sites have taken a binary approach to ratings: (1) positive rating, or (2) abstain:

While some others are incorporating the notion of negative ratings:

Out on the Web, where you’re interacting on platforms with thousands of anonymous or unknown people, negative ratings make sense and help bring some order to the scrum of content and products.

See Louis Gray’s post for a good perspective on this whole rating thing in social media.

Inside companies, things are a little different. There’s a vetting of other Enterprise 2.0 users, in the form of the hiring and annual review process. This automatically raises the average quality of contributions.

And there’s this….Enterprise 2.0 apps are used by people you know and work with. People you’re going to see in meetings, on projects and who have common connections. A negative rating to someone’s Yammer or wiki entry or social bookmark is a big deal. You’re essentially saying:

“Dude, this is bad. I mean really bad. So bad that I had to ‘dis you and let the rest of the organization know how bad it is.”

Personally, I’d have a hard time with this. In the most egregious cases, I’d apply the negative rating. But I’d strongly prefer to “work it out” in the comments to the original content.

My concern is that a negative rating turns into a basis for internal feuding and chills open discussion about ideas, information and observations. But in a large organization with a heavy flow of content, maybe the negative rating is the most efficient way to handle the value if information.

Perhaps I’m in the minority here. How about you? Would you give a thumbs down to your co-workers’ content via Enterprise 2.0 apps?

*****

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Facebook Is Starting to Get My Attention Again

October 3, 2008 by 9 Comments

Facebook recently made its new design permanent, despite the protests of many vocal users. Where the old focus was on a slow newsfeed, ornamenting your profile and interacting through thrird party apps, the new design puts content and conversations at the center of the user experience.

I think Michael Arrington still has one of the best perspectives on it when he wrote The Friendfeedization Of Facebook back in July.  As he said there:

But it’s also clear that they like what they see at Friendfeed, which expertly combined the idea of an activity stream that was first popularized by Facebook with the microblogging trend introduced by Twitter. Users constantly add content that their friends read and comment on, which creates yet new content. The virtuous page-view creating cycle continues.

The attraction of FriendFeed for me is the ability to discover new things via the variety of feeds, and to engage others in conversations about a wide range of topics. I had stopped using Facebook because of the inane apps and the funky secret algorithm that controlled what went into the news feed. Movie trivia games and sheep throwing with old school friends just wasn’t that fulfilling.

Interactions from My Facebook Network Are Increasing

But recently, I’ve noticed activity in my Facebook network picking up. I generally don’t post anything in Facebook – tweets are my status updates, FriendFeed is my activity stream. In the past few days, I’ve had more interactions via those tweets than I’ve had in a while. Here’s an example.

Tweet: “Alternative theory…Palin’s interview with Couric was just to set the bar incredibly low for her upcoming debate with Biden.”

Responses from my network…

High school friend: “If so, she’s a genius.”

College friend: “Brilliant tactic IMO.”

Cousin: “I can hardly wait. It will be so cringe-worthy!”

Former co-worker: “hmmm, I have my fingers crossed. Sadly, Biden has the tendency to put his foot in his mouth too……”

As a point of comparison, here’s the response this tweet got on Twitter:

N/A: no one replied.

Now it’s not like I’m the most active Twitterer. But I’ve been more active there than on Facebook. Facebook had more interaction in this case.

And as one more point of comparison…here’s the response on FriendFeed:

5 Likes, no comments

Likes are great, they are the currency of FriendFeed. No conversations though in this case.

Facebook: The Value of Context and Better Interaction Hooks

Actively engaging in FriendFeed and (somewhat) Twitter, I’ve built up some context with my networks on those sites. And there are plenty of good conversations there. FriendFeed is still my favorite haunt.

What interests me with the Facebook experience is the variety of people from my life – classmates, family, colleagues – that commented on that tweet. I really haven’t maintained a strong interaction with those folks. But there’s an existing reserve of “context” from my past interactions that is the basis for interacting.

And Facebook really did take a page from FriendFeed, with commenting on various activities. I’ve been impressed with how non-FriendFeeding, non-Twittering people in my network have started using the new commenting functionality.

I don’t know if it will last, but early results are promising.

*****

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Tim O’Reilly Course Corrects the Definition of Web 2.0

October 1, 2008 by 14 Comments

eBay was Web 2.0 before Web 2.0 was cool.

Tim O’Reilly wrote a nice piece the other day Why Dell.com (was) More Enterprise 2.0 Than Dell IdeaStorm. In the post, he re-asserted the proper definition of Web 2.0. Here’s a quote:

I define Web 2.0 as the design of systems that harness network effects to get better the more people use them, or more colloquially, as “harnessing collective intelligence.” This includes explicit network-enabled collaboration, to be sure, but it should encompass every way that people connected to a network create synergistic effects.

The impetus for Tim’s post was that people leave Google and its search engine off the list of Web 2.0 companies. As Tim writes, seeing the power of what Google’s search engine did was part of the notion of Web 2.0.

Here’s a way to represent what Tim is talking about:

I like that Tim sent out this reminder about Web 2.0. Here’s how Web 2.0 has become defined over the years:

  • Social networking
  • Ad supported
  • Bootstrapped
  • Fun and games
  • Anything that’s a web service

This seems to have fundamentally altered Web 2.0. I’m reminded of a post that Allen Stern wrote back in July, CenterNetworks Asks: How Many Web 2.0 Services Have Gone Mainstream? In that post, he wondered how many Web 2.0 companies will really ever go maintream.

Check out the comments on Allen’s blog and on FriendFeed:

I would say MySpace but that really came before Web 2.0

mainstream – Facebook/hi5/bebo, Flickr, Youtube, Slide, Photobucket, Rockyou

Oh and you’ll have to add Gmail to the list as well.

I’ve yet to see one, really. 😉

Is eBay web 2.0-ish? [this was mine]

Agree with Facebook, MySpace, YouTube. I’d add Blogs as another 2.0 winner. I’d put eBay and Amazon as 1.0 success stories

A better way to ask this is “which web services since 2000 have gone mainstream?” Blogger. Flickr. Gmail. Facebook. MySpace. Digg. YouTube. WordPress. Live Spaces

Look at those responses! You can see a massive disconnect between Tim O’Reilly’s original formulation of Web 2.0 and where we are today.

One example I see in there: Gmail. Gmail is a hosted email application. Does Gmail get better the more people use it? No. There’s no internal Gmail application functionality that makes it better the more people use it. It’s just an email app the way Yahoo Mail is an email app. Being a web service and ad-supported isn’t, strictly speaking, a Web 2.0 company.

Terms do take on a life of their own, and if the societal consensus for a definition changes over time, then that’s the new definition. But the responses to Allen Stern’s post highlight two problems:

  • People discount or ignore key components of the Web 2.0 definition
  • Web 2.0 is slowly coming to mean everything. Which means nothing.

Finally, Tim’s post helps me differentiate the times I should use “social media” as opposed to “Web 2.0”.

What do you think? Should we go back to first principles in defining what really is “Web 2.0”?

*****

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“What’s the Difference Between IM and Yammer?”

September 23, 2008 by 3 Comments

It’s been a couple weeks since Yammer launched at TechCrunch50, and I assume Yammer is getting a road test out there in the workplace. One thing I saw after the launch was people wondering if Yammer was really just a copy of instant messaging. Here’s a representative tweet:

What’s cool about it? What’s the difference between IM and yammer?

Let’s hold off from noting the irony of posting that question on Twitter…

It is a fair question, because of their high similarity: short messages to a group of subscribers. But there’s so much more to the story.

Comparing IM and Yammer

The table below describes similarities and differences between instant messaging and microblogging (e.g. Yammer):

The table is pretty self-explanatory. Let me add a little more context from two blog posts related to this.

Sam Lawrence of Jive Software has a nice post, 18th Century Twitter. A quote from his post:

Everyday thousands of employees miss the opportunity to find people who can make what they’re doing less redundant or more valuable. What’s the ROI of a fully networked, 100% connected workforce? What’s the value of having all those connections saved for others to profit from?

And John Tropea writes about 140 characters to knowledge share. He makes several points about how Twitter inside the enterprise (e.g. Yammer) is a powerful basis for surfacing knowledge. In this quote, he comes at microblogging from a blogging perspective, not an IM perspective:

Twitters value contribution to the knowledge flow-spontaneous, unpolished, work in progress, thinking out loud-lends itself to this type or quality of participation due to its brief, immediate, and intimate publishing format…let’s hope internal blogs generate the same calibre of tacit value without being hindered by their format.

The fact that John looked at services like Yammer from a blogging perspective as opposed to an instant messaging perspective illuminates a key difference between IM and Yammer.

When you know what you write is visible to everyone, trackable and does not have the burden of being “on point” to recipients, you’re somewhere between instant messaging and blogging. I think Sam’s post does a nice job of summarizing the value of that.

I’m @bhc3 on Twitter.

 

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Using Social Media In Hollywood – An Interview with MADtv’s Chris Kula

September 22, 2008 by 5 Comments

Chris Kula is a comedy writer living in Los Angeles. He currently writes for MADtv, seen Saturday nights on the Fox Network. I learned about Chris through an unusual connection – a link on my blog.

A few months back I wrote How to Write a Farewell Email to Your Co-Workers. The post ranks pretty high in the search engines, and is a consistent traffic source. It includes a link to a parody farewell email blog post by Chris, and I’ve noticed each week that many people click on that link. I was curious about who Chris is, so I reached out to him. He’s social media savvy, and I wanted to find out what’s happening in Hollywood these days with regard to social media.

First, some background.

Chris Is a Funny Dude

On Chris’s site, you’ll find a number of creative videos he’s put together, hosted on Vimeo. Check them out when you get a chance, they’re very good and are terrific displays of his comedic talents. These videos are Chris’s work done on his own time, not because he was being paid. Here’s one of Chris’s creations,”This Is Budweiser”:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “Chris Kula – This Is Budweiser“, posted with vodpod

Chris started Flickr Punch on blogspot. Flickr Punch is a site where Chris applies punch lines to pictures he and others find on Flickr. He includes several of these “punchlined” Flickr pix on the home page of his personal site.  Here’s one for Storm Trooper fans:

Finally, Chris has also written for the Onion News Network. Perhaps his best known creation for The Onion is Child Bankrupts Make-A-Wish Foundation With Wish For Unlimited Wishes. This spoof is so realistic, concerned citizens contacted the charity about the news. The Make-a-Wish Foundation issued a press release saying that the charity was indeed OK. Chris’s creation even earned its own Snopes page.

He’s Got Social Media Chops

Chris clearly knows his way around Web 2.0 and social media. Above I’ve noted his work with Vimeo, Flickr and Blogspot (Blogger).  He finds humor in Wikipedia entries in a couple of his videos. He maintains a Tumblr blog about food he eats. He has his own blog, and includes links to his Facebook and MySpace profiles.

I was curious about the role of social media in the entertainment industry. Most coverage of entertainment focuses on industry efforts to clamp down on copying music, TV shows and movies. But what about people that work in the industry? How do they use social media in their personal and professional lives?

I’m particularly interested because Facebook has attracted a solid user base, and now faces the work of penetrating parts of the market that are less likely to try social media. Twitter hit a growth inflection point in March 2008, and continues to move forward into the consciousness of the mainstream. So how is social media playing outside the technology geek hot house?

I asked Chris eight questions, which he answers below. Obviously, these are just Chris’s experiences, but they do shine a light on what’s happening in Hollywood.

Eight Questions for Chris Kula

1. You’ve got some great stuff on social video site Vimeo, and your Flickr Punch site is great. What made you create those?

When I was working crappy day jobs in New York, I was really proactive about creating my own online content – be it videos or photo caption stuff (like FlickrPunch) or writing on my blog. At the same time I was doing improv and sketch at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, but that was more an ensemble type thing; making web videos and producing blog content was my way of establishing my individual voice as a writer. I got my first comedy writing job (at the now-defunct Time Inc. website Office Pirates.com) based largely on the content I’d been producing on my own.

2. Looks like you stopped updating on Vimeo and FlickrPunch a couple years ago. Did your social media stuff tail off after getting a job with Onion News Network and MADtv?

Yeah, I started producing less of my own stuff once I started getting paid to write. So now I don’t get as much chance to do my own thang as I used to, but on the other hand, I’m able to pay my rent and, you know, eat. It’s a fair trade. (But, given the very fickle nature of TV writing jobs, it’s really only a matter of time ’till I am once again updating my blog with sparkling new content just for the pro bono joy of it.)

3. A couple years ago, The New York Times ran a piece about United Talent Agency sourcing new talent via social media. Have you seen an increase in studios/talent agencies’ use of social media to source talent in Hollywood? Are the next generation of people trying to break into Hollywood using social media a lot more, with link to examples of their work instead of portfolios?

Absolutely. I think that’s the number one thing you can do as a writer/performer type today: have an online presence. The potential audience you can reach online is just so great, be it on YouTube or something more comedy-specific like Funny or Die. And yes, that audience includes the suits – I know a lot of sketch groups whose online body of work has earned them agents, managers, pilot deals, magic beans, etc. There are still the “conventional” routes to getting representation – writing a spec script, or putting up a live sketch show – but now you should absolutely be posting your own videos *in addition* to working on that stuff.

4. What’s your favorite social network these days? Why?

I really should make Facebook the Home page on my Firefox, as it’s basically always my first click. I like that I can keep up with what my friends “are doing right now” in an entirely passive fashion. Highly useful: event invitations for plugging shows, photo/video tagging. Highly ignorable: invitations to become werewolves, vampires, zombies and/or slayers of these creatures. (My second favorite social network is Tumblr, and these days I check my Myspace only about once a fortnight.)

5. You and your friends ever tweet?

Twitter has yet to infiltrate my friends. How I’ve managed to survive this long without knowledge of Julia Allison’s every waking activity, I do not know.

6. I checked out your Tumblr blog, Kula Foods. It’s cool. You really like food, don’t you?

My food blog is quite literally an exercise in self-indulgence. Delicious, savory self-indulgence. I post all the photos and text directly from my Blackberry Pearl. I’ll keep updating it as long as my metabolism allows.

7. What do you think of Ashton Kutcher’s Blah Girls?

re: Blah Girls – As a celeb-obsessed teen girl, I’m so loving it! Annnd… now I’m so over it. LOL

8. You’re a big Michigan fan. Are they going to make a bowl this year?

As a proud-bordering-on-elitist Michigan alum and fan, I used to complain about how other major conference teams can win, like, six games and still end up in a bowl game. Cut to: present day – Michigan football is the shakiest it’s been in, oh, three generations and I’m praying that FIVE wins might get us into the prestigious Carquest Motor City Bowl. Go Blue?

Thanks Chris.

You can see Chris’s work on his blog, and on MADtv Saturday nights.

*****

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