socialwrite.com

The following actions comprise a list of Cliché behavior in social networking. While these actions have, until reaching cliché status, made the actor appear to be somewhat introspective, deep and rather emotionally connected, they in fact represent a culmination of the symptoms of a stew of behavioral disorders and general lack of personal management skills.

The compulsion to add too many people as your friend early on in a new social network will be known from now on as Friendive-Compulsive disorder.

The list is as follows:

* Declaring email bankruptcy. First known cases: 2002. There has recently been a resurgence in the financial and startup blogging worlds. “I have 500 unread emails. I am declaring email bankruptcy”

* Maintaining an Orkut, Friendster or Vox account and publicly claiming to actually log-in to these services

* Deleting your Facebook account. This one is growing in popularity and is most certainly already cliché, but we are not near the end of this.

* Having both a Myspace page and a Linkedin account. I am sorry, opposite worlds. You may implode or spontaneously ignite due to the fact that on one of them you are living a lie.

* The latest is Twittercide. The act of publicly announcing the killing of your oversubscribed twitter account.

Just a quickie while this blog lives in the templateless limbo that it is now in.

Wikis have a well earned reputation of being a quick-deployment option that is easy enough to explain to your colleagues: “It sits there, and I can edit it, and you can edit it,. and it will always be there when you need it”.

Wikis are not social tools however. They are collaborative tools. This is an important distinction, mainly because the value that social tools create comes from their inherent social components: Sharing, currency, relevance and the filters that can be built from social network data.

(Good) Social Software on the other hand will focus on the personality above all else. Who is creating this? Why did they create it? Who else should know?

The obvious killer app, on first blush at least, is to combine these two things. The truth is: many have tried and they have all more or less failed. I think the killer app is probably a lot more subtle.

Please bear with me while I try to figure out what is wrong with the Wordpress install here. Something seems to have gone wrong and it is stuck on this default template.

I have been playing with most of the new lifestreaming applications. SocialThing, FriendFeed and a few others.

This big deal about these applications is that they take activity information from a slew of social sites, such as Facebook, Flickr, upcoming, etc, and they bring that information all in to one place.

The image on the right is an example of my FriendFeed.com stream. You can see that it includes updates from Blogs, Twitter. If you could see the whole page, you would see images, bookmarks, messages and more.

I really liked the idea of a combined lifestream at first. The name “lifestream” describes the fact that these apps are all creating a stream of information about our online lives, and there is power in sharing what we are creating, curating and synthesizing.

The problem that is cropping up however is that these apps are probably better called “noise aggregators” or “NoiseStreamr”s than anything else. By the time I had friended a few dozen people on FriendFeed and started trying to keep up with their blog posts, twitters, del.icio.us bookmarks, Jaiku status and more, I start to feel like I am experiencing more of a info-avalanche than I am floating down a lazy river of socially relevant news.

I don’t think that this problem is inherent to information streams, but it is pretty obvious that these tools are in their infancy and a lot of art and science is going to have to go in to improving the information flow.

The most immediate thing they could do would be to provide a way for the user to offer feedback on what feed items are actually interesting to them and which ones are not. ie: If I give someone’s del.icio.us bookmarks a thumbs down every time I see it, then you should stop showing it to me. If I give a thumbs down on ever single del.icio.us bookmark I see, then make sure you never show me one again.

There is a clear trend toward data streams built out of my social network, but the focus has to be on reducing noise, not adding to it.

Is IT becoming extinct? | IT Project Failures
Since the days of punch cards, IT has believed itself to be guardian of precious computing resources against attacks from non-technical barbarians known as “users.” This arrogant attitude, born of once-practical necessity in the era of early data centers, reflects inability to adapt to present-day realities. Such attitudes, combined with recent technological and social changes, are pushing IT to share the fate of long-extinct dinosaurs.

While ITs demise won’t happen overnight, the trend is clear.

“Why is it so hard? Well, corporations are often geared towards “risk management”. When I’ve had to push concepts of social computing in my professional career, I have on several occasions encounter folks that jump to “risk management”. Why not? Haven’t we trained people to think this way?

Companies often say they want to promote “risk taking” and “innovation” but we don’t reward them for that. The truth is that we ask for this, but when we take a risk and it doesn’t pay-off, the company often comes down hard on those people. Actions speak louder then corporate messaging. Over time, we train people to be risk averse. You won’t get fired for NOT adopting social media in the company.” - Rex Lee

I then spoke to another Irregular, Jevon MacDonald who has been working in the so-called Enterprise 2.0 aka socialprise space for some time. He said that where the startups fail but where the incumbents succeed is in identifying a specific value proposition within specific industries. His view is that Sharepoint will be a ‘big winner in the next five years.’ If the amount of noise being made by Microsoft is indicative, then it should be a winner. But…he also says: “Sharepoint deployments are horrendous and I really don’t know why people put up with them.” - The end of software…

“The difference between this and a standard stock market crash is a lack of trusted information. In a stock market crash, like 1987, nobody questioned the underlying information about the firms behind the stock, rather, the question was what the price of that stock should be. In this crisis, information about the underlying assets is too uncertain and too complex to understand. FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) abounds and nobody trusts anybody else anymore. That is a recipe for a global financial meltdown.”- John Robb

20 x 2 : What’s The Difference? from photojunkie on Vimeo.

The folks at the DIG Conference, put on by Palladium,  got in touch to see if I was interested in putting on an Enterprise 2.0 Introduction session in Las Vegas. I decided to say yes to this because it is a chance for me to reflect back on what has truly made a difference in the last few years and what hasn’t.

I asked Thomas Vander Wal to co-present with me as I think Thomas offers a lot of depth and practical experience with Social Computing tools

Here is the description

Enterprise 2.0 Jumpstart

Social Software has had a dramatic impact on how we use and understand the Web today, but its effects are only beginning to be felt inside established organizations. These tools have the potential to dramatically change how tomorrow’’s enterprise will develop, build and refine its products and services.

These tools and strategies, known as Enterprise 2.0, offer the first breakthroughs in business strategy as well as just-in-time problem solving that we have seen in decades.

How is your business affected? What tools and strategies are practical and proven in the Enterprise? What are the first steps to introducing Enterprise 2.0 to your organization?

In this session Thomas Vander Wal and Jevon MacDonald will introduce you to the core concepts behind Enterprise 2.0, practical first steps to understanding the impact of Enterprise 2.0 on your organization, and what its effect has been on other organizations.

I am not sure what day exactly we will be doing the session, but I will post it as soon as I know. If this goes well, I think we would be open to doing some more in-depth sessions.

I went to see There Will Be Blood alone today, which is something I have never done in my life.

Just before I left for the theater I saw that Fred wasn’t all that excited about the movie, and I was a little worried that I would feel the same way.

There were some points that I thought were thrown together, such as the preacher at the end, there could have been some more lead up to fill out his predicament, but on the whole I thought it was great. I was enthralled for the entire movie.

The highlight of the movie is definitly the flawless acting, but the story has teeth as well.

Jerry caught me on the last day unshaven and in my last change of clothes. It was still fun ;)

Watch it here

I am going to be at the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit in March (26th-28th). Anyone else going to be there?

Michael found a nasty one to start off the week with the story of how an ERP install gone bad eventually killed a maker of specialized emergency vehicles.

In the end, stupid customers are much more susceptible to being on the sharp end of the stick when they are unable to properly manage a project internally. When I did web development work, we used to have a saying: A website is always reflective of the organization it serves. Almost always a poorly organized client that lacked direction would end up with a website with the exact same characteristics, no matter how hard you tried to save them.

In the end, trying to make a flip-of-the-switch transition from their old ERP system to a brand new system was more or less a recipe for pain. They would have been better off continuing to use/lease the system from their parent company while they slowly implemented new systems to address specific needs, and in the end they would have had their brand new fully independent ERP system.

Even the Dumpling business is more complicated than you would probably imagine.

Here is a trend that I think is developing, and it is a classic case of competitive pressures forcing companies to make poor decisions.

In the brief history of recorded media and entertainment, we have associated new technological advancements in quality with a large increase in consumer satisfaction and an upswing in sales. From the LP to the Cassette to the CD. With video we went from VHS to the DVD, and now we are being pushed to Blu-Ray and HDDVD.

Moving from cassettes to CDs was an obvious choice for most consumers for one real reason: You could navigate by song. CDs also offered higher quality sound, which many saw as a bonus, but as we all bought CD players with the cheapest of headphones and speakers, it seemed apparent that sound quality was a secondary concern.

After the CD, the MP3 started to come in to prominence and music was broken out even further. Instead of dealing with a long continual tape or LP, we went to track-based CDs, and with MP3s we were moving on to understanding the song as an element of its own, independent from the concept of an album entirely. There had always been “singles”, but they were limited drastically in so many ways: They were selected by record companies, their distribution in physical form was a fraction of regular album distribution, and they were also generally overplayed on the radio and became repetitive.

In essence, the consumer made a decision about priorities. At the time, MP3s topped out reliably at 128kbps, which could be compared to radio quality but is easily distinguishable from even CD quality. What the consumer wanted was not higher quality, which Digital could make the promise of delivering, instead the idea of sharing their music, transferring it to different devices, and burning custom mixed-CDs of their favorite songs was just far too alluring.

The story of video is similar. While one of the driving factors in the move from VHS to DVD was quality, which is much more obvious in video than in audio it seems, DVD also offered a lot of the convenience of the CD, and most significantly did no wear down in the same way VHS tapes could. Never-mind rewinding!

Here is where the story of video is both similar to audio, but also very different.

In between VHS and the DVD there was also the Laser Disc. Laser Video Discs were very large and cumbersome, they were bigger than an LP and consequentially represented no additional convenience over VHS, even though they did offer a reasonably significant leap in video quality. The laser disc was Dead on Arrival, unlike digital video files.

Digital video has been around as long as the Mp3 or longer. Originally it had far more problems than the MP3. Where the MP3 format was licensed quite liberally to all sorts of players, video formats remained fractured with fights between Quicktime, WMV and a slew of others. Users had to download players, get codecs and then pray that their internet connection could get them the video in any reasonable amount of time, which was rarely the case.

This gave the DVD a huge head start, which would have contributed to its adoption.

As DVD was the dominant format, things started to change in the world of online video. Broadband connection rates have been growing steadily, but more significantly: Flash became a simple, lightweight and ideal video player. Flash was ideal for both the producer and the consumer. It required almost no work from the consumer. No messy codecs, no files to manage, nothing. And it was really easy to install to boot.

As next generation formats begin to shape up, HDDVD and Blu-Ray, people also started to find it much easier to create their own videos. Seeing the movie as a scene by scene sequence rather than as the epic we have come to know and love.

We now see video going in two directions, one is guided by the end users and the other by production companies and hardware makers. Producers are pushing the two next-generation formats on to store shelves in a protracted battle focused on delivering higher-quality video to consumers.

For a certain subet of customers however, Blu-Ray and HDDVD seem to be the last thing on their mind. Streaming video is taking over TV and DVD as the dominant video format for one single reason: convenience factor.

This impact is felt within the realm of digital video as well. In speaking to several university students and asking them about how they watch video, many eschewed delivery platforms such as iTunes and Bittorrent because of convenience factors. Even though a typical Bittorrent or iTunes video is of much superior quality, most students are turning to streaming, on-demand flash-based video from sites like ucTV and others. This is an example of convenience trumping quality even within the world of digital video.

Immediacy is more important than video quality

Producers need to realize that immediate distribution is more important that providing a high-quality version of the video. This also applies to the time companies take in distributing videos to the consumer. It takes month for a film to go from the theater to DVD now, but low-quality versions, often with foreign subtitles, are usually available within days online and consumers are more than willing to watch these videos and find them to be an acceptable alternative.

The content format is going to change eventually

This trend is going to stick around and its effect will be compounded beyond simple effects on distribution, content format will eventually change as well. As people become more and more accustomed with ripping and mixing video, they start to accept shorter and shorter videos as high-value entertainment. Youtube is the most obvious example of this.

The 5-minute epic

At some point this format shift will be compounded even more and watching entire 2-hour films will become less and less common. The art of the 5-minute (or 20 minute perhaps) epic will become a significant niche with widespread mainstream acceptance. The Academy Awards, which will be chopped up and delivered as a playlist of small videos, will dedicate a significant amount of their mainstream awards to these short films.

HDDVD and Blu-Ray are a poor market position

Content is king and it is going to be increasingly difficult to maintain market leadership based on high-quality video format. While large amounts of individuals in the middle-upper class will buy large flat screen TVs and high-definition video players, a coming generation of consumers will not be nearly as comfortable in front of the same 40-50″ screen. They are used to watching video on a laptop screen, usually while curled up in bed and they are more likely to watch on-demand 20-minute TV shows as they are to watch long-form movies.

Convergence

At some point, high-definition will converge with immediacy. Large broadband connections and better streaming formats will mean that on-demand streaming video will be of a superior quality. 480p will be more than enough for a huge proportion of consumers.

Not just video

Trending in clothing in the last 15 years have showed similar tastes. Low-quality but fashion-current chains are gaining a larger foothold in the clothing industry. With stores like H&M, Zara, Guess and Forever XXI offering cheap versions of the same styles that you see at stores like D&G, Prada and other high-fashion designers.

Food has also seen this shift with the onslaught of Fast Food, which I think has been the most disturbing convience and immediacy based trending in consumer behavior, but it serves as a barometer for Video and a slew of other industries.

Video producers have to understand this trend and address it head on, most likely to the detriment of short term profits, in order to better iterate of potential business models in this space. Projects like Hulu from NBC show that not all players are completely clueless.

A friend of mine suggested a while ago that someone needed to make a “Wufoo for tests”. It made enough sense to me: An incredibly easy test creation, distribution and marking tool.

Zoho Challenge is just that.

The design of the tool is a little awkward in places from a “get going fast” point of view, but it seems to be on the right track.

My primary concern is the model for creating a test, or a “Question paper” as they call it. When you create a new Question Paper, you are taken to a page which allows you to add questions. The hangup here however is that at first it seems that you are forced to only take questions from the “Question Bank”. A Question Bank is a smart way to hold on to users (they will build up their own bank and keep coming back to use it), but it needs to be easier to just start adding questions.

It really is pretty easy, as there is an “Add Question” button at the top of the page, but I think an approach more akin to Wufoo’s form desginer would go quite a bit further. That said, Zoho Challenge does leave a lot more possibility open to potential power users.

Zoho Challenge is set apart from the rest of the Zoho suite as a “utility”, but I think it may represent one of their most well-designed and deployable applications yet.

Testing software that I have seen can be cumbersome and difficult for the individual teacher. Zoho Challenge fits in to a market that is not at all averse to using web apps, can see the benefit of online solutions very clearly and is generally self-motiviated to adopt useful technologies when they are low cost and reliable.

I got very little negative feedback on my post about the state of the “market for Enterprise 2.0 tools other than from a few marketers who were understandably perturbed.

It occurs to me that the biggest danger for customers is being sold on the “One Size Fits All” approach to software. If a social computing tool is effective in an organization, then it is going to create a lot of change and disruption on that company. If you can’t continually change and hone the tools of change, then eventually the change will stop. The tools can be software, but they can be a policy, a social norm or something else.

Whether it is a Knowledge Market, a voting tool (for ideas, or anything else), a blogging or collaboration tool, or others, then it has to stand on its own merits. Pre-packaged tools offer very little of that flexibility.

My copy of WikiPatterns arrived while I was away for the holidays, so it was a bit of a second Christmas when I arrived back to find that there was a package waiting for me. I couldn’t, as much as I tried, remember ordering anything, so I tore the envelope open and there it was: WikiPatterns.

Those who know me know that I am not a huge wiki proponent. I don’t talk about them very much and I probably don’t give them as much respect as they deserve. They are one of the few Enterprise Social Computing tools to have reall caught on and I admit: I have seen a lot of success inside companies who use them.

So it was in that state of mind that I jumped in and started reading WikiPatterns. If it was going to capture my attention it had to be more than a book about Wikis, it had to take a much broader view of collaboration and social software.

Wikipatterns starts off in the first chapter by recounting one of the stories behind the genesis of the Toyota Manufacturing Process set in 1950, well before there were wikis. Stewart makes a few key points that made me think this book was about more than just wikis

Instead of giving people a job, and trying to control how they work, it’s better to let go: give them the job, and let them figure out the best way to do it. . . The outcome is what matters, not the method. Not only is the end result better, but it’s not just a flash in the pan. It’s something sustainable. An isn’t that what every organization wants?

The book then dives right in and talks about the elephant in the room: Wikipedia. In the section called “The Wikipedia Factor” Stewart explains the differences between Wikipedia and your own internal company wiki.

Wikipatterns covers almost every component of Enterprise 2.0, from examining the effects on Knowledge Management, fantastic case studies to a guide to running your own pilot programs.

Without rehashing the entire book, I have to say that this one surprised me. This is your first Playbook that will help you break through the frustrations of trying to learn “what do I do next?” when you are eager to bring Enterprise 2.0 tools and strategies to your company.

I’ll be handing out copies to friends and clients.

Charles Armstrong on 2008.

A recent study ranked my hometown, Charlottetown, as the 3rd “happiest” place to live in Canada.

This makes a lot of sense to me. Anecdotally, the vast majority of the people I know who live in Charlottetown love it there, and they are truly happy people.

There is one small detail that a lot of us forget when we jump in to a new venture. The one nit-picky thing is that it is usually a good idea to have a maket to sell in to.

Some products find a market. Some will disrupt a market. A few will capture a market, and even fewer will create a market.

Is there such thing as an Enterprise 2.0 market? If so, can you sell in to it? If not: are there startups trying to sell to customers who don’t exist?

To answer the question: There is no Enterprise 2.0 market. Enterprise 2.0 budgets do not exist, except where some early adoptors create them, and there is no Enterprise 2.0 sales cycle. There are very few incentive available to experts right now and the discontinuity that has arisen in the concept is a symptom of that.

From an economic point of view, Enterprise 2.0 does not exist.

This presents a problem for a few people, but most of all it is a barb in the side of the world of Enterprise 2.0 Startups we have seen emerging in the last few years. Most have spent a lot of time, and even more money, trying to sell in to a market that they have no power to either create, define or own.

If you are trying to define an Enterprise 2.0 market, then you will first need to define a problem set that is solveable and that customers in the market will reward you for solving.

Defining the narrower Enterprise 2.0 Software Market means having a problem set that is solveable by software alone. If you are a provider of software only, then this is a big problem right now.

OUCH
Since the genesis of the term Enterprise 2.0, most of us have not had a problem describing the technology that falls under its umbrella. SLATES, which stands for Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extensions, and Signals, is a prime example as it defines a set of technical patterns which could theoretically be applied to solve some set of problems, but the catch is that the problem set still remains largely undefined 2 years later.

What markets do exist?

You can approach this problem 2 ways. The first is to offer a solution that solves a basic need across a host of industries. Jeff mentioned Echosign as a great example of this, their digital signature solution is growing steadily across a large customer base and they are potentially becoming a platform for other identity-based solutions. This is dramatically different from selling a suite of tools to a host of industries, it is focused on solving a specific problem using the 2.0 motif.

The second approach is to sell in to existing vertical markets. That means you are building an Enterprise 2.0 specific toolkit for an industry that needs it. In doing this your solution will have not offer just the same Social Bookmarking, Tagging, Blogs, and Wikis that you probably have, but you will need to offer vertical-specific features which string your Enterprise 2.0 tools together. In doing this there is also a potentially lucrative platform play in partnering with other E2.0 companies who want to sell in to your vertical market.

You will die on that cross

Do not go to war for Enterprise 2.0. We are seeing many of the failings of the moniker as its message has become more and more fuzzy, it is time for you to rescue your startup and refocus. The people who are making the most money off this term right now are consultants who are helping their clients navigate some of the fluff from the substance.

An Enterprise 2.0 market can only emerge when there are a significant number of healthy startups who are successful in either their own vertical or niche space. Through the slow rolling up (consolidation) of those smaller markets, a larger market can be created. This has been seen with Content Management and even with Sharepoint (yes, there is a Sharepoint market). It never did happen with Knowledge Management however.

What about me?, I am an Enterprise 2.0 customer

I can only imagine that this post is a little confusing for those of you who are trying to bring Enterprise 2.0 solutions in to your companies. Here is my advice:

Find a real problem and find a real solution for it

If you recognize like I do that throwing grease (I mean - SLATES) on the fire will only make it worse, then try to focus in. What specific problems in your organization could benefit from a blog-based approach, or under what circumstances would a wiki solve a real headache. What I am saying is: Turn off the noise and get down to work

Don’t trumpet Enterprise 2.0, talk about those real problems

When you find or solve a problem then you should talk about it not in terms of Enterprise 2.0, but in terms of an agile, low-cost approach. This makes sense to a lot more people.

I believe that Enterprise 2.0 provides a framework under which early adoptors are able to connect and share their own knowledge, but it is far too loosely defined in order to be able to be applied directly to any set of organizational problems. What makes it worse is that also means there is no market which can sustain Enterprise 2.0 innovation, and I believe that lack of a knowledge market and of a real dollar market is why we have seen so little movement in the concept in the last year.

The Enterprise 2.0 moniker is for those who do not need direct economic reward or incentive.

Hey Seth — within Canada Michael Geist is generally considered to be the one who has spearheaded the opposition against the new Canadian copyright bill. Cory is, obviously, one of the most well read bloggers in the world, but I think Michael deserves a lot of the credit here for bringing the conversation up to a level that politicians and highly influential people understand.

We love Cory, but it is Michael that we all turned to when we needed a leader on this.

Robert Scoble kicked off a huge debate yesterday.

I think there are two views of Enterprise Software which are, at their core, irreconcilable.

Will there be one winner in the end? Will there be separate streams of it development and thinking in the enterprise? I’m not sure about either, but here is how I see the current environment. If you do not draw the distinction, the debate gets very murky very quickly.

#1 - Supporting Existing Structure (rule based)

The first responder in yesterdays debate was my fellow Enterprise Irregular Michael Krigsman, who writes one of my favorite blogs, IT Project Failures.

Michael said

Robert Scoble misses this point: unlike consumer software, where sex appeal is critical to attracting a commercially-viable audience, enterprise software has a different set of goals.

Enterprise software is all about helping organizations conduct their basic business in a better, more cost-effective manner. In software jargon, it’s intended to “enable core business processes” with a high degree of reliability, security, scalability, and so on. These aren’t sexy, cool attributes, but are absolutely essential to the smooth running of businesses, organizations, and governments around the world.

Michael pretty much represents the first, and largest, school of thought. Most of the Irregulars also seem to have the same definition of enterprise software,

The Results of this approach to enterprise software is that you are able to maximize efficiency, reduce costs and potentially enable some workflows that were not possible before a large system was in place, but you do it all within the existing structure of the enterprise. This is attractive, for example, to Private Equity investors who see an arbitrage potential in using large scale IT implementations as on tool of many to turnaround a business in a lagging industry.

A few of the conclusions of the enterprise software sexiness debate was that soon enough the presentation layer would be peeled back far enough that proper designers could focus more on the sexiness of the software and that would be the solution. That is a little thin on substance however, users are not actually screaming out for prettier interfaces. They really aren’t.

#2 - Surpassing Existing Structure (user first)

Stowe chimed in to the sexy-software debate and made a point that I can often be found making over martinis on a Friday: The next leap in software is putting the user first.

This is the second school of thought which is still emerging: it says that future enterprise software implementations will force massive changes in the very organization of the enterprise. The end goals for this school are to see networks surpass hierarchy. Cross functional teams will be the norm, efficiencies will be replicated and iterated with blinding speed and new product/service development will be a constant, not a project. By putting more power in the hands of the user, both functionally and organizationally, software will have this changing effect.

Front line employees, having access to the same knowledge and data (which was previously locked up), will contribute to the high-level decisions of executives through rapid feedback loops and clued-in executives will not react to obvious needs but will co-opt them.

So this is where we diverge.

A fork in the road, and it is where I think this Enterprise Hot-or-Not debate got off the rails.

You see, many average joes like Scoble are drawing a long-term assumption, and that is that enterprise software is going to converge with where consumer software is right now and where it is going.

The problem is that if you understand current enterprise systems, you know that can’t really happen. You can only hope that things will get a little prettier and perhaps that there will be updates to the software a little more often. IBM, Oracle SAP and others are already starting to deliver updates and UI enhancements more often than they once did (at least it seems that way).

What Scoble is imagining, and what people like Stowe and I dream about on long walks is fundamentally at odds with a large rule-based enterprise platform.

The middle ground that is emerging, which I am not a believer in, is that existing enterprise platforms will continue to dominate the user experience and that more social applications, like social bookmarking, wikis and perhaps blogs, will live alongside these systems.

There is one problem with that: Users won’t take it sitting down.

Those of us who have done large-scale social software implementations have seen that the results are much more nefarious: Once users begin to use social software in their daily work, it begins to capture massive amounts of their attention, and it also influences their thinking. This isn’t immediate, but it happens eventually and is significant.

All of a sudden users will begin to question arbitrary workflows in the SAP install, and they will be frustrated with how news gets pushed out on Sharepoint. The list goes on. The biggest problem isn’t that they are merely frustrated however, it is that they now have the tools to both express and remedy that frustration.

Once example we have seen is with a franchising client that was drop-shipping items to their franchisees who did not need them (this was to create a more consistent cost base for the franchisor). Previously a complaint to corporate would have resulted in a “we are considering your feedback” type response, but instead, the franchisee is now able to air their discontent with the entire network through an internal group blog, who in this case all had the same issue.

Old school (school #1 if you are keeping count) thinking would probably tell you to shut this conversation down immediately and to simply deny the existence of the problem because the drop shipments provided a significant benefit to the central corporation. Luckily this client sits in School #2 and can see that creating a more resilient network is far more beneficial than creating a single short-term efficiency. You cannot create resilient and self-healing networks with rule-based IT platforms. You need a combination of social software and business strategy to accomplish this.

Enterprise software will be sexy, and people will talk about it:

When it disrupts instead of enforces
When Enterprise software is changing organizations, it will make the news. When corporate hierarchies flatten and individuals contribute to both the work and the art of the organization, then it is something they will tell their friends about over drinks.

A sort of “and then the CEO admitted I was right, and I got 25 comments” moment.

When the user is in control
Configurability, personalization and sharing are not considered technologies by most users, they are a base use case for their personal lives. People understand control in a very serious way, and they know when they have it and when they do not.

When it is surprising

Software can be surprising in the best and the worst ways. It should still be surprising though, in some way.

When it changes
I mentioned earlier that people understand control in a very fundamental way. We all understand wealth in a similar fashion, and we know who is reaping the wealth from our work. When enterprise software generates returns for the user in the same way that it generates returns for the enterprise, then users will feel delighted. Whether it is more personal interaction, a sense of control or more personal time, the changes that will be noticed will not be in interfaces or firewalls, but in the actual everyday life of the user.

I have been using Defensio.com on this blog for a few weeks now, and I am going to say that it is now better than Akismet was. Defensio takes a little bit of time to clue in to all spam, but it is a short process.

For those who don’t know, Defensio.com is a spam filter for blog comment systems. It is currently integrated with Wordpress blogs like this one, but there is an API that lets other applications use Defensio as a spam filter as well.

Now, go to any TypePad blog and leave a comment. You will get a nasty human-checker CAPTCHA like the one below. It is archane and acts as a barrier to participation for everyone, let alone anyone with a vision problem.

Now that Six Apart is getting back to things like blogging, as possibly evidenced by the recent selloff of Livejournal, they really should consider buying Defensio outright while the service is still young. If Defensio isn’t up for sale (I mean, everyone has their price), then a partnership would be sensible and smart for both sides. The Defensio product is solid and tested, and transparent spam filtering is a requirement for Six Apart’s products, not a nice to have.

Six Apart is widely considered to be the#2 blogging service behind Wordpress.com for serious bloggers. I do not have hard data to back that up, but I can say it is the perception. Very few new bloggers that I see are going to Typepad, but I am not convinced it has to be that way. Great, easy, set-it-and-forget-it spam filtering would be the most productive first step towards turning things around that Six Apart could take.

 

 

Here are my Defensio Stats:

 

I just finished watching a press conference by Jim Prentice, where he announced that the Canadian Government is finally going to cut the existing oligopoly players out of a big chunk of an upcoming auction for wireless spectrum.

In case you didn’t know: We pay outrageous rates for voice and data service here in Canada more or less because past governments have protected the industry, and it all consolidated in to having 3 dominant players who have a history of collusion (not using that word lightly).

Tom covered this on StartupNorth.

John Robb, who I am lucky enough to get to work with on a few different projects, has been named one of Esquire Magazine’s Best and Brightest people in 2007.

John Robb’s “Global Guerrillas” of the twenty-first century don’t aspire to defeat our militaries nor topple our governments, but merely to bankrupt both, hollowing out the West’s institutions to the point where Osama bin Laden’s vision of the future — that is, his feudal order — carries the day. Global guerrillas are cheap and plentiful. By contrast, we field the few, the proud, and the incredibly expensive.

They change battlefield tactics daily, our lumbering Leviathan develops new military doctrine every decade or so.

We wrap our effort in great secrecy, but they wage open-source warfare, swapping their tradecraft over the Web.

In 1534 a group of men, some disillusioned soldiers, some students, all a mishmash of Spaniards, Portuguese and French gathered outside paris to form an order. The Company of Jesus was a commitment to each-other and to their cause.

to “enter upon hospital and missionary work in Jerusalem, or to go without questioning wherever the pope might direct”

You don’t have to be Christian, Catholic or even religious to have some respect for that kind of commitment. A vow of poverty and a future of unknowns. These men were a special type of person, who would stay committed to their cause through untold hardship. Upon forming, the Jesuit Priests split up and set out to complete the tasks given to each member by the pope.

There are two parts of the story about this order that are relevant to the introduction of social computing in to an organization today.

The first is the story of the constitution of the order. The founder of the order, Ignatius of Loyola, was tasked with creating a constitution and set of rules for the brotherhood. I am sure that having to live within the Catholic Church, easily the largest enterprise of the day, did not make this easy.

His approach, and one we should replicate, was methodical and took place over a period of six years. Ignatius of Loyola did not draw up arbitrary rules as I can only imagine would have been common in the church, instead he introduced rules or customs and tested them out, getting rid of ones that didn’t work and keeping the ones which helped move the order forward. Instead of pretending he had the answers, which as leader would have been typical, he chose to do what was sensible.

The second lesson, or perhaps warning, is how hard the work of the Jesuit Priest was at this time. The thankless journey in to unknown populations to spread a gospel that most people didn’t understand or particularly want. This is the role of the Enterprise 2.0 Evangelist in a large organization today. Behind you, you have the enterprise, playing the role of the church, and in front you have a hostile population.

What can the Priests and Priestesses of Enterprise 2.0 do to be successful? How can a mid-level employee bring social computing in to their organization? Is it hopeless? Are the Jesuit Priests of Enterprise 2.0 bound to a life of pain and rejection? Take a page from the Jesuits. You have to go in to unknown cultures, unknown places with unknown risks and you have to put it all on the line. You must live the faith in the most stubborn way possible and only then will your message be seen and heard. Above all else, the Jesuits aimed to live their faith and be examples rather than simply act as preachers. The impact of this was profound.

Few societies have entrenched themselves so successfully across the globe as the Jesuits, they have been resilient to change and catastrophe over the years and they have, arguably, been successful in achieving many of their original goals.

Leave your views of religious orders at the door, I know I had to, and take a look at the story of a small group of revolutionaries who created one of the most distributed, organic and innovative organizations that the world has ever seen.

I am now using Defensio Anti-Spam on this blog. I will keep you posted about how good, or bad, it is.

The theme of this year’s annual meeting in Davos is The Power of Collaborative Innovation.

From the website:

A “shifting power equation” was the framework in which the global agenda was discussed in Davos at the beginning of 2007. As we look towards 2008, this shift will continue to influence the strategies of business, government and other stakeholders in the world economy.

But closer examination of the international environment also reveals that leadership vacuums are beginning to emerge on a wide range of critical issues looming on the horizon. Moreover, a paradox has emerged in our networked world where knowledge is ubiquitous and change is rapid, but the absence of a common vision and agenda ensures that the status quo will be maintained with respect to major global challenges.

The topic which will be discussed in the light of The Power of Collaboration are

1. Business Competing While Collaborating
2. Economics and Finance Addressing Economic Insecurity
3. Geopolitics Aligning Interests across Divides
4. Science and Technology Exploring Nature’s New Frontiers
5. Values and Society Understanding Future Shifts

My favorite conversations these days are less about how we can collaborate, and more about what the results might be. I feel like we have spent a lot of time building tools, pondering strategy, worrying about roadblocks, that we sometimes loose sight of the more serious global result we could see. It’s not about be prescriptive, but about dreaming a little bit.

If I were at Davos, I would be focused on the Values and Society and the Geopolitics tracks, I would spend the least time talking about Business.

For those lucky enough to get to attend, and who have been clued in to the changes that have taken place so far, I hope this is a chance to show some pretty powerful people that we don’t have to have all the answers to the world’s problems, we really have to let the answers come to us.

Who will be invited? Its anyone’s guess.

I’ll bet on Ori Brafman, Andrew McAfee, and Don Tapscott. There are a handful of people who I really think /should/ be there, but most likely won’t be.

Hat tip to Susan

The CBC here in Canada appears to be pretty malleable. An official from the Chinese embassy here in Canada was able to, with a single phone call, censor a documentary from the air.

You can’t blame China on this one really. The Chinese government does not pretend to offer religious freedom to the Chinese people, so it is probably to be expected that they do not like documentaries about any sort of non-state religions that take root in China.

The CBC however, exists in a country where, and is given its mandate by people who believe that, religious freedom is an inalienable human right. You don’t just throw a documentary in the trash because you get a phone call, from another country.

I hope this issue doesn’t die. The National Post published it on page 11 or 12 today, it wasn’t a priority for them

““I was actually contacted myself by a gentleman who is a cultural consultant with the Chinese embassy,” Mr. Keay said. “He was very polite.” CBC will run a new version of the documentary “sooner rather than later,” the spokesman added, but couldn’t say precisely when.

The Canadian director of Beyond The Red Wall says he has no intention of re-editing a piece that he spent three years working on. “We have to quote-unquote give balance,” veteran filmmaker Peter Rowe said in an interview. “… I’ve never experienced anything like these kinds of demands.”

Rob posted this morning about NPR Music and The Bryant Park Project. If you haven’t spent some time on them yet, go take a look.

Rob has spent almost 2 years working with NPR and I spent almost a year consulting for them alongside Rob. By the time I was done, we felt like things could go either way. We had helped them discover what they had to do, but that is only half the battle.

I can’t take credit for what has gone on, Rob deserves a lot of credit (at least for all the unbilled hours he put in over the years), but I know we both feel extremely proud of what is going on now. At its core, NPR has an incredibly precious mission and now more than ever they absolutely cannot afford to fail at it.

Their team deserves so much applause, and I know they are still innovating today with some huge obstacles and difficulties around them. Even more though, the stations in the NPR system deserve a pat on the back. They opened themselves up at a time when people were running around saying that NPR was going to leave the stations in the dust. Their reward for opening up and trusting NPR is that a stronger network continues to grow, and there seems to be a lot more sharing of success these days.

The other side to this story is how this all came together. At a time when NPR could have hired (and could afford) any of the biggest consulting firms in the country, they called us in cold, remote, Canada, after having read Rob’s blog. When your core consulting team is 3 people, you have to get creative. All we could do was to help NPR find the answers to their problems on their own. They did it brilliantly, and you can see the results today.

NPR used all the concepts we now call ‘Enterprise 2.0′ to reinvent itself. They made some use of technology (like Firestoker), but really it came down to sitting people in a room and giving up control. NPR’s leadership sat down with everyone else and participated, eye to eye and often heart to heart. Nobody knew the answers, but they did the hard work and found them.

I am sure that the public radio system still has more than enough problems. There are more than likely some organizations and people who feel slighted or forgotten, and I am sure there are bits of animosity floating around. The difference that I see now is that there is a framework of participation that can be used to solve new problems.

With all the money that big companies will spend in the next 10 years on trying to embrace Enterprise 2.0, sometimes you really just need to trust a few of the pioneers. Rob, Johnnie, Euan and a few others are the ones you can trust to disrupt your organization in incredibly useful ways. This is such a new world and there are so few who have experience and success right now. Get em’ while they’re cheap!

The Community is the Framework.

The big news today is that Google will soon be announcing OpenSocial [ongoing].

OpenSocial is a BigDeal(tm) for a lot of reasons. If you have been in a face-to-face conversation about Facebook with me recently, you’ll have heard my own ideas about an open platform being what will drag Facebook down. It will be slow, but this is the beginning. I have also written about why starting a company as the Facebook Platform is risky.

There is even more interesting news than the announcement of OpenSocial however. As Microsoft and Facebook strengthen their advertising relationship, Google has hit the ground running and they are currently courting the more successful Facebook application developers to start using Google tools to built their user numbers. Full text of the email is below.

Why does this matter? There are a few reasons. The biggest is that this demonstrates that Google has a serious, long-term strategy in place. Simply releasing the OpenSocial spec did not do anything to confirm how serious Google is about this game, but they are creating a funnel of Facebook Application developers to leverage in the future. Google is going to be more than willing to create very cheap offers for developers in order to keep them addicted to Google’s ecosystem. As OpenSocial expands and matures, Google will light the fire under their Facebook developers and create easy, and profitable, options to migrate Applications and Users away from Facebook.

Google see Facebook as a primary threat, and Microsoft sees them as a battalion of shock-troops to keep Google in line. If Google did not create a long-term strategy now, it’s possible the would have paid dearly down the road.

This is a problem for Microsoft’s investment in Facebook. Because Google has a long-term strategy, this is going to be a protracted and expensive fight. The theories doing battle are open platform vs. closed platform. Considering the success of the Internet itself as a largely open platform for developers, Google is in a great position to win this fight.

Dear Facebook Application Developer,

Would you like to drive more users to your app? We’ve expanded our pay-per-action (PPA) beta test and would like to invite you to participate by creating ads for your Facebook application.

To start setting up your first pay-per-action campaign, click on the link within the pay-per-action alert in your AdWords account and follow the simple steps at http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=68150 to get your PPA ads up & running across the Google content network and on other Facebook applications.

Key Benefits of PPA

* Save money by paying only for actions that you define, such as users adding your app. Rather than paying for clicks or impressions, you only pay when a visitor performs a specified action, such as installing your Facebook application or visiting your main application page.
* Save time by setting up AdWords conversion tracking: you can set your desired cost per action and pay for completed actions to hit your cost-per-action targets.
* Increase conversion rates by using publishers’ knowledge about visitors to their websites to your advantage. Individual publishers in the Google content network, including other Facebook applications, choose to display PPA ads that they feel will appeal to their visitors. This works to your advantage, as publishers are motivated to choose ads they believe will have a high conversion rate.

With PPA, you decide how much you want to pay for each type of action, whether it’s $1 for a user installing your application or $.15 for visiting your application page. You can also control your spending by setting a daily budget. In addition, you can view clicks, impressions, conversion rate, cost per conversion, total conversions, and total cost for each pay-per-action campaign by running a Placement Performance Report or a pay-per-action report in the Report Center of your AdWords account.

For more information about pay-per-action ads and a list of our most frequently asked questions, please visit the pay-per-action section in the Google AdWords help center: http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=11635

We are excited to offer you a new way to attract new users to your Facebook application and meet your advertising goals.a If you have any questions, please email adsense-developer-research@google.com.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

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Update: Techcrunch and VentureBeat are now covering this.