Looking Ahead Into The Past

I am pulling my thoughts together for tonight’s panel at The Podio Store, on the topic of Tools For Work. I will be on the panel with Eugene Kim, David Skult, and Jon Froda, and we’ll be talking about works tools of the past.

We can learn a lot about email and its impacts on work. Most today don’t recall the time prior to widespread email adoption in business, or the transitions involved. We have internalized email to such an extent that for many it is impossible to envision business without it.

One thing we DID learn through the adoption of email is the underestimation of the costs of transition, and the enormous impact of second order effects once the technology has been ubiquitously adopted. Most large businesses required a return on investment analysis to demonstrate direct cost savings prior to adoption of email; in over 70% of the time, no subsequent analysis was performed to see if the expected efficiencies had been achieved. Insteda, the second order effects took over, and companies realized that their businesses had changed so fundamentally post-email that there was no practical way to remove email even if it in fact cost more and led to inefficiencies.

We can anticipate that the same second order effects (as identified by Sproull and Kiesler in Connections) are at work in other techonologies like instant messaging and the streaming collaboration tools that are emerging today, like Podio.

Stowe Boyd, The Business Case For Streams versus Email

How Is This Different From Email, And Does That Matter?

Email is not predicated on social networks, except to the extent that the users of email are networked. The premise is that there is a universe of individuals (and perhaps named groups) to who messages can be directed. And they can send messages to you, if they know your email address.

Like streams, email has sending and receiving contexts, but there is no notion of writing an email message without addressing it to a specific list of people.

Email is addressed, stream posts are released.

Email is private, and the distribution of messages is determined by the author at the time of writing. Individuals may decide to block my messages, but they can’t opt to see all of them. This means that the effective use of the information in the message is based on the premise that the author knows who should read it.

Streams are public (within some defined ‘public’), and the distribution of messages is determined by the actions of all the members of that public. Individuals decide who they will follow, and the collective streaming of information is the result of the affiliation of all the members of the public.

In the context of business, this means that email is selective: the author selects who should read the message. Streams are elective: the eventual recipients of messages elect to receive them. And this election is principally based on the individual, not the topic, per se, although different tools may implment that very differently.

Relative to email’s selection orientation, streaming is based on the premise that individuals might be more effective if they can elect to receive information flows that are potentially useful to them, and therefore, they should be able to make the determination for themselves as to what are the best sources of information.

Looking at this as a ‘wisdom of the crowds’ sort of issue, it is more likely that information will be best distributed within any given group if each person can decide what information sources are likely to provide good information for themself, rather than leaving it up to the sources of information to decide who should have access to it. This is the argument for openness in open societies, as well, and it has an immediate and obvious analog in the workplace.

So, whenever the discussion comes around (once again) about how we already have email, and that all this streaming malarcky is nothing new, please remember that the models are quite different, and at least in some ways are an inversion of each other. Email is inherently more centralized and top-down, while streaming is inherently more distributed and bottom-up.

When we hear arguments against streaming in the business context they are often the same arguments that are made against distribution of decision-making and the value of top-down controls. I won’t go into the counter to these arguments here — they are out of scope — except to point out that bottom-up and distributed business organization is often linked to agile and resilient businesses, ones that are more likely to thrive in challenging and fast-changing circumstances.

Last Thoughts: What We Can Learn From Corporate Email

We are at a juncture in the rise of streams which is similar to the rise of corporate email. People today don’t recall the controversy about adopting corporate email in the ’70s and ’80s, and then again, web-based email in the ’90s.

One lesson to learn is that ROI studies will be asked for prior to roll-out. However, later on, when the entire company and then the world has shifted to email, senior management will realize that there is no return to a pre-email or pre-stream world, and therefore most companies will simply opt not to calculate whether the return was realized. It will be moot. (See Lee and Sproul, Connections, for a detailed examination of this around corporate email.)

The second lesson is interoperability and standards. Corporate email led to a a Cambrian explosion of email products that were largely non-interoperable. It took years to get different systems to intercommunicate, so large companies often had three or more unintegrated email solutions, based on acquisitions, or different groups in different countries making differently local decisions.

We need to start thinking about interoperable streams, from the outset. For example, I have been advocating interoperability of the tumble blog model for some time, which is a specific subset of the more general streams model. Since we have some much innovation going on, this is likely to turn out to be like the SQL standard, which was the intersection of the leading implementations of the SQL model of databases. At any rate, businesses looking to roll out streams in their companies should definitely put pressure on the vendors to commit to interoperability in the next few years, before this gets away from us.

23 March 2011 3 Permalink

Aligning Time With Mission

One of the principles of what I am starting to call social cognition — the subtle shift in our consciousness as we are exposed to social tools — is that we share time online, not space. This make it quite unlike our interactions in the offline context.

And the corollary is that our time, increasingly, is not our own. But I mean this in a positive sense.

One of the outcomes of this is that we need better, shared representation of our time together. In the business context this is tied to the coordination of our work around shared goal, and the alignment of time with mission.

I read an interesting post by Mike Monteiro of Mule (via @steverubel), that explores some ideas about the relationship of time fragments and their linkage to goals:

Mike Monteiro, The Chokehold Of Calendars

The problem with calendars is that they are additive rather than subtractive. They approach your time as something to add to rather than subtract from. Adding a meeting is innocuous. You’re acting on a calendar. A calendar isn’t a person. It isn’t even a thing. It’s an abstraction. But subtracting an hour from the life of another human being isn’t to be taken lightly. It’s almost violent. It’s certainly invasive. Shared calendars are vessels you fill by taking things away from other people.

“I’m adding a meeting” should really be “I’m subtracting an hour from your life.”

We need a goal-oriented calendar, but first we need to understand why a goal-oriented calendar is necessary.

Imagine that rather than scheduling individual points in time, such as meetings, you were instead scheduling a goal. With all its dependencies with it. A simplified model might look like this:

By handling events as something we work towards and need time to produce things for, rather than as disruptive singularities, and by respecting that work time as something associated with a goal we achieve a calendar that shows both those meetings, now less inane, and the time time necessary to do the work that will make those meetings successful.

Most of these things currently exist. Across multiple applications. And badly. Now it’s time to fix that.

I agree with Monteiro.

I also believe that calendars that will be smart about why and how we work will also be integrated with streams. For example, commentary and work products (a deck, say) that we create in support of a meeting could be annotated with appropriate metadata so they would stream to the participants and be attached appropriately to the meeting object, as well.

8 October 2010 Permalink

Surrender To The Stream, And Be Happy

Streaming apps — based on the open follower model, or variants of it — will be the dominant motif of the web for the foreseeable future. And this is having an impact on everything that touches it, including our sense of time.

A great deal of research has shown that that our perception of time is quite malleable. For example, we have all experienced boredom as making the clock slow, and, an the other hand, how time seems to move more quickly during periods of happiness or excitement. Can this be exploited to make work more fun?

Robert Levin, A Geography Of Time

Psychologists and planners have sometimes used the “time flies” phenomenon to their advantage. In one project, for example, psychologist Robert Meade was able to improve workers’ morale by speeding up the psychological clock. Meade took advantage of the fact that that time is experienced as shorter when people believe that they are making progress toward a goal. The sense of progress, he found, can be enhanced through simple procedures such as establishing a definite end point to the task and providing incentives to reach those goals. Before his experiment, Meade herad comments from workers like “It sees like the day would never end” or “It seems like I’ve been here all day but it’s not even lunchtime yet.” After establishing a sense of progress there were proclamations like “The day went by so quickly — it seems like I just got started.” It is difficult to know, of course, to what extent speeding up the passage of time led to a more pleasant experience  or vice versa. The direction of cause and effect, however, is less important than the net effect on workers’ well-being. Employers might be pleased to note that these increases in morale are often accompanied by accelerate production.

Management may have a hard time accepting the soft benefits of time compression and the way that tools modify our consciousness, but they will readily accept improvement in productivity and work attitudes.

One of the effects of participating in open streaming apps (like Twitter) as part of your workday, or the use streaming apps specifically designed for business use (like IBM Connections, Yammer, or the myriad other offerings) is how it shifts users’ perceptions of time, in the way that Meade research suggests.

Simply by providing a context in which users establish what they are working on, and posting notes about their progress — or asking other for help to make progress — and receiving feedback as they make progress, workers using streaming apps are likely to experience time as moving more quickly. This is either associated in our minds with other experiences that make us happy, or directly makes us happy. In either case, it seems fairly obvious that users are happier when exposed to social work contexts with these characteristics.

Management may have a hard time accepting the soft benefits of time compression and the way that tools modify our consciousness, but they will readily accept improvement in productivity and work attitudes.

Note that incentives can be amazingly minimal: just the positive regard of close contacts can be enough.

And the same holds true in our activities outside of the workplace. To be happy, it seems that we simply can share our near-term goals and our progress in reaching them with our friends and family in real time, not just stretched over weeks or months. Learning how to knit, or play the blues, or performing your next Karate kata with a groups of similarly involved others makes time pass more quickly.

There is also ample evidence to show that we learm more and make better decisions when we are engaged and happy, too. so this turns out to be a fairly virtuous cycle.

So, the next time someone suggests you are doing something childish, illegitimate or almost immoral by Twittering what you are up to, tell them about Meade’s research. And then get back to the stream.

12 September 2010 5 Permalink

Giving Up On Disqus Comments

I keep expecting that Tumblr will announce their own take on comments (ministreams? A better version of Notes?) but they haven’t as of yet.

But the Disqus comment system just doesn’t gibe well with Tumblr, or my increasingly Twitter-oriented world. And the Disqus ‘Reactions’ — an implementation of BackType’s Twitter monitoring technology — seemed to stop working this week. So I have modified this template to drop the Disqus comments, and I have included a Tweetmeme button on each post, instead.

Here you see two posts, one with no Tweets referring to it, and the other with one. In either case, clicking on ‘tweet’ will allow you to create a tweet with a URL pointing to the post.

In the case of posts with existing tweets pointing at them, clicking on the number — ‘12 tweets’ — will open a Tweetmeme window displaying those tweets.

So, I am adopting this mechanism in lieu of external comments. At least the Twitter stream is a living breathing place, while the comment threads on blogs feel like an old cobwebby library.

—-

Update: Saturday 11 September 2010

I was tweeted by @golda from BackType who suggested that a BackType button might be simpler that the sort of noisy and ad-busy Tweetmeme result.

Another reason to switch to Backtype from Tweetmeme is that BackType will show results going back as far as the post was original created. Although there seems to be an issue in my case, perhaps due to the domain name change I went through at the start of the summer. So I will try this for a while and see.

10 September 2010 Permalink

Facebook Is The New AOL

[originally entitled: Blogtalk 2010: Notes And Thoughts On The Social Future]

Galway is a lovely place, and I have always wanted to see where ‘the hills sweep down to the sea,’ so Blogtalk 2010 was fun. I saw old friends, and made some new ones. But this get-together reinforced a few thoughts, which wound up in my keynote, as well.

The era of blogging is over: its impact as a goad, a competitive force on print media has been felt, and deeply internalized. Meanwhile, most of the failures of 20th century journalism remain: notably, failing to create open social discourse, and becoming entrapped in the liturgy of journalism while failing to debunk lies and expose injustice. But print media have adopted the trappings of blogging, and have co-opted much of the heat — if any — of the blogosphere.

This has been relatively quick, partly because blogging is really ‘personal publishing’ — low-cost publishing, and lines up pretty well with the one-to-many dynamics of mass publishing. Comments and backlinks are pretty weak sauce when considered in the light of ‘social media’. Blogging, in the final analysis, ten years later, isn’t particularly social. Especially contrasted with social networks and other tools.

Facebook is the new AOL.

Blogtalk was filled with talk about social networks. A representative of Facebook spoke, and was almost orgasming as he related how great all the newest features were. Facebook and Twitter’s growth rates were repeated like kabalistic incantations throughout the event, and the unstoppability of Facebook in particular — its manifest destiny as the basis of all things social on the web — was generally taken as a given.

But social networks as realized today by Facebook and others are closed worlds, silos in which vastly different user experiences are managed. I heard presentations on a variety of approaches to federated and/or open identity management schemes, which could potentially support open and/or distributed social networking models, but these are only of theoretical interest to actual users.

I believe that Facebook represents the high water mark of social networking, as we understand it today, a time dominated by social networking applications, as if our social interaction is something best managed in a single enormous database, whose rows and tables are designed by a small group of developers in one company.

Facebook is the new AOL.

Facebook is managing the chaos of social interaction on the web, normalizing it and standardizing it for us, just as AOL made the web neat and tidy. That seemed a winning proposition in the late ’90s, which led to astonishing valuations for AOL. They acquired Time-Warner using that wealth, and in 2002 Time-Warner wrote off $600M as AOL started to fall. Now, AOL has been spun out, and has no central role in our experience of the web. 10 years is a long time. Time-Warner is now the second largest entertainment company in the world.

The moral of this story is that you can make a business out of simplifying what is chaotic and confusing, but only at the outset. As people become habituated to what at first was scary and headache-inducing, they will move away from controlled experience to more personally managed negotiation of the world.

‘But, all my friends are on Facebook!’ That was true in 1999 about AOL, too. All my friends had AIM accounts, so it was the best place for instant messaging. Until Yahoo and MSN offered audio and then video, and blogging broke loose. And then everything changed with broadband.

And what is going to be the equivalent of broadband for sociality online? What is going to come along to destabilize the Facebook stranglehold on our ‘social graphs’? Simple: sociality has turned out to be the most interesting thing to emerge from the past decade of the web. It’s not all the servers, the cloud computing, the data, or even the explosion of materials online: its the social dimension, and the tools we have built to explore that.

At the same time, we are witnessing an almost unprecedented era of invention around new devices, form factors, and operational premises for computing and communications. Smartphones, tablets, app stores, and the emergence of activities like geolocation, massively parallel gaming, social TV, and so on. These are leading to a deep rethinking of the operating environments we rely on, in our PCs, mobile and gaming devices, and formerly internet-deaf devices like TVs and appliances.

The next generation of operating environments will be social at their core. Our current operating environments are based on standard understanding of things that programmers care about, like files, directories, and access controls. The average person could care less.

We will see social operating systems where following people’s activities, or creating likes, or publishing profiles will all be built-in. These will not be features of apps, or managed as metadata in walled silos. The primitives that structure our social connections will be built into the fabric of the next generation of operating environments, just like file systems, URLs, and HTTP are well-integrated into today’s.

As a result, actors like Google, Apple, the Linux community, and Microsoft — as well as upstarts that don’t even exist yet — will be the implementers of the next generation of social web, with social interaction built into its DNA.

Imagine that I will turn on my next generation iPad, a few years hence, and I’ll be presented with various applications that show views over the streams of information finding their way to me based on my social relationships. But those relationships are not based on application managed information, but related to my device connecting to the web, like getting an IP address today. I would get a social IP, and ping out to all the other entities online, so that information from those that I follow would find me, just as email is routed to me today independently of what email application I choose to use.

There will still be a place for applications to present and augment the basics of social interaction, but they will not be what Facebook is today: a huge social scene whose rules and regulations are managed by the owners of the application, for their own interests.

Clearly, The New York Times, ABC and Apple don’t want to hand the future of our social connection over to Facebook, or any other cabal of software companies. The answer is not in copying Facebook, which seems to be the goal of Google’s Me project. Inevitably, the way ahead is to take the social dimension — at least the core features that have emerged in the social web to date — down into the operating platforms. Actions like following, liking, posting, and reposting have become the core of our social existence. And these core activities should be core to the platforms, not peripheral.

Based on common protocols, vendors of different platforms could still compete based on how they manage these new social primitives along with the other things that devices must do. But just like today’s files — which can move from Mac, to Windows, to Linux, to GameBoy — we would have the ability to network effectively; although in this case, to network socially.

It remains to be seen how quickly or smoothly this transition will be. And in the meantime the dominance of Facebook will make billions for investors. However, the fastest growing segment on Facebook is the 55+ crowd, which suggests that the young and the hipsters will start to defect to alternatives, just like they fled MySpace when the phonies and fogies came in.

Social music and social TV are the two areas that suggest the greatest pressure for a solution at a fundamental — not application, or application framework level.

Facebook’s management may be aware of this, as well. Imagine the scenario where Facebook’s valuation is so high, and the prospects seem so grand, that Facebook acquires an apparently fading Microsoft, and works to fuse Facebook into some version of Windows. Like the AOL Time-Warner merger, I bet it this would lead to smoke but no bang.

Meanwhile, the world will lurch chaotically forward. If cable and entertainment companies develop standards around social TV, and allow experimentation by entrepreneurs to develop social apps that augment TV, we will see some real interesting stuff arise, and the defection of viewers from non-social TV will slow, and reverse. Facebook will see its numbers falling as people start watching basketball, reality shows, or movies with friends online. Likewise, Apple could lead to similar experimentation around social music by exposing social APIs in a future socialized version of iTunes.

This will take years, if not decades, to roll forward. But I maintain this will happen, and that, as a result, Facebook is not the future, but just a very temporary present.

29 August 2010 25 Permalink

Flow: A New Consciousness For A Web Of Traffic

A video of my presentation at Reboot courtesy of Nicolas Charbonnier (Charbax): It’s called “Flow: A New Consciousness For A Web Of Traffic.”

I am going to get a transcript made at some point. It’s posted at Slideshare, here.

4 June 2006 Permalink