Teblog

Safe corporate social computing?

Look around at social and collaborative computing and what do you see? A complete hotch potch of different systems, some of which run safely behind the firewall, others which sit out there on someone else's servers. You hop from Flickr to Outlook to Skype to Facebook to discussion groups, or whatever. Each has its own approach and, often, integration is only possible through hyperlinks or copy/paste.

Add to this the fact that you're working on different devices, laptop, desktop, internet café terminal, mobile phone, Blackberry and so on and what have you got? A lot of time wasting, a lack of security and data distributed all over the show.

It can't last. To move forward we need to get to a point where all we're concerned about is doing stuff with our information and other people while the systems themselves move towards invisibility.

Of course we're going to have to get from where we are now to where we'd like to be then. One issue is integration. Another is multiplatform. And a third is security. I'm sure there are others, but they'll do for now.

We need common interfaces, the ability to surface our information to whatever device we happen to be using and to do it in a way that doesn't  expose us or our organisation to risk.

Enter stage left an organisation called Outblaze*. I had some minor contact with its CEO, Yat Siu, in 2005 and I'm ashamed to say I totally forgot about his company name. His tale about internet connection speeds in the Far East is what stunned me at the time. He was talking about 100 megs being common, with up to a gig being possible, if you were prepared to pay $215/month at the time. He now has a 1 gig connection to his home.

This means that using the internet is a totally different experience over there. And the software and user interfaces that have evolved are highly visual and engaging - you feel more as if you're in a virtual cartoon world than working a computer.

Outblaze sits quietly in the background providing 'white label' messaging and social computing services to a wide range of clients. Try MSN, AOL and Yahoo! for size. It's big. It has 76 million users tied to 480,000 web domains. Its clients offer Outblaze services as if they were their own. Outblaze picks up a monthly fee per user based on which particular services are picked from the company's long menu. At a broad level, it provides messaging, security, collaboration, community/social networking, digital identity, compliance and gaming facilities. Each heading contains, on average, half a dozen or so sub categories.

If you took the community/social networking stack, for example, it contains: social networking platform, online video editing and sharing, photo sharing, bookmarks sharing, blogs, wiki, chat, forums/message boards and dating/friend matching. It supports devices from mobile phones to desktop PCs and anything that can use the web.

The company is already hugely successful around the world and it is now extending its reach into the enterprise and, at the same time, it wants to increase its European presence, where it (vaguely) claims to have between five and ten million users. It thinks that Europe is more ready for its approach than the USA.

Richard Bye is the company's vp of sales and corporate development for EMEA (Europe Middle East and Africa), so he's the guy in the hot seat for this initiative. He believes, and he's probably right, that enterprises want their own social networks but they can't do it in-house and they don't really trust the public services. Nor do they want the capital expenditure or the disruption associated with such an initiative.

It's obvious where this is heading. With a solid base of experience of running enterprise-class hosted and integrated systems, Outblaze's system appears to check all the boxes. No doubt it will try and get its leverage from working through the third parties that already serve these prospects. Potentially, it's a straightforward value-add for them and huge leverage for Outblaze.

It will come into conflict with some presently outsourced services. Messagelabs springs to mind, but I'm sure there are plenty of others.

And, who knows, perhaps we can learn to relax a bit and allow a little of the Far Eastern culture to penetrate our rather stolid computer interfaces. All we need is a bit more bandwidth.

PS The above blog was written just before I left for Lotusphere on 20th Jan. On 21st January, IBM/Lotus announced  the beta of its own social/collaboration hosted service called bluehouse. If IBM can get its rollout and provisioning strategy right, it could put the company centre stage.

*Outblaze's new website should be online by the end of January. Having looked at the old one on Wayback Machine, I can't blame the company for hiding it.

Dealing with social media addiction

The internet is silting up with ego-driven dross. It's little wonder that the anti-network-neutrality brigade would like to turn it into freeways and side streets, depending on willingness to pay. And, equally, it's no wonder that the network neutrality supporters want everything to stay the same and for the pipes to be fattened ad infinitum.

With limitless capacity and fixed price access, anyone who can afford a few dollars a month is able to promulgate whatever they want out to an unsuspecting world. They could do it with blogs, podcasts, videocasts, social networking sites, Second Life or Twitter.

It doesn't matter that most of the utterances are ignored by most of the world. For most people the joy lies, I suspect, in the uttering. It's like vanity publishing. Everyone has a story and this is a way to get it out.

Most people like making connections and 'friendships'. By participating in a social site like Twitter, they can delude themselves about their connectedness. Enough of the digital glitterati hang out there to make it worth dropping by and picking up what these A-listers are up to. Even if it is as boring as 'stuck in traffic on 101', or whatever.

If we were able to really restrict our appetite for social media consumption to our genuine friends and work colleagues, for example, then we'd probably derive a lot of value from it. I wouldn't mind knowing what my four analyst colleagues at Freeform Dynamics were up to at any time although I really wouldn't welcome a continous stream of the stuff.

And this is the issue really. If you get involved in any big way with blogs, podcasts, videocasts and social sites, it can be like a drug. But this drug doesn't so much mess with your head as mess with your time. "I'll just see what [name your own guru] is up to at the moment" and that's another chunk of your life thrown away, never to be recovered. It's even worse with videos, which are becoming all the rage in Twitterati circles. A bit of puff and a tiny URL and, if you're not careful, you end up watching some nonentity on an ego trip.

I think we ought to start accounting for our time in the same way that lawyers do. And then measure the value extracted from each social media engagement. Did it entertain? Did it educate? Did it inform? Choose your own criteria and monitor your online activity. If you're dissatisfied with the outcome, ask yourself what else you would have spent that time doing. If the answer to that is 'something better' then you have a problem. Only by recognising the consequences of the addiction can you form your strategy for beating it.

PS For social accounting purposes, that probably took you 135 seconds to read.

FAST move by Microsoft

Anyone who's followed me over the years would not mark me down as a Microsoft lover. As long ago as 1980 Steve Ballmer used to visit me and tell me of his dreams for Microsoft. I liked the man, I was taken aback by the vision - even more so when it came true - but I never actually liked the company.

Having said this, my software company (Caxton) embraced Microsoft enthusiastically when CP/M died and MS/PCDOS took over. And so it's been ever since. I use Microsoft software. Heck, I still publish some as a hobby.

So what to make of the latest news, that Microsoft is to buy search company FAST? I am stunned. Truly. I take my hat off to Microsoft for this move. Forget about the staff meltdown that FAST has experienced recently, the fact is that this company has a great reputation and some solid clients. I'm sure it's not beyond the wit of Microsoft to win key developers back, if it wanted to.

Enterprise information has always been siloed and this drives users crazy because there's no easy way to gather together all the information they need. Search companies like FAST and Autonomy provide the means to overcome this problem. With the arrival of social computing into the enterprise, the siloing is accompanied by massive amounts of unstructured information, in all manner of different formats. This is a problem which can only get worse.

IBM has its UIMA interface which sits atop the silos and gives a way to reach in to unstructured information. This is quite apart from its search engines. Oracle and Autonomy, too, have their ways of grabbing what they need. They add words like 'secure', 'discovery' and 'meaning' to their product names to make them more comforting to the buyers. But Microsoft: it's been playing around at the entry and low end with its own search offerings.

Now, in a single stroke, the company puts itself in contention with these other major players. Assuming the deal goes through, it immediately removes one of the major stumbling blocks with large scale implementation of SharePoint Server - that of being able to draw information together from multiple hierarchical silos. If the integration with SharePoint is done well and if the missing bits of the social computing stack are added, then Microsoft will have leapfrogged the industry and incredibly strengthened its position.

To Twit, to who?

Okay, I confess. I've been Twittering over the holiday period. As part of my social computing beat for Freeform Dynamics, it's up to me to try and understand what the heck's going on, even if it isn't (yet?) mainstream.

Like blogging, Second Life, instant messaging, Facebook and all the other social computing activities before it, at first glance Twitter looks a bit mad and potentially very disruptive. It is, essentially, mini-blogging. 140 characters to say what you like when you like. Your posts appear on your followers' screens or on their phones.

You can be certain that companies like IBM and Microsoft are watching with interest. And, no doubt, many of their staff will be participating enthusiastically. As with all the previous social activities, they'll mine value out of it, if there's any value to be mined. Then they'll try to either replicate it within their own collaboration suites or, if they have to, make sure that this stuff can be surfaced within their own offerings.

The early adopters of social media tools are a fickle bunch. They swarm. Because they are so connected, ideas spread rapidly and they find themselves flitting to the next new thing. And, presumably because there are only so many hours in the day, marginalise whatever social computing activity they previously indulged in.

Facebook was de rigeur among these people and now they're Twittering. I have no doubt that they will be on to the next good thing very soon. But they leave a trail. I was going to say like animal spoor, but that sounds rather negative. First of all the creators of these tools have probably worked for nothing and shared their tools freely. If they end up with a 'hit' on their hands, then they have masses of beta testers, also working for 'nothing'. (In actual fact, they disclose a lot about themselves.) They will have identified value in the offering, even if they subsequently move on.  For the Microsofts and IBMs of this world, this amounts to free research.

When blogging first caught on, it seemed to comprise mainly of people wittering on about nothing in particular to an audience that largely couldn't give a toss. Some bloggers, though, actually made sense and started to attract followers. Just like journalism, some educated, some informed and some entertained. It didn't really matter. By writing authoritatively about their interests, they started to attract those who were interested in similar things. Communities started to form, through adding comments and including links from their own blogs. This often led to other more conventional forms of contact. Beside this undeniably valuable human aggregation, a massive pool of permanently stored information is there for anyone to explore in the future.

So what about Twitter? Time-wasting nonsense was my predominant reaction to it for several months. I made the same mistake that I did with blogging, predominantly that I thought I had to keep up with everything. It's not possible. I thought the posts were largely pointless. Many of them are. Just like blogging, some are silly, some are irritating while some deliver direct value. Some Twitterers do all three, depending on their mood. The best ones are of the 'hey look at this' variety. If someone you respect enough to follow says this, then you're probably going to welcome such a tip-off.

But then you get the "I am in a sushi bar in Times Square, yum yum". Most of us couldn't care less, unless we happen to be in New York, in which case it's an opportunity to make contact. If you're thinking of calling someone and they're on Twitter, you could look at their stream and see what they're up to. Frankly, I think there are dangers in giving too much away. If I wanted to burgle someone, all I'd need to do was follow their Twitter stream to find out when they're away. Okay - a bit silly maybe, but it is a reminder of how much we give away, wittingly or not.

But, behind this, values emerge. Sign up and find some people or entities (Twitterers are all people, but some go by their company name or their interest - 'predictions08' or 'FTtechnews' for example) that you know and see who they follow. This is a useful way of finding who's out there who might be of interest to you. Watch out for the current courtesy of reciprocating 'follows'. If you look at the list of people I follow, don't assume I have the faintest idea who many of them are. I've just added them because they added me. (Unlike Facebook where I'm very fussy who I accept as a 'friend'. 'Follower' is a much more sensible term.)

Conversations emerge on Twitter, but it's not a good way to converse, any more than blogging would be. Do you track comments on your comments on someone's blog post? So Twitter provides messaging as well. You can't assume that anyone's aware of anything you've posted. Twitter is just a stream of jumbled stuff into which you can dip to 'catch the mood' perhaps or pick up tips, links and like-minded (or not) souls. And, of course, it's always a good idea to reciprocate with links to good stuff that you've stumbled across.

The very worst thing you can do is to try and catch up on everything that's been said since the last time you were on. Accept that you'll miss stuff. Or, if there are people whose every utterance you must follow, get them sent to your mobile or log in to their page when you have a moment.

I can't predict whether Twitter will prove to be a fad or whether it will go mainstream. What I do know is that the entrails are being studied and if there's anything of value there, it will surface in some form in the offerings of major software companies.