Key question: What do you, dear reader, think about cross-posting to multiple blogs as a solution to the challenge of maintaining both a personal and a corporate presence?

Chris’s post focuses on “trust agents” who have a personal presence in a given community but also represent a company, and raises the issue of what happens when they move on to another company. Some folks blog on the corporate site, with the company for which they work providing the platform. His own situation?:

My own blog has been mine since day one. When I worked with Jeff Pulver, it was still my blog. With CrossTech Media, this is my blog. They might ask me to be mindful of our company and occasionally post information germane to my business, but that’s expected. I’m their guy. Why wouldn’t they want that of me? And I love writing about the work we’re doing, like the New Marketing Summit (plug plug).

But the blog is mine. It’s my shingle. It’s where I conduct my business. Most of this business is on behalf of my organization. I’m grateful to have a company to work with, and both CrossTech Media now and Pulvermedia before supported this stance.

At Optaros, we’ve always tried to encourage consultants to maintain a presence in various communities on their own, independent of the corporate platform. We’ve never wanted to project a kind of “corporate voice” that is impersonal and anonymous, and having people speak in their own voices on their own platforms helps project a more authentic, created-by-real-people-working set of voices in the communities with which we interact.

In addition to encouraging external blogs, we also started supporting blogging on the corporate site when it relaunched in early 2008 and on the Enterprise Open Source Directory, which Optaros sponsors.

It’s an extension of the same logic – kill the bland, anonymous corporate voice in favor of real personalities who write in their own voice about subjects with which they have deep experience – with a minor change in that we’re using the corporate platform. Optaros’ VP of Marketing Marc Osofsky describes the approach in a blog post: What is a Web 2.0 Corporate Website?.

(We did consider simply aggregating content from the external blogs of Optaros employees, but providing our own platform creates new opportunities for employees who don’t maintain external blogs, and creating quality content directly seemed a better long term strategy than simple aggregation).

I’m a big believer and supporter of both these positions: supporting employees who have an interest in maintaining an external blog as well as allowing employees blogging on the corporate site. But what happens when you’re writing a blog post that really applies in both places?

Do you:

1. Post it (exactly the same content) in both places, maybe even using an XML-RPC client to automate that process.
2. Post it to your personal blog, and refer to it from the corporate blog?
3. Post it to the corporate blog, and refer to it from the personal blog?

Sometimes I’ve posted the same content to both places – most recently my review of Groundswell – and I’ve done the “post once and reference elsewhere” approach as well.

In an ideal world I’d have time enough to craft (frequently) meaningful personalized messages for each appropriate channel – valuable content for each audience, uniquely tailored to that audience – but I’m not sure that’s ever going to be realistic. It also gets complicated by the additional presence of the Enterprise Open Source directory blogs – which means some posts I write (focused on open source software platforms, frameworks, and projects) could have three “venues” in which they make sense.

(I also bring all three together by reference at JohnEckman.com which is an aggregated lifestream – but that’s likely too much me for anyone to really subscribe to).

The easiest solution is to just cross-post, but somehow, honestly, that just feels not-quite-right to me, at least as a constant stream. Not everything I write on Open Parenthesis makes sense on Optaros.com, and vice-versa. Maybe the only real solution is to continue to muddle along, choosing each time based on what I’m writing about whether it belongs on my Optaros.com blog, here on Open Parenthesis, and/or on the Enterprise Open Source Directory blog, and whether full copies or references make sense.

Who would you hold up as successful examples of blogging on and off the corporate domain?

Check out the announcement on the Miro blog: Miro 1.0 is here.

There’s also:

• Comprehensive Feature Guide to 1.0
• The official Press Release
• Explanation of co-branding potential
• A comparison of Miro and Joost

As the following image (from the Mozilla Labs Prism page) illustrates, the idea is that Prism splits apart the light coming from the cloud into separate apps. (I know, light doesn’t really come from clouds, but you get the point):

In essence, what Prism does is simply to create a single-url loading instance of firefox without all the browser chrome – so that the application gets an icon of its own, has an entry in the Start menu, is accessible via alt-tab application switching, and the like.

Its an interesting direction for WebRunner, and a good step forward for some specific use cases along the desktop application / web application continuum. Take an app which has offline sync via GoogleGears, run it inside Prism, and you’ve got a desktop application which syncs to the cloud but can also be accessed from other non-prism browsers when you are away from your machine.

(For more info on Prism, see Read/Write Web, Geeks are Sexy, Alex Faaborg’s discussion of its UI, feature suggestions on Prism Brainstorming, Mark Finkle’s discussion of changes from the existing WebRunner, and the forums at Mozilla Labs).

In the process of explaining what Mozilla Labs is up to, the (anonymous?) Mozilla Labs blog entry author said:

Unlike Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, we’re not building a proprietary platform to replace the web. We think the web is a powerful and open platform for this sort of innovation, so our goal is to identify and facilitate the development of enhancements that bring the advantages of desktop apps to the web platform.

This got the attention of Adobe’s Mike Chambers, who first posted in the comments on the Mozilla announcement, taking issue with the idea that Prism is fundamentally different from AIR. After all, he noted, AIR also runs applications developed on web standards and runs them in a desktop container with some additional desktop-like features:

So, is the main difference between something like Prism and Adobe AIR, that Adobe AIR is being primarily developed by a company (Adobe), and that Prism is being developed by Mozilla?

Later, he expanded on this issue in a blog post: “Mozilla Prism and the Disingenuous Web,” repeating the notion that AIR and Prism seem quite similar in goal and usage, and complaining:

Come on Mozilla, the web development community deserves better than that. Adobe has been an active supporter of the web development community, of open source, of web standards and of Mozilla (donating the ActionScript virtual machine from the Flash Player (Tamarin)). Adobe AIR leverages a number of open source technologies (including Tamarin, SQLite and WebKit) and we actively participate in both of those development communities, and we have been open with our development process for some time.

So what does differentiate Prism from AIR? (See also “AIR, and a Prism” at Technological Musings for another comparison)

Mozilla Prism, for now, is Windows only; Adobe AIR, for now, is Windows and Mac OS only. Both have promised Linux support in the near future.

As several readers pointed out in comments threads on both Mike Chambers post and the one at Mozilla labs, the Mozilla foundation has a better track record at porting applications to Linux than Adobe does. (Flash Player 9 notwithstanding).

(Note that Linux and MacOS X installers are already listed in the Mozilla Labs Wiki – I’m trying one out in Linux now, and it seems to work just fine).

Adobe AIR is based on WebKit (also used in Safari, originally from the Konqueror browser in KDE) for rendering HTML; Mozilla Prism is based on Firefox. AIR can handle flash content, pdf content, or Ajax (HTML/JavaScript) content; Mozilla Prism can as well, though it relies on the same plugins the Firefox browser does to support these other content types.

One significant difference is that Adobe AIR applications are created by developers, who do some “extra work” to create and package their application as an AIR application, whereas Mozilla Prism applications are created by end users, who take an existing web application and tell Prism to run it.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, while AIR “leverages a number of open source technologies (including Tamarin, SQLite and WebKit) and [Adobe] actively participate in both of those development communities, and [Adobe] have been open with our development process for some time” (quotes from Mike Chambers’ blog post), Mozilla Prism is itself an Open Source project (Mozilla Public License).

What this means it that if the development community is unhappy with the directions in which Prism is going, they can fork, and take the existing code base in different directions.

Or, working in collaboration with the existing project, they can extend that code base, taking it to other platforms or contexts.

In other words, I’d say the difference isn’t, to answer Mike Chamber’s question, that one is developed by a company (Adobe) while the other is developed by a foundation (Mozilla), but that one consumes and participates in open source (Adobe AIR), while the other is itself fully open source (Mozilla Prism).

That’s not to say Adobe has not been a good open source citizen or contributed appropriately to WebKit, SQLite, and others – I believe they have contributed substantially to a number of projects. It’s just that an implementation which is fully open is preferable, for many folks, to one which is mostly open except for where it isn’t.

I’m surprised that is still so hard to understand.

From their email update:

We’ve also received feedback from many of you who rely on trains for travel, particularly our users in the Northeastern U.S. and in Europe. So now, you can click the new Add Rail option in your TripIt itinerary and add a train reservation. You can also forward rail bookings (made on Amtrak, Via Rail Canada, Eurostar, and in the UK Great Northeastern Railway and The Trainline) to plans@tripit.com and we’ll automatically add those rail bookings to your itinerary. If you use other train sites, please forward us those confirmation emails and we’ll work to add them in the future.

Haven’t had a chance to test anything other than Amtrak for now, but it you forward those “This is NOT a ticket” reservation emails amtrak.com sends to plans@tripit.com it does a pretty good job.

It got the time and stations right, picked up the reference # Amtrak uses, and got the traveller info right.

I was mildly disappointed it didn’t recognize Penn Station (NYP) as being in New York City, but that’s pretty easily corrected in the itinerary and I believe it would be picked up from any corresponding hotel reservation you send.

(People I’m reading on this include my colleague Sebastian Wohlrapp, Marc Andreessen, Josh Catone, and Jeremiah Owyang – of course there are a gazillion others as well).

Did I miss something somewhere in the API documentation or the Campfire Video? (It has been a busy few weeks, and I would be happy to be wrong).

As I see it, in short: Open Social is not Social Network Portability. It’s social network widget portability.

Open Social enables widgets written to its OpenSocial API to be deployed (without rewriting) to multiple containers, but it doesn’t link my profiles on various networking sites, or allow me to carry my relationships with other people across network boundaries.

So if I make a “photos of my dogs” widget, and deploy it on Orkut and Hi5, I can share photos with my friends on both of those networks, but the two are completely separate. I’d have to log in to Orkut and share some photos there, then go log in to Hi5 and share some photos there.

My friends who are only on Orkut won’t see photos I share to Hi5, and vice versa. If I add someone as my friend on Orkut, they don’t “automatically” become my friend on Hi5.

In fact, as I read it, nobody but me even really knows that these two profiles (one on Orkut, one on Hi5) are the same person.

This mostly helps developers of widgets to run inside social networks. Instead of having to write an application for Orkut, and another for Hi5, and another for X, developers can create one application adhering to the Open Social API, and it can be used on all those networks.

This also helps small social networks, who don’t have a large enough user base to convince widget developers to create widgets for their platforms – the long tail of social networking platforms, if you will.

If anything, this will enable small, silo-style, disconnected social networks to continue to proliferate.

Can anyone point me to any example demonstrating how Open Social is more than described above?

I know the Container API / SDK – which will tell networks what they need to do to become containers – has not yet been released, and perhaps more will be clear when it is. But for now, this seems like a good thing (I do think an open API for widgets is a good thing) but certainly not a great thing.

[Update]
See Tantek’s comment below and his post on Open Social and Portability, as well as this O’Reilly Radar post from yesterday, which I just came across: “It’s the data, stupid.”
[/Update]

[Update2]
There is this text in the description of Hosting OpenSocial Apps:

To host OpenSocial apps, your website must support the SPI side of the OpenSocial APIs. Usually your SPI will connect to your own social network, so that an OpenSocial app added to your website automatically uses your site’s data. However, it is possible to use data from another social network as well, should you prefer. Soon, we will provide a development kit with documentation and code to better support OpenSocial websites, along with a sample sandbox which implements the OpenSocial SPI using in-memory storage.

(I added the bold). I guess we’ll have to wait to see just how data from “another” social network might be used, or even how data from many social networks might be used.
[/Update2]

It’s licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License, so spread it freely. I didn’t care for the fit of the music to the video in this case, but it communicates equally well without sound.

Key point: Objectives, not technology, need to lead your effort

Don’t build a community just because your competitors do. Don’t just try to “generate buzz” – what is the goal you hope that buzz will accomplish? Figuring out what you’re trying to achieve will let you then measure what you are doing.

It isn’t “how do we get involved in the groundswell” but what problem are we trying to solve or what opportunities are we trying to create.

These are the main objectives:

1. Listening
2. Talking
3. Energizing
4. Supporting
5. Embracing

Analogies to organizational roles:

Research -> Listening
Marketing -> Talking
Sales -> Energizing
Support -> Supporting
Development -> Embracing

In the groundswell (ie, in the web 2.0 era), each of these needs to be transformed a bit. He went through each of them with some examples, including vendors.

Unfortunately, I didn’t hear a single mention of the use of open source to help deliver on these objectives – each objective ended with a brief table listing approaches and vendors – but no mention of assembling your own solutions with open source frameworks, despite the reality that open source frameworks are often the best solutions in many of these spaces.

I know Forrester hasn’t historically focused on open source and I don’t expect them to – but buying product solutions from proprietary vendors isn’t the entire universe. He also didn’t really cover how you integrate these solutions together – so that you don’t end up with five siloed solutions but a cohesive strategy and integrated set of applications which exchange and share data. [Note: this did come up during the Q & A - see the end of the notes below.]

Listening

Listening – this is like your old research department, which is designed to get information from customers.

Example of Lynn Perry, cancer patient, on waiting for treatment at the treatment center – sitting in the waiting room, recognizing “my time is more precious than theirs” – the importance of scheduling and managing people’s tasks in that context – while spending tons on treatment equipment, don’t ignore the need to manage people’s time.

National Comprehensive Cancer Network forum – supporting patiences and caregivers everywhere (SPACE?) – built by Communispace.

This is an example of using a private community (he points to vendors like Communispace, MarketTools, Think Passenger) to create listening opportunities.

The other approach is monitoring buzz in the blogosphere, etc.

Talking

This isn’t just about talking – but it is about conversation, and building brand by participating in the conversation.

Adidas Soccer page on MySpace – when you friend this profile, you get graphics you can use in your own MySpace layouts.

4 million impressions for 100k. This is highly effective talking strategy.

Talking can also mean blogging, something Forrester gets lots of questions about.

Energizing

This is about helping your best customers recruit other customers.

Jim Noble and eBags – energizing with ratings and reviews. He wrote a good review. The zipper broke. He engaged with the head of design from eBags, who actually took his changes to the factory in HongKong where they implemented the suggestions he provided.

Use ratings and reviews (vendors like Bazaarvoice, PowerReviews)

Or designate lead customers to energize others – by creating a brand ambassador program.

Supporting

Dell Support Forum – Posts from predator – 20,452 since 1999.

“I actually enjoy helping people. That’s what got me hooked: when you help people and they say ‘Thank You’.”

The point is people will be willing to help each other. (Vendors: Lithium, Jive, Prospero)

Or, enable customers to build solutions together (Vendors: SocialText, Confluence, Wikia)

Embracing

Work with users to create and prioritize new features, new products.

Salesforce.com idea exchange as the primary example. (Vendors: Communispace, MarketTools)

What about objectives before technology?

Getting back to objectives, Bernoff went through some ROI calculations – cost of running a forum versus answering support calls, cost of corporate communications (in and outbound) versus blogging, etc.

But it isn’t just about ROI – as you start doing this it is a reformation in the way you do things – it will change the company in more profound ways than just the ROI calculation.

–
First question from the audience – is about “who can help us” – he mentions that there are many companies which “can help you build communities” (quick plug – mine not Bernoff’s – companies like Optaros).

Another question from the audience asked about “an integrated approach” – he cautions that companies shoudl start with one objective and then grow from there – integrated is good, but it should be integrated which grows from initial successes – know where you are going in being integrated, but don’t try to do everything all at once.

(Note: somewhere in between disclosure and a plug: Optaros‘ work with Swisscom Mobile Labs is a Groundswell Awards finalist).

• Don’t get caught up in the next shiny object: forcus on creating experiences for people
• People ask how much control to give customers – but customers have already taken control and we’ll never get it back
• Twitter (with friends)
• Flickr

Carrie Johnson and Christine Overby just finished the day 2 opening remarks, talking about things carried over from day one – Richard Edelman’s “Windy City Rules” and “Be It, Don’t Buy It” (see Jeremy Pepper’s notes); Christine Hefner on Playboy’s use of new media (myspace, Playboy U) and organizational change (as in, if you can’t change the organization you’re in, change organizations).

Next up Josh Bernoff keynote.

I written before about both Dopplr and Tripit but never specifically to compare the two. Both track information about your travel as well as the travel of your friends, in order to let you know when you and your friends will be in the same place at the same time.

Well, next week I’m headed to Chicago for the Forrester Consumer Forum, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to compare the use of the two sites in relation to that trip. All the images below are thumbnails, click on them to see full size.

If you just want the conclusion?: The fight’s not over yet, but Tripit has become more consistently useful to me. Dopplr’s facebook app and existing userbase is all that keeps me there at the moment, and that is an advantage easily lost.

Adding Trips

Dopplr users add trips by just putting in start date, end date, and name of the city they are visiting:

It’s a simple, clean interface, which tries to autocomplete what you type. They use place names drawn from Geonames, and seem to have most major cities covered. (See posts here and here on how that autocomplete has evolved).

Notes are optional, and can help store things like airline confirmation numbers, hotels, etc.

Tripit users add trips by forwarding confirmation emails (from airlines, booking agencies, hotels, etc) to plans@tripit.com from one of their registered addresses. Tripit receives the email, parses out the information, and tries to assign it to an existing itinerary where that makes sense, or creates an “unfiled item” for things it can’t assign to existing trips.

Here’s what Tripit created based on my forwarding of email from the airline and the hotel:

Tripit recognized, since I sent the airline email first, that the Chicago Hotel belonged to my Chicago trip, and automatically added to my itinerary directions from the airport to the hotel, as well as a map centered on the hotel. (I deleted the generic “Map of Chicago” which had been added before I sent the hotel confirmation email).

In detail view, Tripit also retains things like loyalty program numbers, confirmation codes, seats if noted in the confirmations, etc. All of this can also be seen in a print-friendly format for carrying with you – very valuable if you travel alot and can lose things like confirmation numbers. I also like the “Help Us Improve Tripit!” section, which lets you give live feedback on how well their engine parsed the emails you forwarded to it.

Adding Friends

Adding friends in Dopplr can be done by inviting them to join the service (put in name and email and Dopplr will invite them), by allowing Dopplr to look through your gmail contacts, twitter followers/friends, and/or facebook friends. It can also import hCard format data. As Dopplr also has a facebook app, it has access to your friend information. For twitter, it doesn’t even need to log in as you since your followed/following relationships are public once it has your username. For Gmail, you have to provide your username and password, though Dopplr promises never to send messages without your specific approval.

In addition, you can also view “New Travellers on Dopplr” and “People You Might Now” – these use second order connections (people who were invited by people with whom you share trips, people who share trips with other people with whom you also share trips). This creates a nice mix of deliberate invite (I want to share info with a colleague) and synchronicity (I haven’t seen that person since last year’s SXSW but it might be fun to see if we’re ever in the same town).

Dopplr is still in private beta, meaning people do have to be invited, but invites are unlimited for those already in the system. (Want one, just leave a comment below).

On Tripit, which is now open to all users, you add friends simply by putting in email addresses and customizing the message – no links to your address book, facebook, twitter, etc.

What am I sharing?

Dopplr’s model resembles Twitter’s, in the sense that you have a bi-directional relationship (those whose trips you can see, and those who can see your trips – not necessarily the same people). You explicitly choose for each “friend” you’re connected to whether they can see your trips or not, and they control whether you can see theirs.

This is great, from a “not accidentally disclosing more than you want” perspective, but it actually can be a bit confusing – several of my colleagues thought they had shared their trips with me when in fact all they had done was accept being able to see mine – they missed the extra step. (If you browse over to connections this gets much clearer, as they call out who can see your trips versus whose trips you can see, but if you just glance through the setup process you can miss it).

Tripit, on the other hand, distinguishes between friends and collaborators. Friends can see your trips, and you can see theirs – destinations and dates.

Collaborators can view detailed info and can add plans to your trip – this is really designed for people traveling together to add details to the agenda – events, hotels, day trips, raw notes, data imported from the provided TripClipper (basically just a bookmarklet which adds urls to a given trip), and so on.

Feeds, APIs

Both offer various feeds of your own trips and trips you have visibility into.

Dopplr can give you an iCal format or ATOM feed of your own trips, or the trips you have visibility to. (In fact, the Atom feeds are geocoded, so you can do some fun and interesting things with them). You don’t seem to able to subscribe to specific fiends’ feeds, though.

Tripit also lets you get a calendar feed (iCal) of your trips, or specific friends’ trips, but not all your friends trips and yours in one feed. Their feeds are not geocoded.

What’s Missing?

Dopplr supports OpenID; Tripit does not.

Tripit allows for “collaboration” on trips, but Dopplr does not.

Tripit doesn’t get trains. Sending an Amtrak confirmation just results in an error. I know trains are less common, but in the BOS-NY-WA corridor the Acela is a common mode of business transit, and I know many European travellers use trains frequently as well. It’s also easy enough to work around, since you can add details manually. (Dopplr doesn’t care how you get from one place to another, just what cities you are in on what dates, so it avoids this problem).

[Update: Per this blog post, Tripit is working on rail support]

I don’t think either of the sites is really leveraging the value of the historical data well yet – Dopplr lets you get a geocoded feed of all your trips, including past trips, but there isn’t yet any real way to use this data – # of days away from home in last X months, for example.

Tripit, if you forward a travel confirmation in the past, accepts it and creates a trip – but then it doesn’t show up in your “upcoming trips” list (well, it isn’t upcoming). If you view your list of trips in calendar view, you can go into the past and pull up details on an individual trip, but there’s no reporting on the trips you’ve taken in the aggregate or reusing former trips in a new trip.

ICanHasCheezburger, or at least sites like it, should have a place on your corporate intranet.

So Why should lolcats (pictures of cats with captions in the imagined/projected diction of a cat who uses IM/SMS a lot) belong in your Enterprise 2.0?

Developed by two individuals known as Cheezburger and Tofuburger, is best enjoyed without deep explanation – just start visiting the web site, subscribe to the RSS feed (this is the one which works best on my phone), or follow them on twitter. For those who need explanation, start here:

• ICanHasCheezburger/About
• I’M IN UR NEWSPAPER WRITIN MAH COLUM: Rapidly spreading Web photo-posting phenomenon centers on felines with poor spelling (Houston Chronicle article)
• im in mai blog, postin’ bout cats: The Cuteness of Grammatical errors
• im in ur programmz, codin in ur dialect: LOLCode and Feline Dialectology

Because your employees are people too. In fact they were people long before you made them employees. As people, they have interests which only partially (or maybe even not at all) overlap with whatever it is you pay them to do (gasp!).


Part of the disconnect between the fun people have using web 2.0 properties like YouTube, Flickr, LiveJournal, MySpace, and (the darling of the moment) Facebook is the fact that they get to talk about things that are not properly corporate. Some folks react to this by worrying about wasted time and lost productivity, but I think that is absolutely the wrong approach – at least if you want creativity, innovation, dedication, and loyalty from the people you employ.

Sometimes laughing out loud at a Lolcat from ICanHasCheezburger does more for my productivity than a week of intensive sessions on strategic planning.

To put it another way, and borrow from Dave Weinberger, your employees’ [interests] are miscellaneous. Or, looked at from the other side, the things your enterprise might be interested in are miscellaneous. Trying to decide definitively upfront what’s on topic and what’s off topic on your intranet will kill, or at least fatally wound, any potential innovation which might happen there.

A few recent examples of miscellany from Optaros’ own Intranet 2.0. (Ok, we don’t really call it that – it’s just our intranet, but it is Enterprise 2.0 enabled – every employee has an internal blog, in addition to forums and wikis for projects/topics of interest, etc.):

• And now for something completely different – a discussion from one of our user experience (UX) folks about Monty Python
• A post from a senior developer on foosball strategy, complete with diagrams of optimal bank shots against which defenses are inefficient and difficult to maintain
• Results of a cracker eating contest in the Austin office
• Photos from the Swiss offices’ joint (Geneva and Zurich) Tennis tournament – our own Swiss Open)

The PEW / Internet Project recently released a report on hobbyists, showing that:

83% of online Americans have used the internet to pursue their hobbies

and:

Relatively younger American adults are more likely than their elders to look for information about hobbies or interests online. Some 86% of internet users ages 18 to 29 and 88% of internet users ages 30 to 49 utilize the medium to pursue hobbies. By comparison, 77% of 50-64 year-old internet users and 62% of online Americans age 65 and older report using the internet to pursue hobbies.

So are these users, accustomed to researching online things of interest to them, going to be asked to stop cold and speak (and read) official corporate voice only when they hit your corporate intranet?

(Full disclosure: Optaros was a sponsor of the Web Innovation Summit).

Unfortunately I got in too late on Tuesday night to see any of the Tuesday evening sessions. I would have enjoyed Anthony Bradley‘s Web 2.0 Basics Tutorial, based on reviewing the slides and seeing Bradley’s other presentations. I like the way he approaches questions about adoption and Enterprise class Web 2.0 applications.

Wednesday am, running a few minutes late due to a conference call with Optaros colleagues on the East Coast, I wandered into the opening remarks just in time to hear the speaker (was it Adam Tinkoff?) ask “is jeckman in the room?” – he’d been following me on twitter as I tweeted away about my travel saga. (Planes never arrive on time anymore – it’s really just a question of how late they will be or if you’ll get there at all). Best publicity I’ve had from twitter so far, though I’m not sure my “complaining about travel” tweets are the ones I most want to be known for.

Then, I watched the initial keynote session: “Planning for Five Major Mutually Reinforcing Disruptive Discontinuities,” featuring Tom Austin, Gene Phifer, and David Mitchell Smith. Three analysts, five discontinuities – it was a whirlwind trip.

High level, the five discontinues are:

1. Software as a Service (SaaS)
2. Consumerization
3. Web 2.0
4. [Free and] Open Source Software
5. Global Class Architectures

Although I wish Gartner analysts in general would stop talking about the “hidden costs” and “hidden risks” of open source, since I don’t really think they’re really hidden in either case, most of what they had to say about the five discontinuities made perfect sense to me. If anything, my only critique was that they didn’t seem to me to be telling the audience anything they didn’t already know – but I guess it is difficult to gage the audience’s level of familiarity with these concepts, and the keynote did ground most of the discussions for the following three days in some shared basic concepts.

—

Second session I saw was on Enterprise 2.0, with Anthony Bradley and Tom Austin. (Also covered here in eWeek).

Although they had some logistics issues (the version of the slide deck they had loaded wasn’t, apparently, the one they expected to see) they ran through most of what I’d expect to hear about as Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0, like all the major overlapping discontinuities, and like open source, was described as unavoidable – the message to enterprise IT organizations being they need to get involved and move beyond skunk works type projects into real projects.

My favorite section was on the myths and urban legends of enterprise 2.0 (paraphrased):

• People will naturally share things on the web
• There is exactly one right way to organize any set of data
• If you have a good culture, other controls aren’t needed
• Social software is for kids (like Kix)
• Enterprise 2.0 is just vendors trying to sell Knowledge Management in a new wrapper

They also offered a nice list of 8 ways to ensure success and 8 practices to avoid. I won’t reprint them all here (not sure what Gartner’s copyright policies are) but they included:

Success: Start small but real. Be open, let emergent structures emerge, and lead by example.

Mistakes to avoid: Don’t ignore accountability; don’t think Web 2.0 is a “fad”; Don’t have a plan for growth.

–

Having been intrigued by a couple of things Bradley said, I then went to the “Plant Seeds: A Model for Community Adoption in the Enterprise” which he also presented.

I really liked the framework he presented, though I’m not terribly fond of long acronyms (all of PLANT SEEDS is an acronym). Focusing on starting not with “experiments” or “proofs of concept” in the Enterprise 2.0 but real solutions to real problems, with scope controlled so as to minimize risk. Larger successes build from small successes, not from experiments.

He described the “legal-precedent” type approach to adding governance to these efforts – you set out high level rules, then as/when examples of borderline behavior (or outright bad behavior) come up, you use reactions to those behaviors to guide future behavior. (Rather than trying in the abstract to determine all the ways people might behave wrongly and explicitly forbid those).

He also described the nature, nuture, or both notion – that some people will naturally want to share, while others will need too see sharing be cultivated and rewarded before they take to it.

Finally, he described the way in which your Enterprise 2.0 efforts need to be integrated, not new silos separate from individuals’ “real jobs” but part of the larger IT ecosystem. The net effect can’t be additional work added on top of a full stack – it needs to replace and ultimately make more convenient the work people are doing – as it will, if the problem is a real candidate for these approaches. (If it doesn’t fit, you may be forcing it as the solution to the wrong problem).

—

The rest of day 1 I spent at Open Source Summit sessions I’ve already blogged about.

In the August issue of WIRED, Frank Rose is pretty down on the opportunities in Second Life for consumer brands in the US trying to create interest. But the fact that some (even many) have failed to create interesting experiences shouldn’t prove that no one can.

Rose’s argument, in “How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life” (which in the print magazine carried the headline “Lonely Planet – Second Life: It’s So Popular No One Goes There Anymore”), is that marketers are basically spending out of fear: fear of missing out on the next big thing, fear that traditional marketing and advertising methods are dying and nothing has yet come about to replace them. He writes near the beginning of the article:

Adrift in the uncharted sea that is Web 2.0 — YouTube, MySpace, social networking, user-generated content, virtual worlds — corporate marketers look at Second Life and see something to grab onto. At least 50 major companies have ventured into the virtual world to date, spending millions in the process. IBM has created a massive complex of adjoining islands dedicated to recruitment, employee training, and in-world business meetings. Coldwell Banker has opened a virtual real estate office. Brands like Adidas, H&R Block, and Sears have set up shop. CNET and Reuters have opened virtual bureaus there. It’s as if the moon suddenly had oxygen. Nobody wants to miss out.

And again towards the end:

What’s behind this stampede is not that hard to divine. “A terror has gripped corporate America,” says Joseph Plummer, chief research officer at the Advertising Research Foundation, an industry think tank. Plummer has been around Madison Avenue since the early ’60s, when modern advertising techniques materialized. “The simple model they all grew up with” — the 30-second spot, delivered through the mass reach of television — “is no longer working. And there are two types of people out there: a small group that’s experimenting thoughtfully, and a large group that’s trying the next thing to come through the door.” Second Life appeals to the latter — the ones who are afraid of missing out, who don’t consider half a million dollars to be a lot of money, and who haven’t figured out (or don’t want to admit) that Second Life is less than the bold new frontier it appears to be.

Marshall Sponder, in a blog post responding to Rose’s article, concedes that “the Second Life platform is immature in that it can’t handle large numbers of visitors on any spot, the grid is down way too often and the interface is still clunky,” but argues that “getting businesses to fail in Second Life is businesses copying their physical store in a Virtual World, rather than really coming up with something creative (even though more of the brands who have entered Second Life think they are being creative, they aren’t).”

In other words, it’s the rush to have a presence in Second Life, without really thinking about what it makes possible, that is leading to failure. This is analagous to companies rushing now to have a presence on Facebook, so convinced that they need to have an application (any old application will do) that they don’t think through the real potential of the platform(s) and risk being complete ignored, or worse.

Second Life shouldn’t be ingored by large brands, but they should start by being users first – something I suspect many fail to do – and talking to other users second. If you can’t find people (who you haven’t paid to say so) who think the idea is exciting and interesting, don’t bother.

I finally got time to watch it on the train on the way to New York last week. It was well worth the wait, and I’d really encourage you to go watch it if you’re interested in social networks or youth culture in the U.S. Danah got a lot of press earlier this year for her post/essay on social class issues in MySpace and Facebook, to some of which she’s also written a response.

Fast forward through all the room introductions (sorry to those who were in the room, but I don’t think that makes for interesting viewing to one who wasn’t there) and get to the core of the discussion.

Here are my quick notes on the bits I found most interesting – these are really more like raw search engine terms that will hopefully connect people to the video than cohesive notes (see also Ethan Zuckerman’s much more complete notes):
–

What Web 2.0 is really about is the shift from a sociality organized around topics toward a sociality organized around friendships / relationships – people who I know.

Early adopters of social network sites were self-defined geeks, freaks, and queers. Tech savvy youth, alternative youth seeking places to gather without prejudice.

Friendster became more mainstream quickly – which drove out fringe users. Friendster went about trying to make people behave by canceling accounts. But not all the users wanted to play by the rules – fakesters existed for good reason – ie, the Harvard U fakester (this was before you could identify groups — the Harvard U fakester profile was used to connect people in an ad hoc group). They killed people who were playing around, but in the process they killed lots of good profiles too.

MySpace – planned as a Friendster clone, but more loose with rules. Indie Rock folks were targeted as an audience, in part because they had been kicked off Friendster. Some of the key features that are still on MySpace came from this era – the individual profile URL for example. http://myspace.com/bandname. The first set of users were musically inclined – tracking bands. First emergence of code in MySpace forums – MySpace knew within 24hrs of it occuring that people were pasting html and javascript in the forums but chose to allow it. “Copy/paste literacy” – someone else’s term. Leads to some interesting stuff, since people didn’t really know what they were copying and pasting.

danah’s using “social network” site as opposed to “social networking” – focus on a place where people write into being their social network – not use it to meet new people.

Basic characteristics of Social Network sites:

• -Profile (inherited from dating sites)
• Friends (not the same as friends in the offline world)
• Public comments (saying things very publically about other people) – started as testimonials on Friendster but got turned into communicative space. (Table salt and pepper fakesters writing to each other). (66% of comments on Facebook are on the wall, not via private messages)

How are network publics different than the kinds of publics “we” grew up with:

1. They’re Persistent. They stick around.
2. They’re Searchable. You can find things. So can your parents.
3. They Offer Replicability – copy and paste from one space to another. Negroponte’s digital bits come to life. This is one of the best ways to bully – copy and paste conversation from IM and edit.
4. They Have Invisible audiences – you don’t know who is watching. These are mediated spaces.

It’s a question of context. Context sets expectations (formal and informal). Context used to come from topic – socialization on usenet of what is ontopic and offtopic. Example alt.tasteless and cat recipes, cat shaving, cat skinning, etc. By the time the boom was over, there is no more “like minds effect” on the internet and conflict is certain.

Joshua M – No Sense of Place – Stoky Carmichael and the issue of how to go on TV – how could he speak a neutral voice? He chose, and ever since we think of black power as anti-white.

This generation in growing up with celebrity style publics – where everyone can be famous among 15 people, but now know which 15.

Depression era – Labor Unions, Compulsory education at High School level (14-18) gets created, in part as a way of keeping laborers out of the workplace. Keep kids away from labor organizers and out of the workplace – leads to age segregation. This is also where a new kind of bullying occurs because of the lack of older folk. “Teenager” itself is a 1941 creation.

(In some ways the whole pedophilia issue is about the anxiety of teenagers knowing adults – why is this such a megatopic right now?)

Children’s Society in Britain is tracking this issue of fear – no real correspondence in the US.

Playdates – one version of the kind of control now being exercised.

Young People are turning to these network publics in part because they have no actual public to go to.

Why do people write public comments? In large part because the defaults are public. But also because there is a visibility issue – you need to be seen commenting, you get replies, etc.

On MySpace, to get rid of comments, they just delete the person, which deletes their comments.

The difference between the profile with 30 friends versus 900 friends is a question of what imagined audience is. Facebook’s “private” setting means just my friends – which is not admissions officers and law enforcement.

There are two audiences youth don’t want:

1. People with direct power over them.
2. People who want to prey on them – the more realistic fear here is less sexual predators than spammers and marketers.

How do they avoid them?

• - Artificial walls / lies.
• Demand the way the world should be – get out. No mom’s allowed, etc. This is where the “public” gets difficult – we want to be public but only to people like us, not to parents or teachers.
• Ostrich. Pretend that if we can’t see the invisible audience they don’t exist.

This is the way they have to socialize – it isn’t necessarily the most optimal way, but often the only accessible way.

Cellphones – totally locked down – this is interesting because users prefer the online social network because those aren’t locked down. Email is for talking to parents.

One of the reasons social networks outside the US are more profile oriented – because here we pay to recieve SMS – elsewhere people use SMS to communicate and the network just for the profile.

—

Ethan – one of the analogies you use is the Mall – which is part public but also very private – which makes them interesting legal cases. But all these social network sites are similarly partially public and owned by private companies. Do the youth your studying care? Are they aware of that commercialization?

db – I wish. It’s actually very accepted. “If its got ads on it it will be free forever” They are so used to being blasted by ads they don’t think twice about it.

Class dynamics on MySpace/Facebook – working class, marginalized kids (freaks, music kids, etc) are on mysapce – college-bound, “good” kids are on Facebook – this plays out in part between different schools, between different neighborhoods in schools, etc. The military banned MySpace but not Facebook – they banned what soldiers are using not what officers are using. REcruitment is done via myspace – and youth talking bad abotu the war may be what’s behind that block.

Cultural aesthetics – facebook seems less commercial because it looks modern and controlled, as opposed to myspace’s wackiness. MySpace is still about bling – and it is ok for the ads to match that aesthetic.

The difference between having Tommy Hilfinger written across it and knowing what a Prada bag is.

The youth don’t know a public that is not commercial.

—

What is this evolving into?

db – the tech industry is obsessed with Web 3.0, and immersion, and 2nd life and WOW.

I think the next level will be mobile. I think the question is can we do it – given the way mobile is structured in the US.

Growth and fragmentation cycle – investors require infinite growth but that doesn’t necessarily match what is best for the community.

Facebook is gaining the older audience but losing the younger audience. They ran into this even when college students were upset that they added high school students.

Cluster effects – you need entire groups to participate. Not everyone created their own sites – people share passwords and check each others messages, and play with each other – they don’t want secure “my site, my password” stuff. People create profiles for their friends who can’t or don’t.

–

What about youth subcultures who *are* reacting negatively to the commercialism of the culture? What about networks that are using these technologies to organize against this? Other possibilities exist.

I’ve been working on this as well – on the edges – in order to look at what is next you need to look at the edges not the center.

db – I’m just not seeing it among high school students – I wish that I was, but I’m not.

What about the possibilities of temporary autonomous zones – there is power in these.

db – but people build social cues into these environments. WoW is one of the few exceptions where guilds for example are age diverse. Otherwise people are signaling their age / class / gender / race in all kinds of ways.

The challenge is that what is at teh edges is not what becomes mainstream – things get modified on their way to the mainstream and lose imuch of their edge in the process.

Kids are told that all adult strangers are bad and evil. Kids are afaird to talk to me, even though I’ve got berkely.edu all over. I don’t know how to break that in the online world.

—

The adults are just not doing a good job navigating the future for you – you need to become the navigators for them. Hawaiin political movement – charting hawaii’s future.

–

What about Gender?

db – It’s amazing how many of the boy’s profiles were created by their girlfiends in part in order to be the first in the top eight. None of it is really surprising which is why I haven’t written much of it up.

Boys are much more likely to collect strangers, more likely to friend porn divas, etc.

Homophilly? (Birds of a feather stick together) – Homophilia? It is clear that people are more likely to meet people that are like them – the more you have in common the more likely you are to become better friends.

Interaction with people unlike you – social network sites are helping reinforce this, but it is the absence of real public experiementation in the first place. We’re losing that across the board not just in social networks. In fact social networks *may* enable more interaction in unexpected ways.

Pew research – the 7% who are not online, 75% of them don’t want to be online.

—

Parent info sharing – this is really being driven by 30s parents having kids later. I’m not seeing real activity among teen parents that is different than other teens use. Not really seeing a teen parents group rising up.

—

So what do we do?

db – well, for one thing there is the defensive – bills to ban these sites in congress in various forms.

Education – help people get literate about how to use these sites and how to manage them. Innuit morality play – how would you feel it? Why do x rather than y?

In terms of law, the number one request is to stay away – so much of the legal intervention is around sexual predators – if we’re going to do something let’s actually enforce the laws about sexual predators rather than talking about the danger.

We need digital street outreach – the equivalent of clean needles and condoms distributed to youth.

IT would be great to have a street outreach online – people just hanging out talking to kids at risk looking for attention (but this runs up against the stranger danger problem in that youth won’t talk to adults).

Ethan – the bingo for today is Paris Hilton, Needle exchange, and Jerry Fallwell.

–

danah’s also become a Berkman Fellow for the 2007/2008 school year, so hopefully we’ll get more opportunities to follow her research.

Sounds like TripIT provides some of the features I wish Dopplr had – including the ability to pull travel information out of the confirmation emails generated by the airlines, as well as more granular (hour by hour) info about overlaps in your travel with friends.

All they’re missing is the obligatory elided-vowel-of-web-2.0, which I think would make them TripT.

Will this be enough to push a switch to TripIt? I’ll let you know once I get my invite. ;)

Head over to GetMiro and download the Public Preview 1 (v. 0.9.8) release.

Miro is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and pre-packaged for a number of Linux distros (Fedora, Ubuntu, with Debian and Gentoo coming soon) as well as source code for the true DIY.

Miro lets you:

• Play virtually any video file, across different platforms
• Download and play full screen, high definition video
• Subscribe to video podcasts, video blogs, any rss feed with enclosures
• Locate new video content using the Miro channel guide
• Download videos from YouTube, DailyMotion, Google Video and others
• Download BitTorrent videos and watch them in the same application

Miro’s based on the Mozilla XULRunner framework, and is an excellent example of cross-platform, non-proprietary alternative approach to taking Internet-based applications beyond the browser context, without losing the open, standards based approach that made the web successful in the first place.

Deborah Weil has been around the block a couple of times and she must have known when GlaxoSmithKline’s agency approached her to consult on a new flog for its Alli weight-loss product that it was a dishonest, insincere attempt to cash in on the social media craze and that the parameters set for it doomed it to failure.

He’s referring to Weil’s post where she requested of her readers:

head on over to GlaxoSmithKline’s official corporate blog for alli, the first FDA approved, OTC (over the counter) weight loss product. Take a peek and, if you’re inspired, leave a Comment.

She also, to be clear, disclosed the relationship:

Full disclosure: I’m working with GSK on the blog. And this was my idea to ask for Comments.

However, as Kevin Dugan points out in the comments, the email version of the post included the sentence “No need
to say that you know me, of course.” See also Weil’s followup post: Using the backchannel of email to invite Comments on your blog.

While I’m not sure that Bowles’ personal attacks at Weil and her “inexplicably popular” blog help his argument, and alliconnect doesn’t fit my definition of a flog (since it declares directly it is written by GSK folks), the core of the issue is the extent to which traditional PR and Marketing techniques are conflicting with next generation Internet conversations. On this, I think Bowles is right on:

Many companies still don’t get it. To them, social media represent just one more set of marketing tools to sell more stuff. They believe they can have it both ways–control the message AND build relationships of trust with potential customers. They are wrong and, when engaged to provide advice, communications professionals who understand the new realities have a obligation to tell them so.

Echoing the question Weil asked, is it acceptable to use email (what Weil calls the backchannel of the blogosphere) to suggest to people you know that they visit your own blog, or the blog of a client, and leave comments?

I’ve certainly emailed folks I know and asked them to check out the Optaros Enterprise Open Source Directory – and encouraged them to leave feedback. When I’ve written a blog post or a white paper I’m proud of, I’ve emailed popular sites and asked them to check it out – for example, when Ajaxian.com “picked up” this post, that was at least in part because I had emailed them directly, telling them about the post.

I’d argue that part of the launch campaign for any new service or site these days should include a “market to the influencers” component, which includes plans for how to get influential bloggers early access to the invite-only beta.

Is the difference that Weil was encouraging traffic to a corporate blog. rather than her own? Is it that she suggested, albeit lightly, that they not disclose their relationship to her, despite the fact that she consulted with GSK on the blog?

(See for example Dennis Howlett’s Holy Crap!, which cites the product itself as one of the issues, and Weil’s suggestion not to disclose as another).

Is the real problem the fact that GSK is abusing the blog concept? Bowles argues:

You can’t have a successful conversation when personal anecdotes and negative comments are banned and the few comments that are left are so obviously scripted and uninspiring.

What if Weil had suggested explicitly that people visit the Alli blog and leave comments positive or negative? What if she had suggested that they disclose directly that there were doing so in response to her invitation for comments? What if that invitation for comments had been posted directly on the blog in question?

(In addition to disclosing the relationship on her blog, she is listed as a contributor on the Alli blog)

If I posted on the EOS Blog and then came here and asked you all to comment on it, would that be a conflict of interest, or effective marketing?

Ultimately, I’m as concerned about astroturf and bad corporate-pr-blogs as anyone else, but the issue comes down to whether authentic and transparent conversation is being had at the site in question, not whether people were encouraged to go there.

(For some real, unfiltered, and clear feedback about Alli check out: alli: miracle diet pill with teeny tiny side effect and Laugh? I nearly shit my pants. I wonder if the Angry Aussie has tried posting comments on the alli blog).

Andy Peatling at Blaze New Media posted about a recent project: Chickspeak, a social network for female college students.

In their words, it’s is “an organization for young women created to inspire big dreams, strong values and success in the world”:

Our website exists to be the most entertaining and engaging reflection of women’s life in college, while also providing the support and information necessary to stay healthy, grounded and achieve great heights while in school and well after graduation. We are your voice- your interests and passions, your unique journey and experiences. Updated daily articles are written by women currently in college and cover everything from health and beauty, to relationships, travel, entertainment and much more. We also feature guest writers and columnists who are recognized experts in their fields and who act as advisors to our members. Members can post comments on articles and build relationships with other members and the ChickSpeak Team through forums, personal blogs and private messaging. We are an evolving concept and welcome any woman who’s excited about this to get involved!

What’s most interesting about it for me (not being a femail college student) is how it was built – leveraging WordPress MU as the core, changing the theme to de-emphasize the “blog” functionality and bring member profiles front and center.

From Andy’s blog post:

To achieve the desired change it was down to making a new WordPress theme. The theme would have exactly the same look and feel as the core site – making it look like the new member home page was still part of the core site itself.

Within the theme, I removed the code that usually makes the blog posts front and center, and changed it to the code that outputs the users profile. The blog code was moved to the sidebar so it could still be accessed as the members “journal” feature.

Finally, the code to output the users new private messages was added to the sidebar, as well as some code to output polls, photos and other smaller bits and bobs.

The project also incorporates BBPress for forums / discussions, has links into myspace and flickr, and so on, as you might expect from a social network circa 2007. (The facebook app can’t be far behind, if they don’t have one already.)

In one tab, Andrew McAfee arguing that sometimes “It’s not not about the technology”

In the other, Jeff Jarvis arguing that “Towns are hyperlocal social networks with data (people that is)”

At first glance this might seem like a debate waiting to happen: McAfee arguing that he’s growing weary of hearing people say “It’s Not About the Technology” and Jarvis saying “It’s Not About the Technology.” But if you look at what both are actually saying, a synthesis makes more sense.

Thesis, McAfee. He points to the cliche “It’s not about the technology” and explains how in some contexts that perspective can be dangerous:

This perspective is dangerous because it essentially denies two important facts: that technologies can differ from each other in salient ways, and that they can change over time. Losing sight of either of these can lead to confusion, or worse. . . .

INATT, version 2, also encourages the view that there’s nothing new under the sun — that one generation of technology aimed at addressing a business problem is the same as all other generations. So (for example) we need to collaborate and share knowledge better, but it’s not about the technology. We’ve been disappointed with our past results in these areas for reasons that have nothing to do with the technologies we were using, and there’s nothing about any new technologies that give us better chances of success now.

This sense of INATT is pessimistic and self-defeating, even if it’s not intended to be. It denies that there can be improvements, incremental or radical, in the ability of technologies to accomplish important goals. I disagree categorically with this. . . .

Sometimes, at least in part, it is about the technology.

Antithesis, Jarvis: He returns to the discussion of hyperlocal online, and argues that, for those trying to deliver hyperlocal:

Local is people. Our job is not to deliver content or a product. Our job is to help them make connections with information and each other.

. . . I’m not suggesting that hyperlocal is just a social networking tool. Or just a forum. Or just a bunch of blogs. Or just a listings tool. Or just a search engine. Or just a news site. It needs to end up being all those things and more. And as I said the other day, this will not happen in one place, on one site, but will be distributed across wherever people are being people and communities communities, locally. The trick, once more, is to organize it all. Elegantly.

Synthesis: Those trying to deliver hyperlocal solutions need to recognize the social connectivity already in place within communities, and orient themselves not around content delivery or product delivery, but around facilitating connections between people, and providing elegant organization. Applying the right sets of technologies in the right ways is what will make this possible in new, innovative, and potentially revolutionary ways.

They discuss a project Optaros did with Swisscom Hospitality Services as an example of the impact next generation Internet applications can have customer interactions, as well as how we think such applications are most effectively delivered.

The presentations from the webinar are now available:

• David Douek, Product Management, Swisscom Hospitality Services: Swisscom Hospitality Services Room 2.0 (Case Study) (pdf|899.27 kB)
• Joel Gardet, Project Manager, Optaros: What it means to assemble next generation internet applications (OptAM) (pdf|4.05 MB)
• Bruno Von Rotz, VP Strategy & Research, Optaros: The Evolution of the online customer communication and interaction (pdf|3.46 MB)

A corporation is by definition an artificial person, or a legal entity which can act like a person. (Among other things, sue and be sued, make money, enter into contracts, and so on.) If you’re really interested in the legal concept, check out the Wikipedia entry on the notion of a juristic person, especially the section on creation and history of the doctrine.

I’m more interested in the modern, Web 2.0 application of the concept, in which Corporations have profiles on social networking sites.

Delta Airlines, for example, made quite a splash twittering a few months back. I added the twitter Delta Airlines as my “friend” – trusting that Northwest, Jet Blue, and United wouldn’t get jealous – but haven’t heard much from him/her/it recently. In fact, deltaairlines’ last tweet was 1 month ago – “switching on the Nintendo DS download stations at Terminals 2 & 3 in JFK.” His/her/its 103 followers and 93 friends must be sorely disappointed.

Lots of companies show up on myspace – seems to have started with the notion that a band could have a myspace page, which then evolved to the point where a band doesn’t exist until it has a myspace page. Then record companies – smaller ones first, bigger ones when they sensed interest – started to have myspace profiles. And radio stations – kexp is one of my top friends. Then Borat came along, and he had a myspace page.

This weekend, Forrester published a new research report “How Consumers Use Social Networking Sites.” In it, they discuss “friending”:

The most common approach [to marketing to MySpace and Facebook users] is to set up a profile on these sites that members can then join, or “friend”; for example, the movie “X-Men: The Last Stand” has more than 2 million MySpace users as friends.

In fact, this idea is one of the three core recommendations, as noted in the executive summary (which Charlene Li also posted to her blog):

Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook have seen tremendous growth over the past two years, attracting a young and engaged audience. Frequent users of these social networking sites not only engage in more activities and have a more positive attitude about these sites, but they are also far more interested in profiles from their favorite companies. Marketers interested in reaching their audiences on social networking sites should: 1) dispense with traditional Web marketing tactics, 2) encourage “friending,” and 3) regularly refresh content.

They’re right that marketers should pick up on this opportunity. But I also think we need a new category for these kinds of relationships – a new class of user within the system who isn’t just a regular person. Having a “friend” named Delta Airlines wouldn’t bother me if it let me whitelist messages from that friend to let me know when a flight is late / cancelled, for example. If it is just going to offer new opportunities for spam, I can always uninvite them from my network.

I remember companies doing this in the era of IM as well – creating personas you could add to your buddy list who were really just little branded communication channels.

Will we see users scrambling to create shell profiles in their company name just to prevent someone else from doing it first?

How many of the “friends” in your buddy list, on IM, or in a social networking site, are juristic persons?

If Apple wanted to be my friend, could I accept that friendship or would Kubuntu get upset?

Update July 5:
Just came across Paul Dunay’s excellent Measuring Effects of Social Networks, which uses the example of Adidas Soccer:

Adidas agency Carat Fusion knew Adidas Soccer was popular: Its year-old MySpace profile has 80,000 friends who downloaded wallpaper and adopted the persona of one of the company’s shoe styles.

What the agency didn’t know was whether that popularity translated into real value. But thanks to a new study it conducted, the agency now knows that the consumer-powered campaign increased purchase intent 78%, brand image 71%, and likelihood to recommend 57%!

Update July 6th:
Also check out the report commissioned by the folks at Fox Interactive Media, Isobar, and CaratUSA: Never Ending Friending,
which quotes Rob from Los Angeles saying: “I don’t want companies to advertise to me. I want them to be my friend,” and argues that “Friending is the new Advertising.”

Update: July 8th:
See “News Corp’s Nightmare Scenario: Achieving ‘Never-Ending Friending’” for a more negative take on the fictitious friends scenario, which concludes:

the mass adoption of these methods and, more important, the subsequent mass “gaming” of the marketing methods outlined by this report, will destroy the most valuable social media property of the digital generation.

It’s well worth a read, even if you’re not in the PR world.

At first I was concerned it was going to be all too Dr. Pangloss (or Pollyanna, to make the same reference in a different register):

The public relations industry finds itself at an historic juncture. It always has been about social influence – i.e., “relating to the public.” Now that the rules of social influence are gaining precedence over other approaches, public relations looms larger than ever. Working together, internal public relations departments and agencies can better serve their organizations while resetting the mandate and direction for an entire industry.

I was worried this was going to be the story of a “difficulty” turned into an “opporunity” – rather than becoming irrelevant, PR is more important than ever!

But it’s really a very measured and methodical paper – they later write that:

social media must become part of the way public relations practitioners do business or they will become obsolete

and

public relations practitioners . . . should recognize that defining, or redefining the role they will play in this changing communications landscape is critical

In other words, things are changing, and PR either needs to get with the changing climate or risk becoming irrelevant.

Other useful notes:

84% of participating firms they surveyed were “employing blogs on behalf of clients” – that’s an even higher number than I expected. (For the record, no PR firm employs this blog – I write it).

They also lay out changes in skill sets, personnel, and business models agencies and PR firms will need to go through.

Executive Summary:

Enterprise 2.0 promises a new approach to creating, managing, and consuming knowledge within the enterprise, allowing patterns and value to emerge out of relatively freeform, experimental, unrestricted exchanges. Unlike knowledge management systems of the nineties, which locked users into strict taxonomies, enforced rigid workflows, and reflected hierarchical management relationships, emerging social computing systems rely on lightweight, adaptable frameworks designed to facilitate knowledge creation across traditional boundaries, enable rapid change, and foster contributions from throughout the management hierarchy.

This new knowledge management paradigm needs to be supported by new technologies and approaches. It isn’t, however, just a matter of selecting the right set of applications or the right platform; there is no “One True Architecture” which includes all the features and functions users could ever desire.

The paper goes on to talk about Drupal and Alfresco as core platforms on top of which Enterprise 2.0 solutions can be delivered.

I’ll be at Enterprise 2.0 for the next few days – attending sessions (and blogging what I can) and at the Optaros booth during the demo pavilion hours.

Stop by and say hello!

I don’t normally blog here about projects Optaros has been involved in, but I think this article in the Current is too good to pass up sharing: “It’s public radio, but with nearly everything different, including the name”

It describes the new station/site (in which Optaros was involved) from Chicago Public Radio called :Vocalo.

There will be a website, but it would be wrong to say that it’s the station’s website. Really, it’s the website’s radio station.
The name, :Vocalo, is an invention, essentially “Vocal” with an “o” at the end. It rhymes with “Zocalo,” a Spanish word that in Mexico refers to a town plaza and in Colombia refers to the infrastructure that stabilizes a large building. The colon before the “V” is intentional — a trademarked emoticon.

The part that I think is most interesting is how involved the potential audience – not the current CPR audience, but the residents of the area the station could potentially serve – were in the process:

In eight focus groups, we gave special attention to the people who had, for various reasons, rejected us but were potential listeners—people who were committed to the area, who volunteered in the community, who follow the news and use radio. We asked them to listen to WBEZ for a week, keep diaries of what they thought, and meet for two-hour group conversations. Then we took questions that arose in the focus groups and surveyed listeners by mail.
These potential listeners were intensely interested in information and discussion about our shared place, the Chicago area. African-American, Latino and Asian-American non-listeners in our surveys and focus groups placed their highest value on local service. They sought it in our broadcast day and held it to high standards—not of production quality but of accuracy and relevance. They were highly critical of what they heard.

Taking the results of the listener (and non-listener) research, which the article sums up as “Nearly all felt the station was not for them – and was not trying to be inviting,” the CPR team went through a sustained and quite strategic effort to make honest changes – not just to rest on their traditional audience but to reconnect with their strategic mission.

One of the results of that work is the new site and station:

This new station will be built on community radio sensibilities but without the characteristic schedule of special-interest shows. In fact, it will have no shows at all. It will air a continuous, seamless talk-based stream completely devoted to Northwest Indiana and Chicago metropolitan area culture, issues and selected music.

It’s also available as an online stream, for those of us outside greater Chicagoland.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out over time as a format and as a concept – reclaiming public media by reconnecting it its core mission.

Involving your community in creating your product has lessons that go well beyond public radio, of course – we all have to be open to reimagining what it is we “do” and how it does or doesn’t meet the needs of current users and prospective users.

In addition to the explicit benefits for the site owner, implementing social features means building a community around shared experiences. The notion of “shared experiences” difficult to define, but the benefits of increased participation and caring are clear. People respond best to communities where they believe they’ll find like-minded people and where they feel their ideas and opinions matter. This trust is the real benefit of social software.

Therefore, adding social features isn’t so much a leap of faith as it is an investment in a long-term experience design strategy.

It’s a great article, describing some of the softer or harder to quantify benefits of adding social features to your site, and connecting them to core user experience design issues.

The first (as described on Charlene Li’s blog) is Forrester’s Social Technographics report:

At the heart of Social Technographics is consumer data that looks at how consumers approach social technologies – not just the adoption of individual technologies. We group consumers into six different categories of participation – and participation at one level may or may not overlap with participation at other levels. We use the metaphor of a ladder to show this, with the rungs at the higher end of the ladder indicating a higher level of participation.

The second, more recent report is from the PEW Internet & American Life foundation: “A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users.”

They break down the participants into three major categories:

• Elite Tech Users (31% of American adults)
• Middle-of-the-road Tech Users (20%)
• Few Tech Assets

Each of those areas has subsegments as well – for example, the Elite Tech Users are divided into Omnivores (8%), Connectors (7%), Lackluster Veterans (8%), and Productivity Enhancers (8%).

The PEW report I think is ultimately the more valuable of the two – the Forrester “ladder” metaphor helps to explain the basic concept that you shouldn’t think of either your audience or “social media” as monolithic ideas: different audience profiles can and should lead to different priorities in terms of site design and development – but I find the overlap between the different rungs of the ladder confusing at best and misleading if not read carefully.

The PEW report comes with lengthy appendices with all the raw data, as well as clear delineation between the different groups while still recognizing how different behaviors and attitudes are shared across segments.

It’s also available free of charge, unlike the Forrester report.

Today Joyent announced the public release of Slingshot, a framework for (their words) obliterating the distinction between the web and the desktop.

Slingshot lets developers take Ruby-on-Rails applications and deploy them to desktops (Windows, Mac OS X).

Is it just me, or does the red rock in the slingshot graphic look a bit like the Adobe Apollo logo? Ok, so maybe not a direct version of the logo, but certain the Adobe Apollo red.

Is this a cheaper faster way to get to sent to the moon and back, or just another David vs. Goliath myth?

More on Slingshot, including a quick tour.

I’ve been thinking a lot about – and playing around with – Twitter. These Dylan lyrics came to on the plane this morning, as an apt description of why I’ve had a hard time “getting” the value of Twitter:

And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
. . .
Heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’,
. . .
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

No, I’m not suggesting that Twitter is an omen of some rapidly upcoming flood. It’s the middle line there I’m thinking of.

Annalee Newitz writes in “The Trouble with Twitter” that:

Twitter’s popularity reflects the accelerating pace in cities: people use Twitter as they stroll around with mobiles, and the rapidity of their updates reflects a sense that new, exciting things are happening to them every minute, not just every few hours (blog time) or every day (newspaper time).

But the problem I have with Twitter isn’t that it is too fast, and thus discourages reflective thought, or that the messages are too short, and thus discourage contemplative rhetoric. Those things are true, but not the problem. (They’re equally true of SMS and of IM).

The problem is that no one is listening.

More accurately, the problem with Twitter is that there is no conversation to listen to. To borrow Gertrude Stein’s description of Oakland, there’s no there there.

Twitter is basically a giant publish and subscribe universe which renders conversations independent of location and medium by smashing them into little 140 character bits.

When you “tweet” you put your words out in the giant ocean of all conversations in the system – and the people who are subscribed to receive your words will see them, and perhaps read them.

It’s like yelling into the wind – albeit with a sophisticated routing algorithm that enables specific people downwind to hear you.

Others who tweet are sending their words into the same vast ocean (or wind, if you’re bothered by my mixing metaphors) – and if you are subscribed, you will be able to possibly read them.

It’s a conversation in which, at any moment, you may or may not be aware of those responding to you, and the people to whom you want to communicate may or may not be listening.

The problem is that aggregated monologues don’t make communities.

While irc and more recently IM-based chats sometimes have the appearance of a noisy room in which everyone’s speaking and no one listening, most chats actually have a clear set of threads. Multiple threads will be ongoing at once, and threads change (new ones start, old ones die out) without any formal logic, but there are generally threads of conversation involving participants who have some degree of likelihood of hearing each other.

Even when the majority of folks in a chat are lurking, there is at least a sense of who is participating in the conversation.

Blogs, in contrast are often accused of being monologues in slience – and for bloggers who are not on the A-list (or even the D-list!) blogging can seem like speaking into the wind. But blog platforms have mechanisms built in (permalinks, trackbacks / pingbacks, and comments) to encourage conversation over time.

If you have, on Twitter, a stable set of friends and followers – where those who are listening are also those who are talking – I could imagine real conversation emerging. I’m already seeing some folks using conventions like “@jeckman” or “jeckman<-” to show that their comments are directed at one user in particular.

But most of the time, you’re speaking with no awareness of who is listening – and listening to folks who weren’t thinking at all of you (except in the most generic sense) when they spoke. This practically eliminates dialogue.

Maybe the problem really is that I just don’t have enough friends – or enough friends who are actively twittering.

(Or is it that I don’t have enough followers? What does it mean, in terms of the social register, to have more followers than friends, or vice versa? I’m sure I read more blogs than there are users who read my blogs, but that doesn’t seem to have the quite the social relevance of the Twitter metrics).

One could also look at this as a fundamentally disruptive technology that I’m trying to frame in terms of known technologies. Twitter gives us IRC/IM but throws away the whole notion of who is “online” or “in the room” at the moment of conversation. It gives us the multiple simultaneous monologues that is the blogosphere without comments, trackbacks, or links between conversations.

But at the risk of sounding nostalgic or shortsighted, without those linkages I remain unconvinced that we’re getting something new out of this particular disruption.

The presentation itself is available under a creative commons license via Slideshare – if you actually download the ppt file from there, you can view the notes on many of the slides as well – or it also embedded below.

It’s a compelling presentation, well designed, connecting the power of brands (and consumer’s emotional connections to them) with the rise of consumer-generated media:

In our a world where consumers hop from one medium location to the next, we need to follow them to as many places as possible, yet also need to recognise that the stories people tell about our brand are one of the most effective media to affect our brand’s performance both in a positive and in a negative sense.

Because those consumers your traditional media efforts may miss, will need to be reached through the friends that do talk to them.

In short, in a million channel world, the brands whose consumers tell the best stories, win.

(Thys also mentions in the comments on the Logic + Emotion post that he’s working on a update, which responds to “the memo that participation and adoption of Social Media isn’t as compelling as we think” – should be interesting to see.)

What stories does your brand encourage users to tell?

Unfortunately, most of the time, consumer brand experiences run from mediocre to awful.

He’s posted a video of the talk he gave at the expo: “Creating Offline Web Applications Within the Browser.” It describes in quite a bit of detail how to use the Dojo Offline Toolkit to enable offline use of Ajax applications.

If you’re not looking for the tech details I still think the first 15-20 minutes is worth watching as he outlines why you might want offline web applications and what characteristics a good framework should provide for such apps.

The report is based on a poll of 406 senior executives (globally) who were asked questions about the impact of Web 2.0 on their businesses.

Some key conclusions:

• 31% of companies think that use of the web as a platform for sharing and collaboration will affect all parts of their business
•  Almost four-fifths of executives surveyed see the sharing and collaboration aspects of Web 2.0 as an opportunity to increase their company’s revenue and/or margins
• 21% of companies also expect Web 2.0 tools to lower public relations, advertising and marketing costs, while 17% expect to reduce the costs of product and service innovation

It’s a very well put together survey with a comprehensive appendix where you can see more of the raw data as well.

They do mention briefly some of the challenges:

• 26% of survey respondents cite the competence level of their IT staff as the department’s weakest link
•  More than one-third . . . cite a lack of resources to invest in new technology

From my perspective, it’d be nice to see more attention to how to cost-effectively get started with Web 2.0 applications – through leverage of Open Source software and consulting firms like Optaros of course.