Jeffrey Mann

Tonight I finally took time to watch the entire demo of Google Wave from the recent IO conference. I had already read a lot about it, but had not yet found an hour and a half to watch the entire presentation. This is a pretty busy period, so finding that much time to do anything not attached to a deadline, or some outdoor activity not connected with a keyboard is difficult.

But it was well worth the time invested. While 80 minutes is a bit long, this is a nice way to get an overview of new technologies; certainly better than white papers or static web sites. The enthusiasm of the Google developers and the people in the audience were obvious, It was easy to see that these were the actual developers, showing something they believe in strongly. It felt like watching a high school science project at times, with better graphics.

I found many of the quick asides about usability in the talk the most interesting. The speakers didn’t make a big deal of them, but they give good insights into how to look at technologies that really can change how we work. The two that come to mind are the observation that real time updates that happen too fast can end up being distracting, so might have to be artificially slowed down. Another one was that watching people type letter by letter exposes work in progress that might not always want to be shown.

Public interest in Wave is very high, perhaps even too high. A client recently asked if they should stop all investments in collaboration until Wave is released. I don’t think so. As exciting as Wave is, halting current projects on the basis of a Youtube video about a product with no release date, no pricing, no upgrade path and a hundred other open questions does not seem like a good idea.

Wave certainly is exciting. It shows what is possible when smart people are given an interesting task, without all those annoying constraints that most product vendors have to content with, like backward compatibility, effort to upgrade, migration costs and established infrastructures. Even just as a think exercise, Wave is useful to show we could work together, and questioning the assumptions that short messages happen in an IM client and longer messages in an email client. These distinctions are more a function of history than necessity. 

My colleagues have published a First Take on Google Wave with more thoughts, but this is what impressed me the most. There are many more questions to be answered before Wave will make a big impact on enterprises, but I look forward to hearing more about it as it approaches real release. I also look forward to more online videos to introduce new products, but please hold it to 30 minutes or less.

I talk with a fair number of vendors every month about their collaboration and social software offerings. Usually, these briefings have a familiar pattern (the easiest to use, the most experienced management team, growing ecosystem of partners, logo slide with lots of customers…), but I’ve noticed something new starting to creep in. Rather than talking about the features and what customers have done with them, more vendors are talking about how they built their products.

I recently spoke separately with two vendors with newish offerings (Oracle with Beehive and Day Software with CQ5 Social Collaboration) who emphasize that rather than pulling together different products or evolving an existing offering, they started over and designed a new product on top of a solid repository. A clean technical architecture has not typically been a high priority from vendors in this space, who either leverage technology from a variety of sources, including open source, or have legacy products which they need to build upon. Rather than making a point of their long history or leveraging of proven technology from elsewhere, Oracle and Day emphasized the “clean sheet of paper” design approach.

I know that there are others out there who have done this, but these are two that I happened to have spoken with recently who had a similar message. This could be just a way to differentiate a late entry into an established market. In Oracle’s case, I expect they also want to distance Beehive from its failed predecessor, Oracle Collaboration Suite.

I believe it is more than just a stab at differentiation, however. Social software has grown beyond the gee-whiz phase where early adopters can be induced to buy by flashy functionality or anecdotes of somebody having done something fun, somewhere. Corporate buyers and IT architects are getting involved and looking for justification and supportable infrastructures.

in response, I expect to hear other suppliers emphasizing this type of advantage, if they can find a way to claim it. No doubt, some vendors will come up with a variety of “creative” ways of demonstrating architectural superiority as this becomes a more common customer evaluation criteria.

For some, building on a framework that has proven itself over 20 years of usage with millions of users will be their evidence of superiority. Others will wave their clean sheet of paper to show they were not tainted by old ideas. Both approaches have their merits in different situations; the good thing for users is that this discussion has started, because how one builds software matters.

We went into this year’s Portal, Content and Collaboration (PCC) Summit event with a bit of trepidation, or at least I did. With the somber economic news leading to reports of spending cuts and travel bans, I expected light attendance and listless participants with no room to initiate new activities. That is what I remember seeing in the last downturn seven years ago.

There was little of that in Orlando this year, however. Attendance was good, and engagement levels were very high. Controlling IT spending and using collaboration to lower operating costs or increase revenue were certainly important concerns, but not the only ones as I had feared. Most clients I spoke to were willing and able to spend money if they could create enough justification.

There was more focus on financial justification than I’ve seen in years’ past, but not to an overwhelming extent; certainly not like in 2002 when it seemed like the only new projects that could be started were ones that replaced existing implementations, on a reduced scale. I had many discussions both in 1on1 sessions and informally how how to implement these technologies effectively and exploring how they can help the business.

Operating in harsh macroeconomic times is tough, and tougher for some than others. I realize that many people could not make it to the conference, and are indeed having to contend with slashed budgets and reduced staff. Overall though, I found the attitude at PCC Orlando definitely encouraging, both for collaboration and social software activities and the IT industry as a whole.

Rather than draconian and panicky cuts, most companies were showing a heightened sense of responsibility, paying more attention to the things which always were important like business value and balancing risks with benefits. They also seemed to be preparing their organizations for when the downturn will eventually slacken with judicious investments and preparatory work now. All of these indicators are encouraging and even gratifying. I expect that the audience at PCC London in September and when Symposium season starts in October will show even more signs of recovery and ambition.

I wire this on my way home from 9 days in Hong Kong and Japan. It was a great trip, partly because I love traveling to Asia. It also is a chance to get exposure to some very different markets and trends than I usually deal with when talking with EMEA and North American customers. I can’t presume to be an authority on the region on the basis of this one trip, but I did glean these trends from conversations with vendors and customers at the Japan conference.

Japanese companies are very interested in social software technologies, why companies are deploying them, and the benefits they expect to achieve. Comparatively few have active deployments, but the curiosity and level of interest is quite high. Many of the questions and concerns are predictably about security, governance, control and business benefits. In the consensus-driven culture of many Japanese companies, free-wheeling social software sites sound strange and chaotic.

Familiarity with social software concepts is quite high through consumer services. Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn haven’t made much impact in Japan but mixi and many mobile phone-based communities have already become an important part of people’s lives.

Twitter, inevitably, also came up often.The whole concept seemed strange to many of the people I talk to, even more so than usual. When someone explained that it is common for Japanese to update their personal blogs dozens of times per day from their mobile phones, I began to see why the appeal of Twitter was so hard to grasp. Western Blogs are usually longer posts updated several times per week or month. Japanese mix the short and long form. They’ve been Twittering for years, so they don’t see the point of microblogging; it’s nothing new.

Some companies are doing interesting things, as a panel at the conference showed. Panelists from Ricoh, CSK Holdings and Tokyo Marine discussed how they are using blogs and wikis in several different ways to facilitate sharing among customers, employees and partners.

The level of interest and depth of questions gave me the impression that there is more activity than might be readily apparent. Several of the companies I spoke with were actively watching what other companies were doing and looking for cases where they could begin to use social software technologies internally. It reminds me of the image of a Harrier jump jet, which runs its engines for several minutes before taking off. In that pre-launch phase, it looks like nothing is happening, but inside it is building up power. When it does take off, it goes straight up, very fast. i suspect that Japanese adoption of social software will be similar, with a long period of preparation and then quick adoption once they finally start.

As well as hitting the visitor high spots like a karaoke bar and marveling at the controlled chaos of the Shibuya intersection, I got to try out some ideas I will be presenting at the PCC conference in Orlando, Florida June 8-10 (not much time at home this time of year). Just one of the reasons I appreciated being able to make this trip. I really want to thank the event organizers at Gartner Japan for giving me the chance, and the customers, vendors and journalists who gave me so much of their time and insights.

Every couple weeks, some industry observer or blogger declares that something that most people know well is dead, and generates a lot of page hits. Whether it’s the iPhone, Microsoft, the mainframe, or Paul, this is a popular meme.

More power to them, but I find it getting kind of old. Technological stuff rarely completely disappears, and takes a very long time to do so when it does. I still am surprised when I talk to people waiting for a fax. I haven’t gotten a fax in years, but many salespeople still keep one ear cocked for the sound of a signed contract rolling in. I had a fax number on my business card for awhile, but had no idea how I would actually receive it if anyone ever sent me one. Some industries still even use telexes.

The latest victim of the X is Dead meme is RSS. Steve Glimor from TechCrunch IT writes that RSS is being replaced by services like Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed. His position is echoed by other writers like Jemima Kiss of the Guardian.

I can certainly see how the context and recommendations provided by these services are more useful than the indiscriminate feeds that come in through an RSS reader. if someone retweets a link, I am more likely to be interested in it, especially if I know and respect the person retweeting. An RSS reader just scoops up everything that comes from a particular feed. I do indeed spend far less time browsing posts through Google Reader since I started using Twitter, but I suspect that has as much to do with needing to get work done as anything else.

I can’t see RSS really dying any time soon, however. Rather than dying in a sudden expiring fit, most technologies just get other stuff layered on top. We continue to use them, at least for awhile, but in different ways. RSS will continue as the best way to monitor what we know we must read; as the best way to download a bunch of posts to read while in a plane or on the train; to track what is happening in internal applications and other software that publishes using RSS. Someone clever will mashup an RSS reader and a Twitter client to combine their benefits.

RSS might be coughing a little bit, but it ain’t dead yet.

I will be talking about some of the new ways to communicate that are getting layered on top of what you’ve already got at Portal, Content and Collaboration conference in Orlando, Florida June 8-10.

It’s odd to see a powerhouse like Facebook scrambling to become more like Twitter, a relative upstart with no visible means of revenue. The reported rejected acquisition bid could play a role in a “If you can’t buy them, copy them” way. But clearly, this is what is happening.

First Facebook changed its user interface to a adopt more Twitter-like activity streams. Although this style of user interface is arguably more like Friendfeed than Twitter, they all seem to be converging on a similar model built on real time feeds of what friends and contacts are doing right this very instant. Who cares what anyone was doing or thinking about an hour ago anyway, right?

The second move came this week when Facebook opened up their APIs to third parties. This is a far more welcome, meaningful and risky move for Facebook. One of the reasons Twitter has caught on is that it is easy to build applications on top of the Twitter service using rich interfaces. These applications range from the sublime to the ridiculous, providing mobile access, different styles of clients, monitoring tools, analysis and aggregation.

For most heavy Twitter users, these third party tools define their Twitter experience. Twitter doesn’t really seem to mind, since it has maintained a pretty utilitarian UI on www.twitter.com. it hasn’t changed much except for the addition of a (fairly well-hidden) search engine and a few tweaks seen recently like showing replies when the @symbol is anywhere in the tweet instead of only at the beginning; useful, but hardly revolutionary. There isn’t much need to go there except to change profile information, which doesn’t happen all that often.

Unlike Facebook and most other sites, Twitter doesn’t need to bring people to their site in order to make money by pushing advertising at them. For reasons discussed in an earlier post, I believe Twitter is concentrating on building volume and loyalty, with monetization to come later. Of course. “later” cannot become “never;” eventually they need to bring in some money. For the moment, that doesn’t seem to be a priority, however.

The threat to advertising revenue is why this is such a risky move for Facebook. When anyone can build a flashy AIR-based client to follow their friends activities, or gadgets that pull selected data from the Facebook stream, then there is less reason for users to actually visit www.Facebook.com, which is when the cash register jingles at Facebook HQ. So far, Facebook has done everything it could to keep users coming to its site rather than sending its data to someone else’s. I think that Facebook is counting on three factors in favour of opening up:

1. More activity means more visitors
   If the third party apps bring in more punters, than eventually they will visit Facebook.com with its full range of functionality. What they lose in visits they gain through more visitors.
2. Other revenue sources will open up
   Advertising is not the only source of money for social media. Expect to see more emphasis on sponsorship, partner fees, value-added services, and joint ventures.
3. If they don’t, Facebook could become irrelevant.
   Right now, they are at the top of the social media heap, recently having passed Myspace, which in turn replaced Friendster as the place to be. Losing some advertising revenue is better than being replaced.

I believe that last reason is the real clincher. The first two are throws of the dice; new money could replace or even surpass what they could miss. The risk of becoming the Last Big Thing in social media rather than staying the current big thing is more like flirting with disaster. A forward-leaning strategy encouraging more partnerships and activity certainly makes more sense in this space than building walls, so I think this is fundamentally a good move on Facebook’s part. It can be scary to put a painfully developed revenue stream at risk, but in the social media market, trying to protect it by erecting barriers will eventually prove disastrous.

By the way, I’m sure that the role of Twitter and Facebook will come up often at Gartner’s PCC conference in Orlando in June.

I intend to say nothing about Ashton Kutcher, Larry King, Oprah or Twitter this week. Well, almost nothing. This has already gotten too much attention.

Mosey along now; nothing to see here.

Last week saw fevered speculation about an impending acquisition of Twitter by Google, and just as much fervent debunking of those rumours. I don’t pretend to have any inside information, so I won’t comment on whether this will happen or not. We don’t like commenting on rumours anyway. But I do have some ideas about why such a move could make sense, and what it would mean if it does or does not happen.

Up to now, Twitter has chosen not to put much effort into developing business models. Like Google did before it, Twitter is building out its platform and attracting users. With a fair amount of VC money in the bank, it can afford to take its time. Twitter does indeed have value, even if it is not what most people think it is. Premium user accounts aren’t the answer. That wouldn’t bring in much money, potentially alienate users and reduce traffic. That last risk is why Twitter shouldn’t go that route.

As I said in my last blog posting, Twitter’s value is in its content, not the client. The Twitterbase is growing by 6 million tweets per day. Twitter is attractive because it has built a service which attracts this much volume, creating a constantly growing, twitching, seething real time source of comments, news and opinions. Companies will be willing to pay for better access to this information for lots of reasons. Consumer products companies can track attitudes toward their brands and their competitors. Media groups can use it to track real time public opinion. Governments can use it to follow what citizens are doing and thinking. Access to this data and the services to analyse it is where Twitter’s business model lies.

Even though Twitter can build out a business model, I don’t necessarily think it should. This is a good time for Twitter to sell itself to somebody. Media hype is pretty high now, with celebrities regularly talking about how they tweet on talk shows instead of promoting their latest film. It is unlikely to get much more intense than it is now. While building a business is possible, it will be a long hard slog for Twitter to monetize its assets on its own.

Google would be a good candidate. The culture and ambitions of the companies match. The Twitter founders sold Blogger to Google earlier and work on the same principles of build first, monetize later. An acquisition plays to Google’s strengths in terms of infrastructure and monetizing analysis of large amounts of data. Google knows how to run highly scalable applications, and make money doing it. Google is not the only company that would benefit from a tie-up with Twitter, but it certainly looks like a good candidate.

Other tie-ups between Google and Twitter short of an outright acquisition could make sense, but would be harder to sustain since Twitter already uses such open interfaces. it would be hard for Twitter to offer Google better access to its data than any of its other partners if Google is just another partner. That rich API has been instrumental in building the healthy ecosystem of clients and analysis services that make Twitter so much fun.

In the end, of course they will do what they think is best for their companies and shareholders. Judging by the lack of noise in the blogosphere, it looks now like “Twoogle” will not happen (but that might have changed by the time I post this).Either way, it will be fun to watch.

Twitter famously has no visible means of financial support, aside from the money it has raised from venture capital firms. A viable business model for Twitter has become the elusive MacGuffin sought by many observers of social media, like the statuette in the Maltese Falcon. Fairly vague comments from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone have ignited a fresh round of speculation that Twitter will start charging for some of its services to businesses.  I don’t claim any inside knowledge, but I’ve got some opinions based on research and the ways I’ve been using the service.

I never really bought into the idea that Twitter would eventually have to start taking advertising or charge users directly. Charging individual users would certainly drive many people away, this hoax announcement notwithstanding. Unless done extremely carefully, so would advertising in the way most web sites do it. More people access Twitter using third party client software like Twhirl or Tweetdeck than go to the Twitter.com site anyway, so conventional advertising potential is limited.

Twitter must avoid doing anything that could reduce the number of people who use it or how often they tweet. Twitter’s real value is in the volume. Millions of people make around 6 million tweets per day, by one count, turning Twitter into a world-wide, real time twitching, tweeting sensing system. If you want to know what people are saying about your product, your candidate, your television show or your research report, then Twitter is the place to look. Companies would be willing to pay much more for better access to this content than a more functional client or some ads. There is much more value to be made by analyzing and feeding real time feedback. Twitter has already experimented with this model by working with the Current cable television channel to feed real time election Tweets during the US presidential election. They could easily take this much further. I think this is the kind of thing that Biz Stone is talking about when talks about opportunities in providing better services to businesses.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about signing a pledge to blog about a woman in technology I admire on March 24, 2009, aka Ada Lovelace day. The subject I chose is certainly an unsung heroine, as I cannot remember her name. She was the administrator for the computer center at Davidson College where I went to university. This was long enough ago that computer centers were something new. The college had just bought a fancy new Pr1me minicomputer, and installed terminals in a dingy, windowless room in the basement.

I admire her (whatever her name was) because she gave the small group of students who were interested enough 24 hour access to the terminal room and all the technical documentation we could digest. She was one training course ahead of us, so she generously gave her time answering questions and then got out of our way and let us explore this fun new machine. I cannot remember her name, because I honestly haven’t thought of her in many years. But in many ways she was responsible for my career (such as it is).

According to Malcolm Gladwell, I was a little bit too young and didn’t spend nearly enough time on the computer to really be good at it. But those hours spent in the basement introduced me to computers as something fun and interesting. We learned all about the Pr1mos operating system (not that it helped my CV much; anyone remember that?) while figuring out how to send “letter bombs,” i.e. messages that used obscure control characters to freeze the recipient’s terminal after displaying an elaborate ASCII “bomb” (that was a great hit about 4:00 am the day that term papers were due). Or programming a phantom (think daemon under UNIX) to compute as many digits of Pi as possible, an idea ripped off of a Star Trek episode. After about two weeks, I got a message from the administrator saying they had killed the phantom, since it was eating into the processor power they needed to run payroll. I had neglected to save the output anywhere, so I never knew how far it got.

I am deeply appreciative that my first encounter with computers was not forbidding and scary, but fun and adventurous. It allowed me to see them as toys to play with rather than something fragile or intimidating. I’m glad that I can approach a keyboard and try things out, just to see what happens. Sometimes that goes wrong (like when I shut down a system I didn’t realize was multiuser to stop a program I couldn’t control), but not very wrong. I am sure that the woman with the fan would appreciate that too. She doesn’t look like she would be intimidated by a mere device. Thank you, Mrs. <whatever your name was> and thank you Ada for making me think of her.