These were some of the top questions people were asking about.

• Promoting Social Software in Conservative Organizations.
  The initial issue many organizations faced with social software was how to get control of the mavericks and pioneers who were dragging in innovative solutions from wherever they could find them. As adoption deepens, more organizations are finding that their internal or industry culture is stronger than the impulses of these dynamic individuals. In conservative organizations, people feel that using wacky new software like wikis or microblogging would be seen as a bad thing, even if there is no official statement or prohibition. These organizations are looking for ways to encourage innovation and responsible adoption.
• Developing a Collaboration Strategy
  A bit of an evergreen, but definitely still a hot topic. There are lots of initiatives, some benefits, and lots of attention. How do we channel that energy into a viable strategy?
• Involving Customers in Social Software Efforts
  The first several iterations of social software concentrated on collaboration among colleagues. After that, the marketing or customer service organization started Social CRM efforts. Now, it’s time to develop a long term view of how to involve customers in the developing conversations.

This year is different for me because it is most likely the last time I will serve as chair for the event as well as attending as an analyst. This was my third year organizing the agenda, which is personally stimulating as well as a pleasant challenge. I became familiar with areas of our research that I otherwise would not have seen. I loved the chance to think about how we present our ideas as well as what the ideas themselves should be. I have loved working with the events team, leading to a much greater appreciation of the professionalism, work, and skills needed behind the scenes to pull off an event like this one. If Symposium is a success, it is mostly due to the events people making it seem (mostly) seamless. I will miss that part of the event, when I go back to just worrying about finishing the slides for my own presentations.

To everyone who made Symposium possible: Events staff, analysts, consultants, management, sales people, and (most of all) clients and sponsors: An enormous thank you. 

The Hyves announcement does not mention it, but Facebook is the elephant in the room for all of these locally-oriented sites. I have seen it with many of my Dutch friends, who started out on Hyves, but gradually moved over to Facebook as they developed more contacts with people beyond the Dutch borders. Bizarrely, when Google translates the original Dutch page from the Telegraaf into English, most of the references to Hyves get changed to Myspace. Just as many Myspace users have moved to Facebook, so goes it with Hyves.

Today’s acquisition by the Telegraaf reinforces the local character of Hyves. Terms were not disclosed, but I think it is fair to assume that there will be no movies made with Justin Timberlake about Hyves. The consumer social networking market is one where the big get bigger; the dominant site either loses touch with its audience which switches en masse to something else (e.g. Friendster to Myspace to Facebook) or gets more dominant, as Facebook has so far been able to do.

I believe that there is a future for local sites, but not a huge one, particularly in Europe. Certainly, there is an audience which wants local content and values the tight cultural connections that a locally-oriented site can offer. This audience will be most viable in markets which are reasonably isolated by culture or language. Local sites are emerging or even thriving in China, Japan, Korea, Russia, and Arabic-speaking countries. Friendster, one of the original social networking sites, was bought last year by a company in Malaysia.

Holland is definitely not isolated, neither culturally or linguistically. While few foreigners speak Dutch, language skills in Holland are so good that if you have any kind of an accent, it can be hard to find someone to speak Dutch with. The Dutch go everywhere on holiday, to live and to work. As cross-border interactions and relations become the norm, the same goes to some extent for most European countries.

Local  focus can be a way to differentiate a social networking site. It usually won’t be enough to compete with a behemoth like Facebook, however, especially in Europe.

This week I got to spend a day with with the IT and external communications staff from several United Nations agencies in Geneva. As I expected, use of social media is a hot topic there both inside and outside of their organizations. They were concerned both with how to prevent or minimize missteps from their own staff, and how to react to others using social media to talk about their operations and activities. The political and humanitarian aspects of UN work added extra dimensions that I don’t usually hear about when talking with commercial enterprises. While politics is never very far from what they do, most people working at the agencies try to steer clear of it to get their jobs done. For those working in humanitarian areas, it is especially important to step gingerly around political considerations.

I was impressed by the earnest desire to not only be effective in using social media, but also to contribute to the greater good. I could see from the discussions and questions that each of these agencies is driven by a clear, specific purpose, whether it is caring for refugees or analyzing economic statistics.  The sometimes inflexible funding methods and often Byzantine administrative structures of UN agencies must not make it easy to concentrate on this purpose always, but it was certainly top of mind with the people I spoke with.

The theme for 2010 is “Think B4 U post!” (sic), with videos and posters aimed at reminding people of the potential consequences of posting embarrassing videos and pictures, or worse. Something that “seemed like a good idea at the time” often goes pretty wrong when populated across the Internet.

While the primary audience of Safer Internet Day is kids, the advice given also has relevance to enterprises. As so often happens, what is important to consumer users of social media, also apply to businesses:

Kids: Have you thought about what could happen if people you don’t know see what you are about to post?
Enterprises: Have you done an impact/risk assessment of what could happen if your social media sites are compromised?

Kids: Do you think about and use the privacy settings of the social networks you use?
Enterprises: Do you understand and effectively use the security and privacy protection capabilities of the collaboration products you use?

Kids: Do you know how much you can trust the people you “friend” into your network?
Enterprises: Do you understand the limits of trust with the partners you collaborate with?

Are you following the advice that you are giving your kids?

First, Hubspot’s measurements show that the rate of growth is slowing, not that Twitter is in decline. Growth is still good, especially in this economy. While 13% is better than 4%, growing at all is good. Given the huge growth they have been having, I am not surprised that it is slowing, especially given the big surges that came from the plane landing on the Hudson, the Iranian protests and the Arrival of Oprah.

Second, while the number of users is not growing as fast as it was, many of the other indicators are positive. Users are more engaged, better behaved, and more spread out around the world. So while one number is down, all of the others showed improvement.

Third, so what if user growth is slowing down? It already has achieved a pretty good scale, enough to drive insights based on the constantly-growing real time content pool. Surely, bigger would be even better, but it’s already big enough to do interesting things.

Longer term, I think that a slowdown is inevitable. While Twitter is pre-eminent in North America, Australia and Europe, other players like Plurk, Me2day and Zuosa have had a chance to establish themselves in Asia. Facebook is busily adopting Twitter features. The market will inevitably split geographically and by interest group at some point. That doesn’t mean that it’s all over for Twitter, but it does mean that the microblogging market looks like it is starting to grow up.

This year, Microblogging (which includes the Twitter service) has crested the Peak of Inflated Expectations and is beginning to move into the Trough of Disillusionment. Some people disagreed with the placement of the dot, but that’s to be expected. From an unscientific survey, about as many people felt microblogging still had plenty of hype left in it as thought it was well onto the Slope of Enlightenment. So that’s OK. If the critics are all over the map, then the position is probably just about right.

It was also apparent that many people don’t really get how the cycle works. The most prevalent Tweet said some variation on “Web 2.0 Trending Up, Twitter Down.” Many commentators seemed to think that moving towards the trough meant that Twitter was over, never to be heard from again.

Actually, microblogging is moving along the cycle rather smartly. The structure of the hype cycle means that everything goes through the trough, before it reaches the plateau of productivity and wide adoption. Moving into the trough is therefore, a good thing for someone’s favorite technology, but not without risks. It is far worse for a technology to languish on the up side of the peak, never to approach wide adoption. Other technologies whiz quickly through the trough to reach the slope and onto the plateau.

The Twitter backlash has certainly begun, and many are piling on enthusiastically. I am not one of them, but there are definite indications that microblogging will have a difficult time getting through the trough. Moving into the enterprise will be especially tricky, one of the necessary steps to really achieve productivity. While there are several enterprise microblogging platforms out there, one of Twitter’s attractions is the massive volume of Twitterers and the amount of content they generate. Recreating that internally will be hard. Some companies have achieved successes, and I would love to talk to any others I haven’t spoken with. But it will be more difficult for microblogging to jump from the consumer to the enterprise market than many other collaboration technologies, such as instant messaging.

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 am as impressed as most people are with the overall design and beauty of the Apple products. Usability is definitely suffering, however, as they get more complex and intertwined. Last week, my wife’s iBook G4 died. Apple seems to think that is a normal thing for three year computers to do, because there aren’t really many viable repair options available. By the time we replace the hard disk, and the keyboard (which has been wonky for about a year), we would have almost paid for a new machine. So that’s what we did: A brand spanking new 13 inch Macbook.

When trying to revive the old machine to get the data off, I reinstalled the OS. Now it starts fine, but when I try to start any applications, they just bounce on the dock a few times and nothing happens. No error message. Nothing to indicate that an app failing to appear is out of the ordinary. Just a little happy bouncing icon. That kind of behaviour drives me crazy. As often as not, when something goes wrong on the Mac, there is no information about what happened and no apparent place to go to fix it. On Windows machines there are all kinds of places to tweak and probe. I never know which one to use, which drives me crazy in a different way, but at least I can find a place to start fiddling. What can I do with an icon that bounces happily away, but little else?

I moved the iTunes over from a backup, and all seemed to go well. I had to re-authorize the machine to play the tunes I had bought from the iTunes Store. Slightly irritating, but I can live with that. Now about half the songs we bought pop up the authorization message (and refuse to accept the authorization), and half work fine. No idea why. We bought them all exactly the same way.

I also moved all our photos over from a backup disk. But do you think that there is a way to get iPhoto to recognize all of the libraries and albums from the other machine? Not that I could find after quite a bit of searching. It imported them all just fine, but lost all of the organization, metadata and slideshows built up over the years.

The new machine has a nifty built-in camera. Except that iChat says that this machine is not equipped with a camera. But it is. I am sure there is someplace to turn it on, but I haven’t found it yet.

We wanted to use the nifty iChat interface. But the descriptions on how to get it working are incredibly opaque. the steps involved to connect to someone else are in no way obvious. Something called Bonjour keeps popping up, but I have yet to figure out what it is or how it will help me, after about 30 minutes of looking, the limits of my patience.

I still have to figure out how to convert old AppleWorks files into a format that Office for Mac can read. I would have thought that would be a standard filter, but I’ll have to go looking for it.

I appreciate the design of the box, and the slick look of the operating system. I am also sure that I will figure out all of this stuff eventually. Please don’t offer technical solutions, as remote support is frustrating for both sides. I am also sure that Windows can be just as frustrating. I honestly really like the Mac in many ways and don’t feel that strongly about operating systems anyway. But I expected more from a system that is so praised for its usability. I have always secretly wanted to be a Mac user, so I write this diatribe with disappointment. I am sure that it is a viable alternative to Windows as a corporate desktop machine, but only because it is equally frustrating, albeit in different ways.

I have stopped muttering about how Macs are so much easier to use while trying to figure out why some obvious function isn’t working. It’s better for my mixed marriage.

Vendors are responding by improving the controls they offer for deciding how much to expose, to whom. This is a great first step, but the real breakthrough must come in the user interface. As this article points out, there are quite a few possibilities, but how many people really take the time and effort to carefully go through and consider who should see what? 

It is not uncommon to receive ten or more invitations per day. I quickly sift through the people who read my name somewhere, but don’t really know me. But many are more subtle. How much do I want an analyst relations person from a vendor I am covering to know about me? Or a client? Or my boss? I sometimes use Hellotxt.com to propagate postings across many different sites. It is much easier and faster than going to each individual site. But I have to force myself to think whether what I am saying really belongs in all of those places.

The problem is that I really am acting in several different personas all the time. In my head, I slip between being a sometimes snarky commentator, professional analyst,  new acquaintance, old friend, fan, brother, husband… Translating the different roles I play from second to second from my head to my keyboard is a far too manual process, and manual processes are very error-prone.

The great designer/entrepreneur who comes up with an effective way to manage the different personas people inhabit stands to make a fortune. It was the suppliers to miners who made the lasting riches in the California Gold Rush. The same thing is poised to happen again with the social media gold rush. Many of the first order sites will do fine. But the second and third order services that make it possible to use the sites effectively and safely will be an even bigger opportunity.

I am not a heavy Tweeter. I have sent out 1,457 Tweets and have accumulated 460 followers. According to Tweetstats, I have averaged four tweets per day, and sent the most messages in October. According to Twitter Grader, I am in the top 98.3% (#13,663 out of 952,391) of the Twitterverse. These are not particularly great numbers, but they work for me. The rock stars of Twitter spend most of their day doing little else but reading, replying and tweeting. I like to think I have a life that won’t allow that. I also have a job, that requires a bit more depth than the average tweet.

The reason I first started tweeting is that I find it hard to find the time to do proper blogs. I need to write research notes, and have more ideas than discipline, so the regularity of this blog sometimes suffers. I can handle 140 character mind squirts though. They just fit into my day better.

My time spent on Twitter has been rewarding. It alerts me to what is going on, connects me to old friends, and introduces me to many people whom I think are worth knowing. I have used it to test out ideas that eventually make their way into this blog or my more formal research notes. Twitter points me to people saying interesting things on their blogs. I can tap into expertise on travel and silly things like the best brand of tea bags to use if you want to use them in the garden. Apparently, Celestial seasonings and PG Pyramids don’t have those paper tags that inhibit mulching.

Twitter also helped us close a sale. I noticed that someone was saying they were having trouble reaching their Gartner account rep. I passed the contact on, and one of our sales people was able to close a deal very quickly. I don’t expect to get that much direct business value every day, but it’s a nice way of justifying something I like doing.