Instead, I want to talk about my anti-resolutions for 2011.They are “anti” in a couple different ways. The main one is that these are not things that I intend to do, but are hopes and polite suggestions about other people. That is much easier, and an idea that seems to be catching on.This is also what analysts usually do; we rarely do stuff, but we comment a lot on what other people or organizations should do or have done.

Most of the resolutions are also “anti” because they describe something that I hope won’t happen rather than new things that should happen. I am generally not a negative person, but there’s a lot of undesirable activity going on out there. After reading this, please stop it. Thank you.

1. Stop saying things are dead.
   I thought that I dealt with this in a blog post last year, but it seems some people weren’t listening. Every week I read somewhere that Twitter is dead; Facebook is dead; Hyves is dead. Secrets are dead. About the only thing that can really be read from one of these pronouncements is that whatever is being discussed is most certainly not dead.

   Concepts in the social media space rarely ever die. They get less popular, fade from attention, morph into something else; but rarely die altogether. Even if they do, it is tedious to talk about how something that most people think is popular is actually dead. If it were really dead, then no one would be talking about it anymore, now would they? It’s as if bloggers get extra points for being the first to jump on the coffin. I find it unseemly, as well as boring.

2. Please don’t keep saying that microblogging is about telling everyone what you just ate.
   I see this over and over again, that Twitter is full of narcissists broadcasting what they ate for lunch. This particular dig is usually a pretty good indicator that whoever says it does not use Twitter very much.  

   I cannot recall the last time I read about what someone ate for lunch on Twitter. I am sure that it happens, but if that is all someone tweets about, then they would be boring and no one would follow them. That is one of the best things about Twitter when compared to real life: it is pretty easy to avoid the boring bits. I don’t see those tweets because I ignore the people that I find boring. You should too.

3. Stop assuming that everyone wants to use social media.
   I have read several books and seen many presentations that enthusiastically proclaim how there is a huge pent-up demand for social media, that everyone is just panting to share, comment, tag and link.

   It just ain’t so.

   The biggest issue I see enterprises struggling with is convincing people to use these new facilities. They expected that once the facilities were made available, all users would grab them and run with them. Instead, they find that most people never try it, and a few kick at the edges a few times before going back to what they were doing. That’s because what they were doing is what they call  “their jobs.” If it is not made clear how social media will make individuals’ lives and jobs easier and more pleasant, they won’t bother. Aside from the relative few who see this immediately, most people need a bit more guidance and cajoling. That’s the hard job in front of every social media proponent who wants to scale their projects beyond the pioneering Happy Few.

4. Stop assuming that social media will change everything.
   Too many social media proponents breathlessly state that nothing will be the same after the social media maelstrom passes over us; that the way we work, play, and interact will fundamentally change, that all of our processes and work patterns will be unrecognizable.

   Ho hum. Heard that before about so many things. Didn’t happen then, won’t happen now.

   Don’t get me wrong. I love how social media has changed how I work, and love talking about how it can improve processes, and the way people work. But it won’t change everything. Nor should it; it doesn’t need to. Quite a bit better or even a little bit easier is certainly enough.

5. Don’t think that your biggest challenge is to get your chief executive to write a blog
   Eager social software organizers often feel that if they can only get the CEO to blog regularly, then everything else will fall into place. Top-level validation and executive buy-in certainly can help, but if a senior executive needs to be convinced to blog, he or she probably won’t be very good at it. With a great deal of work, it is possible to learn to blog effectively, but it’s difficult to get your boss’s boss’s boss to do this. It’s usually better to get someone lower in the organization who is attracted to blogging and more likely to be good at it.
6. If you leave me a voice mail, tell me what you want.
   I know I will be having a bad day when I receive a voice mail that says something like “Hi. This is Mphrlwysiz Affmrrhl. Can you call me back when you get a chance?”

   I am pretty sure that their name is not actually Mphrlwysiz Affmrrhl, but something phonetically similar. Now I have to figure out how to get back to them, and what they want. Since I am often calling while juggling luggage on the way to the airport, it could take several calls back and forth before this interaction gets completed.

   I live my professional life by email. It is great at conveying information, and handling the request right away. With mobile email, I can do this on the fly as well. I understand, however, that some people prefer to talk to other people, to make contact, explain the context. Fine. Just tell me what you want though, so that we don’t have to bounce back and forth too long.

7. “Lose” and “loose” are different words with different meanings. Do not mix them up.
   Look them up if you have to: Lose    and    Loose
8. Don’t leave obvious, essential features out of your product.
   With my Blackberry, I had to choose between wifi and a camera. The iPad ships without a camera, on a device which is perfect for video conferencing. The rims for my snow tires don’t come with hub caps, so the salt corrodes them. Every device needs its own specific power cord and connector, and they never include extras.

   These features are all so obviously desirable, why leave them out? I know what you will say “To get us to buy expensive ‘accessories’ and the next version when it comes out.” But it ticks me off. Please stop it.

9. Stop saying that something New is no different from something Old.
   I have heard it before. Email is not that different from a fax. Mainframes had email and instant messaging decades ago. You could buy stuff to be delivered from a catalog long before you could do so from an e-commerce Web site. A wiki isn’t that different from a Word document with revision tracking on.

   Sometimes these observations are correct. But who cares? The truth is that e-commerce is creating millions of new businesses, and changing the way that people buy, no matter who did it first. Email shapes the way we work to an extent that faxes or telexes never came close to achieving. Tracing the roots of a supposedly “new” development can be interesting. Unexpected similarities can expose different ways of looking at new developments. But if the goal is to squash the new thing back into a corner where it can be safely ignored, please don’t.

10. No one should “Reply all” to more than ten people.
    Yeah, that would be nice. I live in hope.

I guess I must be grumpy this year, since I made it back to 10 anti-resolutions. Last year, I only could think of seven. Grumpy is no way to start out the new year, however. I certainly don’t feel that way as I start into 2011. I think it’s going to be a great year, although it could always be a bit better.

Happy New Year, everyone!

I can assess its impact very personally. Twitter is where I found out that Barack Obama would be the next President of the United States. Twitter is where I heard the anguish of unrest in Iran and the fear during the terrorist attacks on Mumbai. I saw tweets from a minor earthquake in Seattle 6 seconds after it occurred. I’ve been able to follow goings-on at conferences I have not been able to go to, and experienced real world conferences in different and deeper ways. I have met people I didn’t know before in far off countries, and refound old friends. It provides me with ideas and the idea that I am connected with people whom I respect. Twitter on my phone fills the moments when I’ve already read my email and run the risk of having nothing useful to do for a few seconds as I wait in line or for the lift to arrive.

Twitter also contains lots of dreck, is easy to misunderstand, and provides the venue for thousands of petty and uninteresting spats. Luckily, tools and techniques for avoiding those are easily accessible.  If irrational grudges and meaningless arguments are your thing, then Twitter provides a relatively harmless place to indulge in them. I remain positive about the overall effects of social media, but I am happy to see people taking a more serious look at the potential downsides. Anything powerful can be misused. Knowing about the potential pitfalls is the best way to avoid them.

Beyond Twitter, the concept of microblogging has been slower to catch on, but it’s coming. Frequent, small updates can provide value within the enterprise just as it provides amusement and entertainment outside of it. Microsoft this week launched a test version of Officetalk, to test some of its ideas about enterprise microblogging. It takes guidance, thought, and a bit of discipline to use enterprise microblogging effectively. Since these are still not common attributes of many corporate social media projects, it will not catch on everywhere.

As for Twitter, it has become so widely adopted that it has become fashionable to deride it, a sure sign of a breakthrough. I still Tweet and monitor what people are saying but usually find that I get better feedback and comments from what I post on Facebook, perhaps because that circle of people is more restricted than the Twitter megaphone. Twitter still has to prove that it can make real money, but I am confident that it will, real soon now. Given its growing role in society and popular culture, this is getting easier not harder as time passes

Perhaps the worst effect of Twitter is the preponderance of Tw-words it has spawned in the spirit of bad puns. Please see the title of this post as ironic. Please.

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.

Do you think it was a bad business decision for Google to acquire YouTube, in terms of the low revenue (or losses) the video site generates?

Outside of their core advertising-based products, speculating about Google’s business model is always a tricky thing to do. They don’t say much about their plans, and don’t seem to mind losing money on individual businesses if they think (for whatever reason) that it will make sense eventually. With so much money flowing into Google from advertising sales, this is an easier position to take than for many companies.

Google is in a position relative to the Internet similar to where Intel was several years ago with general computing. Intel figured that if people use computers more, they will buy more microchips, most of them from Intel. So they made a lot of investments (e.g. in games, virtual reality, 3D design, video) that didn’t contribute money directly to their bottom line, but increased the general usage level of personal computing. For Google, the more people use the Internet, the more they use Google services like search and the other products they offer. Youtube attracts lots of traffic, so it increases total Internet usage, which eventually — somehow — is good for Google.

Also, Youtube has become the place to put videos and to look for videos, making it more like a platform than just another service. This will open up more possibilities, like licensing deals, tie-ins with television and music companies, libraries, etc. Microsoft has shown with Windows how good it is for a business to control a platform. Google may not have figured out how to build a business (at least publicly), but there are lots of possibilities. Google is comfortable with short term uncertainty if they see a large long term advantage, something else that cannot be said about very many companies. 

It seems that being popular is not always enough for success as a business. Is that so? I’m asking because of Twitter and other free services…

Popularity alone has never been enough to be successful as a business. What is new now is that business success is not necessary to be a success, at least in the short term. Twitter has enough money and is well on the way to becoming a crucial platform. Once they are there, there are plenty of ways to build a business. The short term things they could do to get revenue now (advertising, premium accounts, selling highly desired user names) would get in the way of becoming a platform, which is where the real opportunity is. They don’t want to do anything which would discourage people from using it, and I think that is very clever. I talked about Twitter’s business model on this blog earlier.

What formulas are there to make these services profitable, considering
the big audience they have?

Really, I see two main ways:

1. Become a platform like Youtube and Twitter are doing. I discussed the monetization schemes for Twitter on my blog.

2. For the other free sites that won’t become an unmissable platform, the standard way to monetize is either by advertising or premium services. Consumer sites which attract enough visitors can build a nice business on advertising, but most are unlikely to really break through and be big successes. It could pay the rent and some reasonable salaries, but not buy a private jet. The problem with advertising is that the big get bigger; people advertise on the most popular sites, so that if a site starts to become popular it quickly pulls ahead of the others. The Long Tail for the less popular sites leaves a nice, but not great business.

Premium services attract payment from users who like the service, and are willing to pay for more features or availability. So-called “freemium” sites combine the two, providing free services (sometimes supported by advertising) with limitations, and then paid premium services for those willing to pay.

I started to collect some of the best practices we have found to use in a research note, but since not many of our customers organize conferences like this, I figured it would have limited relevance. That’s what blogs are for.

Best practices for tweeting at events

A few weeks before the event, start tweeting about the event using the #hashtag you want to use. That establishes the hashtag so that you don’t have people trying all kinds of different ones. At Garter, we have established the convention of using #gartner plus a two or three letter abbreviation for each conference. For example, the upcoming Symposium events will use #gartnersym while #GartnerPCC was used for the Portal, Content and Collaboration conferences. We don’t differentiate the location or year in the hashtag, since it is kind of fun to see these as a rolling event across time and space.

Use Tweetdeck or some other client app to monitor mentions of the event’s hashtag. You can set up a search panel that automatically displays new tweets with that text.

If someone says something cool, retweet it.

During the keynote or sessions you can see, quote what is interesting, and always add the hashtag

Tweet any interesting trends or non-confidential insights from customers.

If someone complains about something minor, respond to them (too cold in the meeting rooms, where is the veggie lunch…)

If someone has a major complaint or wants to challenge what is said in a presentation, engage them if you feel like it, but don’t let the discussion descend into a long argument.

Publicize events happening on the show floor, mention room changes or extra sessions, encourage people to sign up for 1on1s, especially if they are filling up.

Organize a tweetup: meet other Twitterers at a certain time, preferably when there is an open bar. It’s a nice way to put faces to @names.

Consider displaying a rolling list of tweets on a display in the hallways.

Displaying tweets during a presentation is trickier. It works in some situations where the speaker is prepared for it, but it can be very distracting to be reading with one eye while trying to say cogent things delivered in an engaging way. If a non-speaker is moderating the session or will be posing questions, they should monitor the twitter stream for comments or questions.

Save some of the best Tweets and display them in the locknote, if there is one, or collect them in a blog post

Look here for more tips on live tweeting.

As always, these conferences are amazingly energizing for analysts, and I hope for the participants as well. Hearing what people are up to and how they are using the technologies we talk about helps keep our research from being too abstract. External speakers like Edward deBono (the father of lateral thinking) and Chris Thorpe of the Guardian (who described how they built groundbreaking crowdsourcing initiatives like Investigate Your MP’s Expenses in a few days using almost no money) were inspiring as well as entertaining.

Dr. de Bono plans to autograph the stack of transparencies he used during his presentation and auction them for charity. See www.debonosociety.com for details.

As well as speaking and talking to clients, this year I took on an additional role as Twitter ambassador. I had planned to tweet highlights and notable quotes using the #gartnerpcc hashtag,but pulled back when I saw that other participants were already tweeting away. In all, we had about 600 tweets, which is quite a bit for or events. There was enough traffic that followers from Canada, the US and Korea were able to get an idea of what was going on without making the trip to London.

Many of the tweets repeated quotes that caught people’s attention. Some examples:

More than 50% of large ecm projects fail if less than 6 months are spent on vendor choice + planning Tony Bell (sic) @ #gartnerpcc

“You shouldn’t need training on tools: who took Facebook training? who’s Myspace certified?” – Deb Logan #gartnerpcc nicely put, again

Others commented on what the analysts were saying.

Unified comms can lead to clashes between those who run the phone/data netwowrks & those who want to innovate on it #gartnerpcc Surely not!

Social networking analysis very interesting, but has some interesting cultural issues. Definite Big Brother overtones #gartnerpcc

Inevitably, some some sessions didn’t go down as well, and Twitterers let us know it.

#gartnerPCC That session with the countdown questions was a train wreck. Sorry Deb, keep the day job.

Ironically, Dilbert had a cartoon that same day which sums up how analysts feel when someone criticizes the presentations they’ve poured their souls into.

I happen to know that the person who sent that last tweet knows Deb Logan quite well, and did not intend it to be as harsh as it might sound.

Thanks to all who contributed to the event IRL and on Twitter. All of the Tweets are accessible in this archive with a representative word cloud here.

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.

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.

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.

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.