Picking up someone else’s smartphone feels like entering a strange world, where everything is familiar… but creepily wrong. It has learned all about someone else, whose preferences inevitably just feel doofy. I long to get back to my own device, which has the email icon in the right place, and knows what to do with copies of sent emails. It feels like coming home. Even though my laptop is slowing down and crashes every now and then, I resist reinstalling the image, even though I know that make everything faster and more stable. I hate the idea of having to teach it all about me again; what pictures I like on the desktop, what web sites I go to. All the things I do without thinking, I would have to think about again. 

Sometimes this familiarity absolutely scares the bejeebers out of me.

Not because I am afraid that my laptop will learn too much about me, or become sentient and try to take my place. The stupid thing goes into a total panic if I change printers without telling it. I don’t feel threatened. But I am scared that I will come to depend on it knowing me so well that I will do something stupid. For every email address that auto-completes, every password that my browser remembers for me, I feel myself getting a little more dependent and looser. I let my system take care of the small things so that I can think of bigger stuff (I tell myself). But what if the little things aren’t so little anymore?

I got to thinking about how UIs are evolving when I read about new cars coming on the market that can park themselves. Letting a car steer itself into a space will take some getting used to, but I can see how this could be considered a little thing. Engineers are also experimenting with cars that will drive themselves, or at least steer themselves on the highway. That seems like a bit of a bigger deal, but I could get used to that. I could make jokes about Blue Screens of Death, or how unreliable software is, but that doesn’t really concern me. I am more worried about me.

Once I get used to my car steering itself, I expect cars to do that. That will be the new normal for how cars work, just like I expect browsers to know that when I type “nyt” I actually mean http//:www.nytimes.com. When I use another system that doesn’t do that, I have a small “what the…?” moment until I remember that I am not “home” and adjust.

But once I get used to my car steering on the highway, someday I know that I will get in a rental car, and it won’t be so smart. This new normal will lead to disaster, when it becomes too normal. My car already decides when to turn on the headlights, how to keep the inside temperature at 19 C, when it’s raining enough to turn on the wipers, and when it wants to go to the garage. I have come to expect that cars have central door locking. That can lead to an unpleasant surprise with some rentals, but nothing as bad as assuming that my car will keep me from bashing into the car ahead of me.

It’s great that these things are looking out for me, but I hope that I still remember to look out.

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.

Instead, I want to talk about my anti-resolutions for 2010.They are “anti” in a couple different ways. The main one is that these are not things that I intend to do, but stuff that I hope that other people will do. That is much easier.This is also what analysts usually do; we rarely do stuff, but we comment a lot on what other people or organizations should do. 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. Vendors should stop confusing “You can use it to do that” with “We designed it to do that”
   Maybe it’s because I am working on a new magic quadrant (for “Externally-facing Social Software Platforms”), but I’m growing weary of vendors who think because a feature can conceivably be (mis)used to fill a need, that they should be considered just as much as a product specifically designed to meet a particular set of requirements.

   You can use a heavy duty flashlight to hammer in a nail (I know; I’ve done it), but that doesn’t mean that a flashlight should be considered part of the hammer market.

2. Organizational planners should stop thinking that participation in social media is enough.
   Don’t get me wrong; I think participation is wonderful. Participation, (or at least monitoring if that’s all that you can swing at the moment) in communities and broader social conversations is the best place to start.

   But merely participating cannot be the end goal. You need to understand what you realistically can get from the community, and what you can contribute, with emphasis on the latter. If you contribute well, you have a much better chance of benefiting at some point.

3. More enterprises will look beyond SharePoint
   I have nothing against Microsoft SharePoint. It is good at serving several needs, and just fine for addressing many others. But there are plenty of other good products out there, doing innovative things. In too many cases, SharePoint has become the default answer no matter what the question. Rather than asking “How can I use SharePoint to do X” most of the time, a better question would be “How can I do Y” or even “What should be the role of SharePoint in supporting my efforts to achieve Z?”
4. Vendors should stop thinking that it is the analysts’ job to promote their product.
   I shouldn’t be, but I’m regularly surprised and depressed at how often this comes up. The biggest part of my job is to help end user customers make better decisions, and to help vendor customers develop better products and marketing strategies. I am not a direct part of those marketing efforts, however.

   I talk about vendors and products a lot, but not because the vendor is a client, or because they took the trouble to brief me. I realize that briefings take time and effort, and appreciate it when vendors invest their time in talking to me. But neither that nor being a client creates an obligation to promote a product.

5. Please don’t blithely assume that analysts are scuzzballs.
   Again I shouldn’t be, but I am often unpleasantly surprised at the ease with which some people assume that analysts are unethical, sleazy, scumbags who do nothing unless bribed. I have no problem with people disagreeing or challenging judgements, but I am as insulted as Tom is by offhand, unsupported assumptions that question my integrity. Luckily, I have enough customers who seem to value the advice which my colleagues and I provide. If we were really as scuzzy as some people seem to think, no one would put any weight in what we have to say.

   I can’t speak for the entire industry or even all of Gartner, but I know that for a fact that I have never been asked to favour a vendor client over non-clients in any research I have done. Most of the time, I don’t even know for sure which ones are clients. We spend a great deal of time discussing how to keep our independence, and none on how to reward paying clients. In the last month, I had two situations where I know that Gartner lost revenue because a vendor client expected their customer relationship should deliver them more mentions in research notes and conference presentations and better ratings (see #4). We showed no hesitation in making clear that this is not the way we work.

6. Please don’t let the Apple people get pitted against the Android/ChromeOS folks
   I suspect that the time is soon coming when we we will see “I’m a Mac, and I’m a ChromeOS” ads, or at least spoof videos along the lines of Apple’s ads making fun of PCs. Since I am more of a PC/Blackberry type, most of this will pass me by, like when the cool kids in high school  split along a strict Michael Jackson/ZZ Top divide (I was more of a Joe Jackson fan).

   I already find most Mac vs. PC discussions irritating (they both work, they both have problems, IMHO). But a split like this will inevitably encourage the disturbing trend that splits the world into camps that generally either talk past each other, or shout at each other. There’s enough of that in politics; let’s try to avoid it in tech where we can.

7. No one will “Reply all” to more than ten people.
   Yeah, that would be nice.

As for last year’s anti-resolutions, as I expected not many of them came to be, or stopped being as the case may be. A little bit of progress on numbers 7 , 8 and 9, but not much. However, this year’s list only has 7 items instead of 10, so I suppose that is close enough to good news to be worth celebrating.

Happy new year to everyone.

While walking the dog (when I do most of my thinking), I started to think about how it could go wrong and thought of this format as a way to illustrate it. I don’t think it was ever Facebook’s intention to make this possible. They have made several missteps, but I don’t think that they are evil. But over time, things change, and other people might not be so scrupulous.

The situation has also been mooted by Facebook’s climbdown after the kerfuffle caused by the change, but I like the idea so I wrote the blog anyway. The main message is something that we, and most social media observers have been saying for some time: Don’t post anything on a social media site that you wouldn’t want your mother, potential employer or a policeman to see.

Facebook II Mines IP as New Business Model

18 February, 2025

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook II, a company launched last month by IP Miners LLC, has announced the auction of photos and other content which originally belonged to Facebook, the once-popular social media site which closed its doors in February 2015 after its plan to sell marketing data based on its users’ Christmas buying intentions fell flat. Facebook II has contacted people who are depicted in photos from the old Facebook site with offers to sell them the rights to those digital photos. Several political candidates, high profile fundamentalist preachers, major league baseball players and prominent actors and models have reported being approached. The offer letter says that if they do not respond, the pictures will be auctioned to the highest bidder.

Facebook was extremely popular as a site where individuals could post pictures and share them with friends. In order to make it legally possible to do this sharing, Facebook retains the rights to all content posted on the site. Many people posted potentially embarrassing or incriminating photos without thinking of the consequences of them becoming widely available, even years later. While the original Facebook site did its best to fulfill the spirit of sharing and provide individual users with control over their content, Facebook II does not feel any obligation to respect those commitments. “What we are doing is perfectly legal,” said IP Miners CEO Nathaniel Moorveld. “People knowingly transferred rights when they used the system. We are providing a public service by offering to sell them their pictures back.”

IP Miners originally focused on buying obscure patents from defunct companies and pursuing technology companies who infringed on those patents. In their best-known case, they sued 400 software companies in 2019 for infringement of a 1953 patent covering “Method for Displaying of Textual information on Television Screens” arguing that it covered any situation where text was displayed on a screen. Litigation to invalidate that patent continues, but 120 companies have settled the suit for undisclosed amounts. IP Miners bought Facebook’s intellectual property from the bankruptcy administrator in 2020.

Moorveld expects this new source of revenue to be even more lucrative than the portfolio of patents the company has acquired. “This is a natural next step in the development of our company and its business model. Facebook I had millions of users, but couldn’t find a way to monetize all that activity,” Moorveld said.  “If there is one thing we know how to do, it’s monetizing.”

Instead, I want to talk about 10 anti-resolutions for 2009. They are anti in a couple different ways. The main one is that these are not things that I intend to do, but stuff that I hope that other people will do. I find that a lot easier. It’s also generally what analysts do; we rarely do stuff, but we comment a lot on what others should do. Most them are also anti because they describe something that I hope won’t happen anymore 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. Enterprises will stop fixating on social software gew gaws and competitive product horse races and put energy into achieving collaboration effectiveness.
   I talk with many customers who are primarily interested in what new features vendors have packed into their products, or the competitive position between a group of vendors, all of whom are viable and could meet their needs. These things are surely interesting and sometimes important, but rarely are they the main drivers for success.  Instead, focus on the best ways to work together and what kinds of input or feedback will help you, your colleagues or your customers be more effective. Look for the bottlenecks that kill productivity. Find the spots where conflict and arguments arise; that is usually where more collaboration will help. Comparing features and competition can be fun, but these activities will be far more effective.
2. Vendors will lessen their emphasis on new features and functionality, and help their customers get stuff done.
   It’s not just the enterprises that need to shift; vendors have their part to play. Too many vendors still consider their job is done when the software is delivered, at least until they have to convince the customer to upgrade to the next version. Making sure customers use the current version effectively is far more useful than pushing out another 150 APIs or increasing the number of themes from 20 to 100.
3. Vendors will get realistic about their positions.
   Analysts spend a lot of time arguing with vendors. Sometimes it is because we are wrong. Often it is because we say things that they know are true, but really, really don’t want us to say publicly. I can understand this; I was a vendor once, and it is never pleasant when people say bad things about you. But I would rather put my energy into other things, so I hope that some of them would look at their strengths and weaknesses more realistically.
4. Security and social software people will stop talking past each other.
   I have seen too many entrenched positions among the social software and security constituencies in my clients, the vendor community and even between analysts. Social software people must not assume that there are no risks and all security measures stem from paranoia and are unreasonable restrictions to be circumvented. Security people must not assume that social software has no business value therefore no risks are acceptable. They need to talk to each other rather than past each other.
5. Network communications and collaboration people will stop fighting.
   Market shifts cause tension for vendors and among the customers they server. As traditional collaboration vendors (like Microsoft) offer voice services and traditional communications vendors (like Cisco) start to offer collaboration products, the different IT departments aligned with these areas are bumping up against each other. Like with security, these groups need to stop talking past each other, and talk to each other.
6. Vendors will stop pitting different user constituencies against each other.
   Some vendors find an advantage in encouraging tension between their customers’ departments. I hate that. I hope it stops. 
7. There will be effective help managing overlapping life and work personas
   The lines between work and private activities have been blurring for some time. The rise of social media is about to obliterate what distinctions still remain. While I keep this Gartner blog separate from my private blog, I use Twitter to track and broadcast both private and business ideas, which makes me distinctly uncomfortable sometimes. Better help in maintaining the differences that need to remain will become much more important in 2009.
8. There will be more help managing personas in general.
   Personas and the tools to manage them should become big in 2009. Users need to be able to control easily and transparently the roles they are acting in, whether private or professional, buyer or seller, commenter or writer, parent or child, producer or consumer, and on and on. The current tools are way to rudimentary.
9. Video will stop being the Next Big Thing and finally become the Current Big Thing.
   Videoconferencing has been the The Next Big Thing since the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, which saw the first video phone.  In almost 45 years, it has stubbornly refused to become the current big thing, however. Room-based video systems are unwieldy and disruptive. Some companies use them effectively, but I cannot begin to count how many meeting rooms I have been in where the video equipment sits in the corner with a tangle of connectors and cables sitting on top of it. Cheap desktop webcams and high end telepresence systems are making video more accessible and a much better experience respectively. The trouble is that most people want low cost AND great quality. It would be nice if those came together in 2009.
   

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10. No one will “Reply all” to more than ten people.
    Yeah, that would be nice.

The last reason these are anti-resolutions is that I don’t really think that any of them will happen in 2009. We will make progress on some of them, but none of them will be fully achieved, which is a good thing.  That leaves something for analysts like me to write about in 2009, and then some.