The most striking observation, although not unexpected, was that they looked at corporate blogging in very different ways, depending on their industry and what they want to achieve. One participant from a broadcasting company was exploring how to weave blogs through their normal activities. Blogs are well on their way to becoming yet another channel they use to communicate the news they collect.

A pharmaceutical company had very different concerns, mainly concerning compliance and control issues. Their regulated industry put very different demands on how to blog. Finally, a financial services company was looking at various aspects, including communicating with customers as well as encouraging internal exchanges. Very different issues arise depending on what the enterprise wants to achieve with their blogging initiatives. All agreed that the technical issues were not really a big problem anymore. They had access to more than enough blogging technology, at least from an EA perspective.

One of the more interesting issues raised by everyone at the session has to do with managing the different personas that people inhabit every day. When someone blogs publicly, are they writing for themselves, or as a representative of the company? Even on an ostensibly private blog, it can be difficult to separate the professional and the private. Different employment relationships muddy the waters as well. When a freelancer or part time employee says something, does it matter less than when employees say it? The level of influence the enterprise will need to assert over these sometimes private/usually professional postings will differ by person, industry, role and company.

I like coming to these conferences which are not 100% in my coverage area, because the participants often have a different perspective than the customers I commonly talk with. Enterprise architects often deal with collaboration issues, but they also usually have a broader brief. The wider field of operations they deal with often delivers different views. Rather than adoption or technical issues, they are asking how it affects the enterprise as a whole, and what policies and plans to put in place.

#GartnerPCC picks up tomorrow. I’m also looking forward to going deeper into these issues with collaboration practitioners.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

We will be publishing formal research on the announcements, but the big news this year is Lotuslive, a real cloud-based platform for Lotus products. Other highlights include Blackberry-RIM integration, SAP integration called Alloy to counter Duet and other integration plugins for LinkedIn and Skype and several upgrades to existing products.

I must admit that the level of energy is also a bit bewildering. The atmosphere at Lotusphere is somewhere between a summer camp for geeks and a rock concert. Even if it is in January, the weather in Orlando usually feels like summer in Amsterdam. I am accustomed to a bit of cynicism or at least skepticism when it comes to vendors, but any of that is hard to find here. Standing room only crowds, cheering, enthusiastic Karaoke nights and even goofy SpeedGeek events are evidence of enthusiastic followers.

This sentiment has certainly changed from when I first started coming to these events about ten years ago. In those dark days, the Lotus strategy was cloudy and confusing, and participants were worrying about their choices and their careers. Now, while Lotus has trouble with formidable competitors with Microsoft, Google and a host of collaboration and social software start-ups, few can question IBM’s commitment to the product line. They are investing in innovation, and it shows.

I am not sure that I believe all of the rah rah purporting to show that Lotus is defeating all others. I regularly speak with big Lotus shops switching to Exchange, but almost never any going the other way. But it’s also clear that reports of Notes’s demise have been premature. That’s good. I like competition. Markets need it, users like it, and innovation requires it.