That isolated word comes to a screeching halt when the last session ends. Physically, the world inside the conference room disappears in a few hours. Workers start tearing down the show floor and some of the conference area even while the last presentations are being delivered. By early afternoon, the site doesn’t look the world we’ve come to know so well for the last four days. From having every minute planned and parceled out, having two hours with nothing specific to do before my train leaves is an odd experience. That’s when I take the chance to stare off into space for a bit. The view from the Croisette is really quite nice, it turns out.

Aside from the normal questions about vendors and best practices, I was surprised by the number of organizations looking to take advantage of new vendor dynamics to shake up the hold that they perceive that Microsoft and to a lesser extent IBM has over their collaboration strategies. They welcome the advantages of integrated offerings and upgrades with more functionality, but dislike the idea that they have no choice but to stay with their incumbent vendors. I think the traditional titans could be in for a surprise when they see the number of organizations seriously looking at Cloud computing as a way to shake up existing relationships, and taking steps to understand which parts of their collaboration lineup can be commoditized and federated.

As conference chair again this year, it was gratifying to see that some of the changes we made this year went well. We continue to see more senior executive attendees, which is reflected in the CIO track. We dramatically increased the number of workshops and roundtables, most of which were well-attended. Several analysts and about 20 attendees were actively tweeting, with about 200 messages per day. Scheduling the analyst keynote on Monday afternoon to give attendees the option of arriving on Monday morning seemed to go over well. The stormy weather on Monday morning was not very welcome, but there’s not a lot we can do about that.

Right now, several analysts are on their way to Tokyo for the Japanese Symposium. I have started the trip to Australia for the event there to be held next week. I expect these to be just as intense.

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.

Chip architectures were also popular points of discussion. At one point, I was able to sound reasonably informed about RISC architectures, multithreading and other stuff that seems pretty arcane to me now. Even then in the early 1990s, it all seemed a waste. Why so much attention to chips and operating systems? That should be far too low a level for most people to be worried about. It’s like spending hours discussing the type of nails and bricks used to build a house, while ignoring the room layout, window placement or paint color. I would think that applications and what end users see would be far more important than the details of the innards of the machines they run on.

Now, most people don’t worry about chips too much, unless you really like that sort of thing (and I am oh so glad that there are people who do, so I don’t have to). But we still seem obsessed with operating systems. Either because they are ho-hum (Windows Vista), might be less ho-hum (Windows 7), supposedly just work (MacOS X — although I disagree), or just sound really cool (Google ChromeOS).

Google has unleashed a flood of commentary and speculation by saying that it is thinking about a new PC operating system built around the Chrome browser. I will let my colleagues debate what this really means. But this all makes me a little sad. I thought that obsessing about an OS in 1993 was depressing; why are we still doing it in 2009? Next, I fear we will re-open the big-endian/little-endian compiler debate. Isn’t it much more important what we do with these operating systems? I was impressed with the thinking behind Google Wave because it shows what can be done with the clever technology under the hood. The thought of having another OS that gets in the way of what I want to do grinds down my soul like a bad third grade teacher.

I realize that operating systems and even chips are important. They make it possible to do the cool things that we can imagine. But sewers, roads, electrical grids and payment systems are important too without too much of the population having to pay too much attention to them. I will pay my share of what it costs to keep them going, but please don’t make me think about them; I have other things to do. That is how I want to think about operating systems; get out of the way and let me think about something really useful, and where I can make a difference, however small.

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.

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.