I resisted getting an iPad when they first came out, because I figured the second edition would be much better. The lack of a camera was a particular drawback, since this is such a perfect form factor for video conferencing. As Apple gets more and more controlling and arrogant (App Store policies, newspaper subscriptions,…), I wasn’t sure I wanted to go down that road.

But the iPad 2 convinced me. It is better in enough areas to convince me to get one. Not one, but TWO cameras. I was ready. They would soon become available in Europe (although about $220 more expensive than one bought in the US), but I figured I could pick one up during a trip to California this week.

Sadly, no.

I saw the news reports of low stocks in stores, and inquired about my chances on twitter. They were not encouraging. Apparently, to score one of these things, I should go to an Apple retail store at 5:00 am and wait in line until the store opened at 10:00 (maybe 9:00) to get one of the few devices dribbling out. Or check out a long list of inventory web sites at other retailers, followed by phone calls to plan out a strategy.

I don’t think so. Yes, I want one, but not THAT badly. For awhile, I will have to content myself reading what colleagues say about this phenomenon. I would not put it past Apple to be orchestrating this scarcity to increase the buzz, and I don’t want to encourage that kind of behavior. I might still get one, but not until I can avoid going to fanatical lengths to get one.

I see a lot of vendor briefings as an analyst. A disturbing number of them go wrong. I cannot count how many times I heard the phrase “Haven’t seen that before…” or “Can you see anything?” or “It worked this morning.” My favourite is “We just released a new build, and it might not be completely stable,” as the software crumbles into a smouldering heap of bits. 

Or worse. Just this week, a very proud web conferencing vendor wanted to show me their flashy new version. It did look good, until it crashed my machine with a Blue Screen of Death, the first one of those I have seen in several years. That day also saw the second and third time I saw it, until we finally gave up.

I’m not sure why, but I am prepared to believe it is my fault somehow. I spend a lot of time in the mountains, which makes for sometimes dodgy Internet connections. Maybe that is what does it.

Maybe its just my karma. Whatever the reason, I am sorry. If I could make it stop, I would.

Last week’s announcement that Mark Zuckerberg is Time magazine’s “person of the year” for 2010 put the issue in perspective. Many were aghast at this perceived slight of Wikileaks’s Julian Assange, but I tend to agree with it.

Too many years ago, I did a customized undergraduate college degree in the Philosophy of Journalism, so I probably should have some deeper opinions about the issues Wikileaks raises. When I was thinking about journalism in the early ‘80s, I was mostly considering differences between the Soviet model of journalism and how it compared to Western ideas. Like so many projects studying anything having to do with the Soviet Union, all that work has since become utterly obsolete and almost completely irrelevant.

Now I spend more time thinking about how enterprises use social software, an endeavour which might remain relevant for a bit longer. The Wikileaks affair actually does not have much to do with social media, or at least it shouldn’t. Despite its name, Wikileaks does not have much to do with technologies like social networking, discussion boards, or even wikis. The organization uses fancy security and anonymization techniques to keep their web sites up and protect contributors, but there isn’t much social about what they do in the way that Wikipedia or Yelp are social.

The rise of internet-mediated social interactions has had a profound influence on how we work, play, and interact as humans. Without downplaying the effect that Wikileaks will have on politics, journalism, and potentially business (if Assange’s threat/promise to release controversial banking documents comes to pass), the influence of social software goes much further. While not the only driver, Facebook is the public face of this influence.

So for once, I agree with Time. It doesn’t happen often.

I fear that an unavoidable, but unfortunate result of the furor around the Wikileaks disclosures will be an increased desire to lock down conversations and restrict communication at both commercial and government organizations. It will be used as a reason to block access to social media sites, stop sharing information, and treat many who want to collaborate widely with suspicion. After a period where sharing and access were generally encouraged, I fear that the pendulum will swing too far back the other way. This inevitable reaction is unfortunate from a social media perspective because encouraging participation is one of the biggest challenges I find organizations facing. As social software gains in maturity, usage grows beyond the pioneers who are naturally attracted to the technologies and interacting that way. After the pioneers, the settlers need encouragement. Clamping down amid an atmosphere of fear is not conducive to encouraging participation.

This would not be the first time that a desire for one thing triggered the opposite. When deciding on steps to take post-Wikileaks, I really hope that the familiar relationship between babies and bath water does not get forgotten.

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

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

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

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

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

The new brand name is the most striking part of this announcement. BPOS never really tripped off the tongue and always kind of felt like a code name. Office 365 as a major Microsoft brand will be a surprise to a certain UK office supply company, but will quickly become associated with Microsoft’s cloud collaboration suite. I actually was surprised at how Microsoft was able to keep this new brand name a pretty good secret until the unveiling. I was also surprised that the web site was not scheduled to be available until 3 1/2 hours after the launch event, leading to avoidable snarky Twitter comments.

Inevitably, there will be fun poked at the new moniker. Do I really want to be in the Office 365 days per year? What happens in leap years (Microsoft gives you a day off once every four years). I honestly don’t think that it would be possible to come up with anything that would not have some kind of downside, and it certainly is better than BPOS or some other anodyne acronym.

The second big news is that in addition to Exchange, SharePoint and Lync (OCS), Office 365 will also include Microsoft Office applications, delivered either in the browser or running from the desktop. While Microsoft naturally emphasizes the productivity benefits integration with the rest of the products will bring, many corporate buyers will be hunched over their calculators figuring out how the new possibilities will affect what they pay for Microsoft Office products. With prices ranging from $2 to $27 per user per month, it won’t be simple to do the maths.

The most important indication from this announcement would be if Microsoft’s design focus is really shifting to the Cloud. Yes, this has been the stated direction for some time, but it has been hard to defend when new functionality that was available in on premise products a year ago won’t make it to the cloud products until sometime next year. If Microsoft starts introducing new functionality first in its cloud products, that will be a major step towards proving that Microsoft is “all in” for the cloud, as Steve Ballmer keeps saying.

While five cities in five days is a quick pace, it’s not out of the ordinary. I really enjoy these tours. As well as eating some great food, seeing (briefly) some nice places (the train trip from Zurich to Milan is stunning), I get a chance to talk to lots of people about what they are doing. It is always a great source of research, as I hear about the questions people are asking.

Here are the top three questions that I heard on this trip:

• How do we introduce social software into a skeptical organization?
  Although social media is hot, it ain’t hot everywhere.Some organizations are more conservative, or have been around for a very long time and aren’t too eager to adopt new technologies. In these cases, people won’t use it because it is cool or because Gartner says they should.
• Should we start our own customer community or build onto one that already exists?
  After hearing all the reasons why customer communities are good for you, this issue comes from those who have not yet really started. They face the dilemma of going where their customers already are (like on Facebook or a more specialized site), or trying to draw them to a site associated directly with their own brand.
• How do we handle privacy? Our users and customers find this stuff creepy.
  This is a huge issue in Germany, where attitudes towards personal and professional privacy are very highly developed, but was a hot issue across Europe this tour. Importantly, the questions were not about legal restrictions and requirements on privacy, but about how social media makes people feel. Many are not comfortable with sharing too much in their professional lives, and social techniques make them uneasy.

I’ve got some ideas about how to answer these questions, and will work them out in formal research notes in the coming weeks. I also will be talking about some of these (especially the first one) at Gartner Symposium in Cannes. Carol Rozwell will cover this in Orlando. There are also sessions on privacy in Europe, and social CRM.

But usually, creepiness is all about perception and how a policy, feature, or incident makes people feel. There is no ISO standard for degrees of creepiness that everyone can agree on. That makes it hard  for many technology suppliers to get their heads around. They are accustomed to making powerful tools that can do amazing things. Something as squishy as “how people feel” doesn’t fit into their engineering plans.

That feeling is not rational, but triggered by deep, unexplainable ur-reactions. I saw that myself when a supermarket I visit started using big monitors that display every item I bought as I went through checkout. Intellectually, I know that anyone can look over my shoulder and see what is on the rolling band. Still, it felt super-creepy to see all my purchases displayed on a big screen for all to see. I must not have been the only one; that experiment didn’t last long.

This problem has come up a couple times when talking to vendors promoting social network analysis (SNA). A tool to map the real communication lines and understand who collaborates with whom is undeniably a powerful tool, one that many companies can profit from. However, describe SNA as “our system will snuffle around in your email, read all the documents you create, and analyze everything you post on the intranet and Internet so that we know more about how the organization works” and you can feel the anti-creepiness hackles rise. Explaining that only automated algorithms will read the email (no people) and that subjects can preview and edit the analyses generated can help, but not really. The feeling of creepiness persists.

Different situations and places also bring different attitudes. Instant messaging and presence are good bellwethers. It is part of the standard infrastructure and work process in may organizations, while in others, employees rebel at the thought that their bosses can monitor when they are at their desk from a distance. What is a useful and even necessary communications tool to most is as bad as hanging surveillance cameras in the bathroom would be to others. Anecdotally, Germans seem to be especially sensitive to these issues. Hundreds of thousands of people in Germany reportedly find seeing their house on Google Streetview too creepy to bear.

Creepiness is also impossible to defend against. The second a company or a person starts to explain why what they have done is not creepy, it already ipso facto becomes creepy.

Google recently made the news with a creepy story of a Google employee who was fired after he used his position as an engineer to read the email, chat logs and other private information of some kids he had met IRL. While creepiness is often hard to define, everything about this incident was creepy. The facts of the breach itself, the pictures of the offending employee, the fact that children were involved, and the realization that quite a few Google employees can apparently dip into our private communications — all of this adds up to a huge bout of creepiness.

There is not much that Google could do in this instance, except fire the creepy guy and hope that the incident blows over. It looks like that will happen, but I expect the overall issue of creepiness will not go away so easily.

I’m an analyst, so I love getting attention, but some kinds of attention are tricky. Clint Boulton, a journalist at eWeek.com, summarized and commented on what I had to say in a slideshow on eWeek.com entitled Cloud Computing: Microsoft’s Stealth Attack in Enterprise Social Software. I have been quoted by Clint before, and have a lot of respect for his insights. I generally agree with most of what he says in this analysis as well, except for some of the emphasis. Only one slide in the webinar concentrated on Microsoft, while the title of the article could make it look like I spent an hour talking about Microsoft. Given the hoopla Microsoft has been raising about SharePoint and its renewed social software features, I wouldn’t really characterize it as a “sneak attack” either.

To be clear: I am not complaining about being misquoted or misrepresented in this article. That has happened to me in the past, so I know what it is like. It’s disconcerting to see my words summarized in a way I don’t completely recognize though.

By the way, I will be talking about similar topics with updated content at Gartner’s PCC Conference in London next month and Cannes Symposium in November.

I was excited by the original video clip that introduced Wave. It was unlike anything I had ever seen before, and I couldn’t wait to get an invite. Once I got one, my reaction was… “Huh? Now what?” Like most people who tried it, I never really got into it. I felt kind of guilty, since I never really devoted that much time to figuring it out. I thought I would have plenty of time to do so once the kinks were worked out. But alas. After about a year, Google announced that they will put no more development effort into it, essentially dooming it as a product.

Google certainly has the right to kill off its projects. It was still in Google Labs (not even Beta), and no one had paid for it. But the way that Google did this is unsettling. If I had spent a lot of time or money incorporating Wave into how I work, I would feel pretty bad after someone pointed out that blog post to me. Just imagine: you have to follow a specific blog page to find out that the product you have built a business around, or used every day is doomed. . If I were a partner who had spent money developing products around Wave, I  would feel even worse. Let down. Adrift. Angry. Certainly, I would think twice about doing business around Google technologies again. Actually, I wouldn’t think twice; I would never do it again.

I love how startups innovate. That means taking risks, which is to be applauded. But when do they stop being startups and when do the risks need to get smaller? I think that we have reached that point with Google now. It wants to be an enterprise player, so it needs to act like one. That means developing and communicating long term technology roadmaps that developers and enterprises can count on. Some think that this kind of flexibility and willingness to act quickly is a good thing. So do I, for small startups. Not for high profile products from grown-up companies. Google was still pushing Wave to enterprises at an event about two months ago. Even today, there is nothing on the Wave inbox page or the Wave help page or the official Wave blog page to indicate it is a dead product walking. Partners and customers are right to expect more. Google has made significant progress towards becoming a more credible technology partner and enterprise supplier. This episode is certainly a step backwards, however.