Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Google Acquires Jotspot

UPDATE: We are offering to help Jotspot customers get out of a spot.

My most sincere congratulations to Joe, Graham, Ken and the Jotspot team with their acquisition by Google.  It has been great competing with you.

This is another great validation of the category we helped start. While Jot took their product in a different direction, focusing on SMBs, being a proprietary development platform and developing other apps, we chose to focus specifically on being the open, best-of-breed wiki. With a different path, Jot too has made good contributions for awareness of the wiki way.

Despite their official FAQ, Socialtext has recently reaped the benefits of the discontinuation of their Enterprise product, JotBox, with customer migrations to the Socialtext Appliance.  Today Socialtext is the only proven wiki Appliance solution available in the market.  Since Socialtext 2.0, I can decidedly say we have the simplest and easiest to use wiki in the market, whether Appliance, Hosted or Open Source.

This acquisition will further commoditize the low end of the market.  Something we have  encouraged with our Open Source versions of both Socialtext and SocialCalc.

Again, congrats, it is a real treat.   

Le Web 3

Saturday I bummed around Palo Alto with Loic Le Meur.  A good friend and angel investor in Socialtext, we talked tech and politics over sushi and Peet's coffee.  He made a videoblog with his mobile phone, revealing my outer dork.

Loic is getting ready to host LeWeb3 in Paris on December 11th and 12th.  Since the first Les Blogs, it has grown into perhaps the leading social software event in Europe.  Loic expects 1,000 bloggers from 25 countries and has made it affordable. 

I'm planning on presenting this year. If you want to provide feedback on the agenda or suggest your startup for a speaking slot, the event wiki is here.

November Wiki Wednesday

Come on by Wiki Wednesday this week for a conversation about Socialtext 2.0 design and SocialPoint with Kirsten Jones and whole team.  The discussion will be both technical, and not, and pizza.

SocialPoint: Best-of-Breed Wiki on Sharepoint

This morning we released SocialPoint, or Socialtext running on SharePoint.  At first, this may seem counter-intuitive for a company like Socialtext.  SharePoint is coming out with wikis and blogs in their 2007 version, why embrace and extend?  Let me give you my personal reasons.

First of all, the humanizing of Microsoft has changed my attitude about the convicted monopolist.  I believe that great people can work to change organizations, not just from Ray Ozzie on down.  I'd rather be part of communities of change. I'll still be a stalwart critic of the organization, but know I will have constructive conversations as a result.

Second, I believe that our Open Source solutions cooperating with Microsoft may grow the Open Source community as a whole.  Most people won't see this in Microsoft's best interest.  I do.  Some people won't see this in Open Source's best interest.  I do.

Third, SharePoint 2007 is an incumbent entry into the market that validates and grows the category.  There is an increasing role for the best-of-breed wiki in the long term.  Markets reward choice.

Fourth, the short-term role for a best-of-breed wiki the works with Sharepoint is immediately apparent.  Here's what Larry Cannell, who runs collaboration at Ford Motor Company, had to say about the next version of SharePoint:

However, this highlights a potential risk of leveraging SharePoint for use cases like blogs and wikis. While SharePoint can provide scalable services that standard blog engines may struggle to support, there could be other tactical issues (in addition to the lack of support for wiki links) that are exposed and can not be resolved until a capability is built into the platform (which could be a long time given release cycles).

These nagging questions, along with the broadly assumed definition of "enterprise" to mean an intranet running all Microsoft products, left me unsure whether Microsoft will become an enterprise Web 2.0 company any time soon. While I believe a platform like SharePoint 2007 could easily position Microsoft to deliver enterprise-grade Web 2.0 services, I think this may be difficult for them as long as the Office and SharePoint teams appear to be so inwardly focused.

Fifth, there is the profit motive, balanced by freedom.  This will sell more seats of both Socialtext and SharePoint.  More users and users as developers can choose, even in an IT environment.

This wasn't the easiest decision, but whenever faced with a difficult one, just listen to your customers.  Here's what the first SocialPoint customer had to say:

"We are also very excited about the possibility of integrating Socialtext with our growing Microsoft SharePoint installation. Combining the structure of SharePoint with the open, flexible features of Socialtext's wiki is a great solution for supporting teamwork."

Right now, I'm intently listening to our community.  The decision is if we should undertake another first with uncertain benefits, if we should release the first SharePoint Web Parts under an Open Source License.

21st Century English Restoration

"who had made a monopoly of the stage, and consequently presum'd they might impose what conditions they pleased upon their people, did not consider that they were all this while endeavouring to enslave a set of actors whom the public were inclined to support." -- war of the theaters

My aunt was an English teacher, and she bemoaned how email killed the use of the English language.  I still can't disagree with her entirely.  However, an English Restoration may be partially upon us. 

Not in a literal sense, but Firefox 2.0 includes spell check.  When IE7 catches up to support the first wide-scale writing interface since email, and for the Mac, the spelling part of restoring English may catch up.  IE7 definitely gets the read part of the web, and through mandated security update (a very deep oxymoron, considering monopoly monoculture) a good part of the world will be Fed.

Long live the king.

Scoble Diggs Up Cost Per Influence

Robert Scoble asks:

How could we measure audience engagement?

What he is after isn't engagement, but influence.  Here's the answer I've been trying to encourage others to implement:

• Metric: Cost Per Influence
• Format: Sell Side Advertising

In other words, we've had this conversation.

Abundance, and Five Years of Blogging

When I sat down in my first economics class at UCLA, the professor wrote on the blackboard all we would learn, in really big letters:

SCARCITY

I've been blogging for five years as of this month, and here's what I've learned:

ABUNDANCE

I have discovered I have a lot to give.  And when I give, I notice others give more.  Some of them I've formed relationships with, and trust opens giving, but I have also learned to trust strangers to share in abundance.  Life is iterative, markets are not transactions and scarcity of attention is false. Our learnings compound abundance and there may be no limit to what we can produce.

David Hornik strikes again with Chris Anderson Strikes Again: The Economy of Abundance:

The basic idea is that incredible advances in technology have driven the cost of things like transistors, storage, bandwidth, to zero. And when the elements that make up a business are sufficiently abundant as to approach free, companies appropriately should view their businesses differently than when resources were scarce (the Economy of Scarcity). They should use those resources with abandon, without concern for waste. That is the overriding attitude of the Economy of Abundance -- don't do one thing, do it all; don't sell one piece of content, sell it all; don't store one piece of data, store it all. The Economy of Abundance is about doing everything and throwing away the stuff that doesn't work. In the Economy of Abundance you can have it all.

I trace a lot of my thinking about abundance to Jerry Michalski's, here's a small chunk of it:

It drives me nuts that scarcity is seen as such a fundamental requirement for creating a business. Sure, there are plenty of businesses built around scarce resources, and sure, Dave's time and my time are scarce, but that's no proof that businesses can't cruise along profitably creating voluntary loyalty by knowing their customers better, never betraying them, always being available and fixing problems, responding more quickly than others.... you get the picture. But go to business school and what they teach you is how to create artificial scarcity. That's the kind of thinking that got us into the present mess.

Digging deeper, Howard Reingold is fostering a discipline of cooperation studies. You can also find this wiki page, with a link to a 1994 essay by Flemming Funch who I used to blog alongside a lot in the early days.

I suppose that abundance economics would include giving one's ideas and actions freely, because one feels like it, because one sees the need for it, and because one understands that when you contribute to the whole, we all benefit.

The Internet is a good example of some of the principles of giving freely and of abundance. So many resources here are given freely, without expecting anything directly in return. So many people are willing to help each other, even though they don't really have to and they don't get "paid" for it.

I think there are many times more power in actions that are done freely, because one sees a need for improvement, than in actions that are done reluctantly, because one is forced by lack.

I believe that abundance thinking, and actions, trumps the minds and greed of the scarce.  That the one overarching pattern in the present wave of innovation is share control to create value.  That what powers it isn't Moore's Law processessing infinite supply or Metcalfe's networking choice and collective wisdom.  It is the capacity of people to produce when old frameworks don't in the way of each other.

So much of this is about how we envision the future.  Not in the grand sense that the rules are changing.  But when two or more people can believe in an opportunity, they can share cost and risk to get there together, in the process reduce them -- and learn so they and others can build upon it.

Low Threshold Sharing Practice

Catherine Shinners shares some hallway conversations from Office 2.0.  One thing stood out for me as a simple practice to get people to share their ideas from Toby Moore.  With the workplace, and school for that matter, we are taught to hold on to our ideas.  Generation M, however, gets their homework done on MySpace, what some consider cheating, but when they enter the corporate world -- it is collaboration.

The other practice is the "3,4,5" notion.   Most people focus on their top two ideas as try to refine them as their best ideas.   At the IOCT, people  are encouraged to disseminate their third, fourth and fifth ideas, things that they, themselves, might deem "lower tier,"   or "half formed," but by putting it out to the larger IOCT community, someone might be able to help advance the idea, to see where the idea might flourish in a broader context.

In this way, as Toby says, it's open source ideas, and while the technical open source community's mantra is with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow, In the realm of innovation and ideas, I pointed out that it's more like, with enough eyeballs, more ideas have legs, and are possibly richer in their potential.

Another way to approach this is encourage people to share ideas for project that are context, not core, to them at least.  Of course, you have to make those projects transparent and grant permission to participate.

Itty Bitty Miki Wiki

Bitty is the little browser that goes on any Web page, it's like Picture-in-Picture for the Web. Miki is the little browser wiki interface of Socialtext, usually for mobile devices. Put them together and you get a cool wiki widget for your blog, personal homepage, wiki page or website. You can use the Socialtext Bitty Browser Widget creator on any public Socialtext wiki. Here is a result, using the Open Source Wiki:

Wiki-powered Sales Teams

Kris Duggan recently joined Socialtext and shares some best practices for using wikis for managing sales.  The primary benefits he sees:

• Group Memory
• Team selling and leveraging your resources (The number one rule in sales!)
• Transparency

The biggest benefit to me is how more informal conversations are captured through CCing the wiki or taking open call logs.  I'm interested to hear the experience of other sales teams.

Weak Signals in Online Advertising

I'm always on the lookout for weak signals for the online advertising market, the driver for the consumer internet.  Now it looks like ad spending failed to meet expectations this year and social media is creating an inventory glut. 

I wonder if Google's market share vertical integration strategy will structurally impact the market.  Some see this consolidation as a sign of strength, but it could be a longer term weakness. At the least, there is a short term driver for M&A for erstwhile competitors. The sponsorship segment of the market seems to be doing well and supporting the proliferation of micro-pubs and there is lots of room to innovate.  As long as people keep buying.

China Selectively Unblocks Wikipedia

I was asked by a journalist to comment on China selectively granting access to Wikipedia, so I thought I would share my response here.

The recent opening of the Great Firewall of China to Wikipedia, selectively by language, ISP and municipality seems ripe with contradiction.  The GFC is obviously not part of the One China policy.  The revolutionary risk has always been a widening gap between hypergrowth cities and forgotten rural hinterland.  One has to wonder if selective filtering against open information is a purposeful and protective measure, but dividing information always fails to conquer. 

Or this could be seen as a positive, if not necessary step, not towards the political freedoms demanded at Tianamen, but economic necessity.  The pattern of wealth creation, in it's most current internet wave, is share control to create value.  Market-Leninism fails to compete in a knowledge economy where markets are conversations.  When the world's greatest source of free knowledged cannot be accessed, the long term impact must be considerate. 

See Also: Interview with Tim Starling via Angela.

Human Powered Serendipity

Nat Torkington has a great post on homophily and social software design.

The Washington Post has a brief article called "Why Everyone You Know Thinks The Same As You".  In short, you hang out with people who are like you, a phenomenon known as homophily. This happens online, and indeed the Internet can lower the costs of finding people like you. But homophily raises the question for social software designers of how much they should encourage homophily and how much they want to mix it up.

He goes on to explore the tradeoff of fulfilling our desire to group with the similar and expose people to the different.  I'd suggest considering that the most productive social networks have a dense core and a dynamic periphery, and strong ties don't come cheap, there is a role for both.

Nat suggests recommendations (if you liked X, try Y) are quick wins, but still within narrow interests, while Mavens-as-algorithms (people who liked X also liked Y) can serve as connectors.  Personally I prefer designing in popularity indexes because it inspires productive gaming for participation.  I also fear my Gmail thinks I am gay.  But while you can automate some aspects of social discovery, they lead to weak ties at best.  The answer may be more pivotal..

Another way to build in serendipity is to have pivotal navigation: tags, top ten lists, and Flickr's interestingness measure are all ways to break people out of whatever group they're in and take them to something new. Links are at the heart of this: we've all been lost in clicking our way through a drunkard's walk of the Internet at one point or another. Inspire that in people: build those links and the metadata behind them into your site from the get-go.

Links remove barriers to our abundant desire to share.  Not only do we have a desire to be with people we like, we suffer from the problem of believing what we write and create is more valuable than it really is (cough).  Some facet of our identity is just waiting to show off to strangers, not just in hopes of finding more people we like, but affirmation from even people we may dislike (deep down George W wants Kim Jong Il to like him, really really like him).  We may want to be with people we like, but we have multiple facets of our identity, so we are like different people when we can get away with it. We also affiliate ourselves with people we would like to be, or objects that help express given facets of our identity.

More practically, people and the social incentives that drive them are incredibly diverse, and value accrues to people who bridge social network clusters.  So give users tools to bridge divides and create new groups.  Support ridiculously easy group forming.  While many things drove Myspace into popularity, easy group forming around independent bands drove not only growth overall, but rich serendipity.

I believe people self-correct for homophiliy.  Just yesterday in an internal blog, Kirsten Jones noted she realized has been so heads down at work that she was going to subscribe to some new feeds on the outside.

But I have one point for this post, it is that people are better connectors than algorithms and if you give them tools for it, their practices will exhibit emergent properties you couldn't predict as a solution for serendipity.

I'll end this post with an underscore, from IWB at IBM:

Through experience, we have learned the limitations in our ability to leverage IT to automate quintessentially human tasks, even many seemingly simple ones, no matter how fast our computers have become.  I think that the key breakthrough that we have needed here is a cultural one - it is perfectly OK to integrate people in the design of our systems.  A good, elegant design is one that lets machines do what they do best, and lets people do what they do best.

VLAB: Enterprise 2.0

Maybe I'll see you tomorrow night at the MIT-Stanford Venture Lab's Enterprise 2.0 event.  I'll be speaking with:

• John Roberts, CEO and Co-Founder, SugarCRM
• Antony Brydon, CEO and Co-Founder, Visible Path
• Mary Coleman, Director, Walden International

Should be a fun debate.

Sprinkles: simple global health

Sprinkles is an innovative non-profit effort to end vitamin and mineral deficiencies, one of the greatest preventable causes of illness and premature death throughout the developing world.  Their approach borders on being too simple, little packets of micronutrients you can sprinkle on any semi-solid food as a delivery mechanism.

"Iron-deficiency anemia continues to be a pervasive and largely unaddressed global health problem, affecting more than two billion people or roughly one third of the world's population." -- Dr Stanley Zlotkin

They have already proven the concept.  In Mongolia after two years of the program, anemia decreased by 38%.  When you consider Vitamin A deficiency is the leading cause of child blindness, Iodine deficiency the greatest cause of preventable mental retardation and Iron deficiency even has a direct impact on GDP, up to 2% loss, basic nutrition is a very big problem.  Sprinkles have been provided in 18 countries with distributed local manufacturing through technology transfer and their goal is to reach 50 milion children in five years.

I had a great conversation with Sprinkles founder and nutritionist Dr Zlotkin at a conference last week.  Their initative is ready for scaling perhaps with the help of philanthropists that read this blog.

The Form I Have Waited For

Early next week fith grade students will access the Internet and learn how to use the new fifth grade web site.  During computer lab, we will teach students to use the technology, which they will then be able to access from home.  Part of the website is an interactive blog.  The blog is password protected to ensure restricted access only to those students in our fifth grade learning community.  Please contact your child's teacher with any questions.

__[ ]__My child _____________________ may access the fifth grade website in class and participate with the blog.

__[ ]__My child may not access the fifth grade website in class.

Signature _____________________

Family email address: _____________________

Office 2.0

Stopped by Office 2.0 today. 

Whereas Barcamp is a face-to-face wiki, Office 2.0 is a face-to-face blog.

That is, it started as a blog that expanded into a conference.  Four launches happened today, if you include the Google Docs timing.  But mostly it is a cacophony of upstarts, lots of parroting of things others said years ago.  And behind all the noise some good relationships.

Teqlo Launches

Jeff Nolan just blogged what company he left SAP for, Teqlo, which lets enterprise users as developers assemble, publish and invite.  Some of the nitty-gritty:

To expect that users, even power users, will be able to build applications that stitch together web services from multiple vendors is a stretch. Teqlo isn’t attempting to build a new development language like Ruby on Rails that dramatically lowers the barrier, what we are doing is essentially reverse programming. We’re treating development as a data flow problem, not a programming flow problem. If there is a core piece of technology that we have invented, it is the routing methodology and not the semantic definition of components; Teqlo takes web services that are wrapped up as components, we call them Teqlets, and determines the optimal sequencing based on the data inputs/outputs of each component. Yeah, it’s hard and there is a lot more to it than I am revealing here, but the point of this post is not to talk about our technology but rather what it means for users.

Congratulations, Jeff.

Enterprise 2.0 Beyond the Office

As Rod Boothby points out, there are a lot of definitions flying around for similar things when it comes to Web 2.0 and the Enterprise.  This week I spoke on a panel at Enterprise 2006, an invitation-only no-blogging enterprise software event that I highly recommend for the mix and setting of CIOs and potential partners.  You may recall that I follow Andrew McAfee's original definition of Enterprise 2.0 as freeform social software adapted for organizations.  MR Rangaswami (who hosted the Enterprise 2006) broadened the definition to include modern technology, development and delivery:

While this is a helpful framework for looking at the disruptive changes across the industry, it dilutes what is really new, and possible.  I'm with Rod that the original definition's emphasis on freeform, emergence and implied decentralization.  Not because it changes the enterprise software industry -- but because it has the potential to change enterprises.

This came to a head on the panel, moderated by Ken Berrymanof McKinsey with panelists Brett Caine of Citrix Online, Josh Pickus of SupportSoft, Mark Symonds of Plexus Online and myself.  All three were great companies exemplary of modern business models such as SaaS.

But the bigger problem is while Enterprise 2.0 can serve as an apt descriptor, from a naming standpoint it broadens the divide between vendor and customer.  Vendors like version numbers.  Customers don't because they have been abused for so long:

1. forced payment for upgrades
2. forced upgrades that don't provide an improvement for business users
3. consequently, an upgrade in the enterprise is seen as a degredation in service availability, especially where IT is outsourced and under an SLA

I bring all this up in part because it will come up again at MIT-Stanford VLab event on Enterprise 2.0 next week where I am speaking alongside SugarCRM and Visible Path.

While I look forward definitions of Office 2.0 to come out of the conference of the same name, I don't think it will face the same issue.  To me, Office 2.0 is modern web tools designed for the scale of a small to mid-sized businesses (SMB/SME).  At this scale, the business model and product  -- and the potential for emergence is reduced.

What they have in common is designing tools for users first, buyers second.  In some cases, these users are developers.  But this is a big shift in strategy for a software vendor that is increasingly a competitive necessity.

White & Nerdy

               

Computer History Museum at Wiki Wednesday

Tonight at Wiki Wednesday: Bernard Peuto and Paul McJones of the Software Collection Committee will give a brief presentation on the SCC and solicit input from the wiki community on how wikis can be used to support this work and the overall mission of the Computer History Museum.

Sign up here and see you at Socialtext.

SlideShare: the YouTube of Powerpoint

SlideShare launches today -- the YouTube of Powerpoint.  While Powerpoint destroys thought, so does TV.  And misgivings aside, slides can be an art form in and of itself.  They are objects you spin stories around.  Like this:

It is easy to embed a presentation and player within a site, blog or wiki. This one is of my Keynote at Networld/Interop, a good companion to the video.  I've been playing with the Alpha and really have to applaud Rashmi (you may know her from Dcamp), Jonathan and the gang at Uzanto.

You upload your Powerpoint (PPT and PPS formats) or OpenOffice (ODP format) slides into My Slidespace with a familiar title, description and tags. The flash player is fast and intuitive.

Slides are findable by search (the content of the presentation is indexed), Latest, Popular, Featured, Profiles and Tags (Latest, Popular this week and Popular all time).  Here is an RSS feed of the latest.

What's also fascinating is their servers are backed by Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service).  The other week when Socialtext 2.0 launched with a large-file webcast, we got Techcrunched and were worried about the load on our servers.  After a little scrambling in IRC, Pete Kaminski leveraged S3, and problem solved.  In this case, SlideShare has web serviced their scalability.  An interesting model to watch, and good thing if this thing is a sudden hit.

Pincus Punked by the Post

Mark Pincus was made an example by the Washington Post today because he stuck to his principles and refused to be censored.  The article is a classic mainstream media take on the abject horrors of newstream media and how it can impact reputations.  Mark's response details many of the inaccuracies.

The irony is now Mark's reputation is at stake because of a mainstream media piece that does no better than what the newstream would.