"Networks don't have people. People have networks." - Demian Entrekin
Christopher Carfi shared this quote, which really resonates with me, not just 'cause its made of people. He goes on to make this point:
The right point of integration is around the individual. Each of us is the center of our own universe.
Here's some related Soylent Green.
LinkedIn launched Company Profiles today, something I've been looking forward to for some time. This could not only be a great research tool for users, but I think is a sign of things to come.
We haven't seen great expressions of group identities within social networking. With this example you can see the potential of aggregating individual activity, profiles and external sources around a group identity. Hack the URL's number to discover others until the full release.
Recall that Reed's Law of Group forming says that the value of the network is the number of groups (2 to the Nth), because of all the combinatorial connection potential between members of those groups. Providing a group identity and exposing individuals for potential connection accelerates weak tie discovery and group forming.
We may get an new PR issue to explore with this. The profiles are trademarked brands that have been created not by the company, but by individuals. In part by employees, in part by past employees. Brand Managers will have to get used to the role employees have in brand definition.
Features like New Hires and Promotions and Changes bring new transparency to HR that may be as shocking to certain corporate mindsets as when Facebook introduced Mini Feeds. I've always said that while social software may get you laid, enterprise social software helps you get promoted. Now it tells the world if you or your colleague does.
Gartner Research released the first Magic Quadrant report on the Enterprise Social Software market this week.
This is a pretty big milestone in the development of the Enterprise 2.0 category at-large. Just a few years ago, the only analysts covering the space were blogalysts. Now, perhaps the most rigorous and influential vendor analyst reports in enterprise software says it really is enterprise software. The analysis rightly says we all have work to do.
It also says that Socialtext is the most visionary provider and behind only Microsoft, BEA and IBM in execution. This tells me that if we want to be the leader we need to demonstrate better execution (mind you, I'm not taking out IBM next year, but it is good feedback). SuiteTwo, of which we are a core component, also scored well in vision but has a way to go in execution.
If you are like the many people getting Quechup invitation spam, consider how it relates to the serious privacy problems with Social Networking. Quechup automatically imports your Gmail contacts and spams them when you register for their YASNS. If Bob signs up for it, he is opting into the graph, but he doesn't opt in to spamming Sally. Sally is included in the graph, whether she opts in to register or not. Over time, even if Sally resists, she is modeled as a node in the graph.
At first, this doesn't seem to matter. But if Bob adds relationship details like they are dating, and then her husband John opts into the graph and adds the detail they are married, you get the idea. But it is far worse, when the value of the network isn't the relationships, but simply the contact information. This is the case with enterprise social networking, particularly for sales. Many don't realize that Jigsaw actually pays people for submitting business cards of people they have met. Yes, there are financial incentives for people to register you into graphs without your knowledge. I'm seriously considering copywriting my contact information (Stowe Boyd suggested via twitter when I was exploring other ways of suing evil social networks).
The fundamental privacy problem is that social networks grow virally by adding you to a graph without asking you to opt in. Once you are in the graph, it may be hard for you to know you are in, let alone opt out (Spoke, you may recall, did this purposely). You are modeled without your control over social context, and identity and relationship data can be layered on top of you as a node. Not all data may be available to users, but more will to developers and all will to the social network service providers. Providers come in all stripes and you not only have to concern yourself with their ethical business practices, but the basic of security. Opening the graph to third party developers based on open standards is a laudable effort to solve one social graph problem. But the privacy concern of governance and oversight over those third party developers who have access to more data than users is uncharted.
Now, we have a very loose definition of privacy, particularly in the US. And the odds of a constitutional amendment are slim. But this is a new and increasingly popular risk to your right to privacy that unfortunately is not popular in understanding.
UPDATE: Someone pointed me to this Rapleaf public profile which I never opted into. Rapleaf has a decent privacy policy, but it is unclear if by emailing them to opt-out I become a user. And if I register to manage my public profile I certainly become a user "We use this information to process registrations, contact our users, and to provide our services." Auren Hoffman is behind Rapleaf, is very conscious of these issues and will probably clarify. But there is an interesting facet about public profiles people don't opt into. Great for SEO marketing and extortion signups.
UPDATE: Facebook opens to public profile search. Guess I'll change my profile picture from the one of me partying like a rock star. Also, copyrighting my contact info is a no go, perhaps I'll trademark it and me.
UPDATE: danah says:
I'm also befuddled by the slippery slope of Facebook. Today, they announced public search listings on Facebook. I'm utterly fascinated by how people talk about Facebook as being more private, more secure than MySpace. By default, people's FB profiles are only available to their network. Join a City network and your profile is far more open than you realize. Accept the default search listings and you're findable on Google. The default is far beyond friends-only and locking a FB profile down to friends-only takes dozens of clicks in numerous different locations. Plus, you never can really tell because if you join a new network, everything is by-default open to that network (including your IM and phone number). To make matters weirder, if you install an App, you give the creator access to all of your profile data (no one reads those checkboxes anyhow). Most people never touch the defaults, meaning that they are far more exposed on Facebook than they realize. zrven a college network is not that secure. MySpace on the other hand is rather simple: public or friends-only. Friends-only is far more secure than the defaults on Facebook. And public is well-understood to mean anyone could access it (and often this is the goal). But I know all too well that privacy has nothing to do with reality - it's all about perception. And Facebook *feels* more secure than MySpace, even if it's not. Still, I can't wait to see how a generation of college students feel about their FB profile appearing at the top of Google searches. That outta make them feel good about socializing there. Not.
It seems odd to me that Facebook is doing all sorts of things to go against what gave them such strength: group support for people who wanted to gather around a particular activity, tightly controlled privacy defaults, and simple/clean profiles (which have been made utterly gaudy by Apps). I think I'm missing the logic here. ::scratching forehead::
UPDATE: Auren Hoffman, in comments:
Ross -- thanks for the shout-out on Rapleaf. Anyone can opt-out of Rapleaf (and you do not become a user). We do have a bunch of people that opt-out every day. We also have many people that choose to only display some of their information (like just hiding their age or gender). There are many public profiles about people on the Internet (ZoomInfo, Spock, Wink, Rapleaf, and others) … at Rapleaf, our goal is give people the opportunity to manage their privacy and numerous online profiles and control what people see about them. Of course, we're a start-up (and thus not perfect) … so we really welcome your suggestions on how to improve.
Charlene Li at Forrester just came out with a report on Social Technographics that surveyed user engagement. The framework is very similar to my Power Law of Participation, but it is an entirely different thing to have some data behind it.
I haven't seen the report itself, but Steve Rubel says "this is the first report I have seen that really delves into what drives and motivates people to engage with the web." I'll get a copy of it and see.
But I still contend that a more ideal community is scale free in structure. What I wonder is if you could benchmark these levels of engagement against a power law -- not just to test Forrester's findings, but to help a given company realize -- "we are under-weighted in critics!"
UPDATE: I got a copy of the report, which is a pragmatic approach that starts by valuing different kinds of participation. A given site could survey its users to understand existing psychodemographic profiles, then review participation points. It may discover latent potential in the Creator category and create a participation point for them. How the profiles vary by age is interesting:
Also note that Creators self-identify themselves as leaders (38% say "I am a natural leader") than any other group, and those who participate in social software are greater influencers (Active categories range from 52-56% saying "I often tell my friends about products that interest me, compared to 33% for Inactives).
UPDATE: Phil Wolff's remix is seriously funny:
When on a social networking panel last week I said something that can be seen as stupid or insightful. Widgets are the battering ram for social networking sandcastles.
Since inception, social networking services have been islands amidst the web. Early calls for interop and identity ownership didn't lead to results, even with Marc Canter barking "FOAF" at every event. Meta-networks make sense in theory, but not as a business like many things meta. Trending towards P2P or personal ownership through client or service is even more ideal, but such decentralization never took root.
Perhaps something is happening now. With the rise to traffic and time prominence of MySpace, entrepreneurs and hackers worked their way into the system, because, well, there is no thing as a closed system. Widgets started to appear. Most notably, the YouTube widget made its way enough to build a $1B business, depending on how you measure, before MySpace caught on to the video opportunity they were giving away. But the next YouTube wont be video, and stuff comes from all angles when users are empowered to paste Javascript. Smaller players will make this even easier, with wizards to add widgets. And the blogosphere from which all this independently froths will keep driving the widget economy.
This is the walled garden under siege by gophers. No, not those gophers, but the ones that tunnel in a thousand directions and drive Bill Murray nuts. People will discover new services wherever the traffic and time is. Some services may overlay social networking as a service, like MyBlogLog does with a degree of execution. Attention follows. Value shifts to networks that provide both the right attention, openness and composition. My bet is a derivative of blogs.
UPDATE: An interesting related project by Penguin Books is A Million Penguins, letting anyone edit a book to be published. The wiki is down at the moment, but PaidContent notes it began with “It had snowed, and was now raining. Gritty slush covered the pavement. Sharp crystals of snow decorated grass.” Reuters notes the challenge is finding “believable fictional voice” within the mass collaboration. This was a big challenge for group editing of the Wired Wiki story.
The last chapter of Don Tapscott's new book, Wikinomics, invites readers to write it: “Join us in peer producing the definitive guide to the twenty-first-century corporation on www.wikinomics.com.” Today we launched a Socialtext wiki for the Wikinomics Playbook, where people can not only learn about the power of mass collaboration, but participate in it. The book is already one of the fastest selling business titles and is an excellent primer on how models of collaboration are unfolding from open source to blogging to wikis in the enterprise to enable people to participate in the economy like never before.
The second to last chapter is about enterprise wikis. Half of it discusses how Best Buy is using a wiki knowledge-base for the Geek Squad. The other half is an interview with yours truly and shares some of Socialtext's success stories. The first chapter is available online as a pdf.
This is a great example of how a book can be augmented with a wiki, as most books are out of date by the time they are published, never quite finished and have the potential for participation. Last month we helped Larry Lessig share the entire Code 2.0 book in a wiki. I expect that soon such commons-peer production, a wiki for every book, will be common.
A small dream of mine came true today. We've been preaching an ecosystem of tools for some time now. We've helped customers stitch them together in interesting ways. In fact, Andrew McAfee's original article on Enterprise 2.0 was borne from observing what was happening in one of our customers and projecting into the future. Well, future happens fast.
Looking back, look what I blogged just before the first Web 2.0 conference:
I'm providing a workshop on Enterprise Social Software with Socialtext Customer Mike Pusateri from Disney. You might recall his great presentation at the at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Confererence in February. Mike and his team are leading the way with how they are using lightweight web-native tools as a platform for productivity. Not just how they use Socialtext for project communication, but how they stitch it together Moveable Type and Newsgator for an ecosystem of tools with RSS.
That was then, this is now. This morning I provided a workship on Enterprise 2.0.
Today we announced SuiteTwo, The Enterprise 2.0 Suite powered by Intel. Intel is distributing the Best of Breed wiki (Socialtext), blog (Six Apart), Feed Aggregation (Newsgator) and Feed Publishing (SimpleFeed), supported by Spikesource, through its channels including Dell, NEC, Ingram, Novell and Red Hat.
This fulfills Andrew McAfee's vision of Enterprise 2.0. In a box. Made simple for Small-to-Mid-sized Enterprises. Extensible because we've all supported open APIs. Enterprise 2.0 is freeform social software adapted for organizations. SuiteTwo is the first offering to realize the SLATES paradigm:
SLATES = Search | Links | Authorship | Tags | Extensions | Signals
In the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review, McAfee went further to distinguish this Network IT (NIT) from Functional IT and Enterprise IT:
As the DrKW example illustrates, NIT’s principal capabilities include the following:
• Facilitating collaboration. Network technologies allow employees to work together but don’t define who should work with whom or what projects employees should work on. At DrKW, ad hoc teams have formed because employees read one another’s blogs. These teams have used the wiki to accomplish tasks, and they have disbanded without orders from senior executives.
• Allowing expressions of judgment. NITs are egalitarian technologies that let people express opinions. DrKW employees use blogs to voice their views about everything from open-source software to interest rate movements.
• Fostering emergence. “Emergence” is the appearance of high-level patterns or information because of low-level interactions. These patterns are useful because they allow managers to compare how work is done with how it’s supposed to be done. Emergence is also valuable for users. For instance, employees can easily search and navigate DrKW’s blogs and wiki for trends and data even though nobody is in charge of making them easy to use....Employees exploit older NITs such as e-mail and instant messaging on their own, but business leaders have a role to play in exploiting newer technologies like blogs and wikis. They can help sustain and increase the use of complements to make the technology continually more effective, primarily by guiding users. Darren Leonard, a managing director in the global equity derivatives business at Dresdner Kleinwort, recalls how he got his colleagues to use the company’s wiki: “First, if a wiki has no structure, it’s perceived not as an opportunity but as anarchy, and our people have no time for anarchy. I went back to my initial pages and rewrote them to be a lot more directive. For example, I made a page with the agenda for an upcoming meeting and asked people to add to it. Second, wikis have to be clearly better than other ways of collaborating. There have to be uses [for them] that demonstrate their power. One of these uses came prior to a special senior management meeting where we could bring questions from our groups and get them answered. I put up a page…asking my [team members] what questions they wanted me to ask on their behalf. People used the page to post questions, edit them, and discuss which ones were the most important and why. That really accelerated wiki use. Finally, old habits are hard to break. The tendency is for people to keep using e-mail because that’s what they know....I have to [tell them], ‘I’m not reading e-mails on this topic. Use the wiki’ or ‘Everyone’s assignments are on this page—use the same page to report on progress.’”
Lead users and enterprises already work this way today. Only they do so without usable efficiency. Integrated single sign-on, search and tag cloud are just the beginning. One click subscription to a page, blog post, search query, report, weblog and wiki make feeds usable (unlike today's user experience, when they click on an orange icon and think their browser is broken). Rapidly form groups, draft together on a wiki page, publish to a blog and track results.
Beyond making such tasks efficient, the benefits to productivity, discovering emergent intelligence and high-engagement marketing are significant. Very soon a user will wake up in the morning, log in to SuiteTwo, immediately recognize something emerging. With the top blog posts telling her what the company is talking about, the top wiki pages showing her what people are working on, top posts from the outside that her company is subscribed to and the feedback from what they are publishing
-- something will emerge. She recognizes the opportunity, pulls on the social fabric and easily forms a diverse group of experts. They follow new feeds and generates others while working with a little productive friction. They develop a plan and draft a new offering in the wiki. They publish to a public blog and track where it goes. The feedback loops continue, she goes home for the day and the organization is bound to adapt again.
This isn't your Dad's enterprise, but one you will be working with soon.
Every time I see Gabe Rivera of TechMeme, I ask for the same thing -- MeMeme. Give me TechMeme where the core index is based on who I read, about 150 people at any given time, to show me what my friends are interested in. I used to ask this from people who make Newsreaders. Because simply somedays you are too busy to read everything, but you want to make sure you haven't missed something big. That's the real value I derive from TechMeme today. But what I really want find something that is big with my friends, which in the larger blogosphere is actually something small.
Today we have two new and seriously great kinds of attention tools. Newsreaders give us the ability to personally personalize. Combined with persistent query feeds, you can follow the people and things you know you want to read. Similarly, social networking services with a purpose let you aggregate the objects of your friends, be it pictures with Flickr, or posts with Vox. Tagging then lets you pivot for social discovery, but that is digging deeper than you often have time or interest for.
TechMeme and others show us mass popularization. Different communities help things bubble up. In Social Software, you first saw this with Blogdex and DayPop. What in the blogosophere has the most attention within a given time period. Now we have Digg, del.icio.us/popular, Reedit, Netscape, Technorati, YouTube, Dabble, Last.fm, Flickr Interestingness and a gazillion other increasingly rich examples. This is a Wisdom of Crowds we couldn't gain before for discoverable knowledge.
As an aside, I wonder how original Slashdotters feel about Diggers' favor for a popular answer rather than a leading question.
So more concisely, what I hope develops:
* Tools that let me personally personalize should give me just one more degree of interestingness and popularization.
* Tools of mass popularization should give me social popularization
Since Flickr has both kinds of attention tools, let me give specific suggestions for extension. For within My Contacts's Photos, show me the most viewed, favorited and commented by my contacts. Then show me the most viewed, favorited and commented pictures by my contacts in Everyone's Photos.
Now, this is just one user's greedy suggestion, and there serious usability and algorithmic challenges to overcome. But what I'm getting at is part of the future of media.
The other night I watched the evening local news broadcast for the first time in a while. Its funny how local news attempts to localize national news. The idea is that if they show you a Mom in the Bay Area of a Soldier in Iraq, you can relate to that and it brings the story home. But unless the story originates from that Mom or Soldier, it is just an overlay with too much of a contextual shift. Similarly, when an item of local news is made national -- it is too shallow for our local tastes and we are attracted to it simply because or fair city is made popular.
I empathize with the expert editors behind these mass media and their attempts to connect the interesting for me, when me is lost in a demographic. But I've had a taste of going direct. When I carry the burden of discovery, and float around YouTube's popular and related clips, I can compose a broadcast for myself. The outstanding political commentary, funny stuff and best soccer highlights from around the world.
But after a long day of work, I'm tired, and want the network to work for me. Cue up not what is popular, or what the people I subscribed to produced. Cue up what my social network has found interesting. At any given time it may be local, national, international, topical or mundane. Of course, in the process of actively consuming it, I'll leave behind breadcrumbs of attention to make it better for my friends.
UPDATE: I've been ranting about this for years. Sam Ruby hacked together a nifty MeMeme and the result shows a clear and simple foci of attention (a post by Spoksky at last glance), FeedDemon has something in the works and Tailrank has something close.
Took a break in Mexico this weekend, literally locking my cell phone in a safe and not bringing my laptop with me. Still catching up, but I had lunch with Felix from Plazes today (disclosure: advisor) who told me I could have tagged the location while being safe with the new Mobile client. The world is getting granular.
Also on the MoSoSo front, I added Twttr to the top right of my blog for those interested in the messaging of the mundane.
My Platonic (or was it Aristotelean?) relationship with Yahoo tells me there will be a third act, but here is act II.
The NY Times has an article on the state of Social Networking Services, where I chime in:
"Social networking is at this very interesting point," said Ross Mayfield, a pioneer in the social networking field and the chief executive of Socialtext, which sells software for collaborative writing and editing via the Internet. "These companies are at the stage where they need to demonstrate real results in terms of revenues and their business model. That voyeuristic fascination of seeing who has the most friends has worn off for a lot of people."
Which is basically a longwinded way of saying the same thing as danah...the problem "is they haven't built anything new that gives people a reason to spend more time at the site."
Normally I would just link to the article in Linkorama, but I'm a sucker for floating head graphs.
Oh, and until this problem is solved, I'll keep quoting myself.
Joi Ito points out an amazing causal statistic on LinkedIn:
If you search for PeopleSoft employees who have joined in the last 30 days, you get over 3,700 results. There are 5,500 or so employees listed in total which is around half of their employees. It probably has something to do with the fact that 6,000 PeopleSoft employees are supposed to get the axe today.
Socialtext is looking for good people, I might add. Engineers, designers, sales and customer support. Just contact me through LinkedIn.
UPDATE: This post referenced in National Business Review.
LinkedIn Jobs was launched, posts leverage overlaid reputation, references and relationships
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