Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Wikis in BusinessWeek

BusinessWeek has a guide for CEOs on corporate wikis.  It's a great series of articles mentioning Socialtext customers Nokia, Intel, Manning-Napier and Dresdner Kleinwort, and a podcast with Andrew McAfee.  It was Jeff Brainard's first day at our company, so I let him blog about it (welcome aboard, ha, ha, ha!).

Podcast with Tom Raftery

Last week Tom Raftery just posted his PodLeaders - Thought Leaders podcast that he recorded with me last week.  The conversation was over Skype from California to Ireland and he had to omit some sections because of echo.  But I like Tom's approach of using user-generated questions from his blog to make it more participatory.  For example:

Dennis Howlett
What’s the spread of take-up of SocialText? And what does a typical SocialText user ‘look’ like? - 11:12

John Collins
Enterprise 2.0 - what does it mean and is it a useful term to use? - 14:25

Ina O’Murchú
Where do you see the future lying with all the social networks evolving especially with regards to their interoperability? - 20:33

John Breslin
What do you think about Semantic Wikis - 22:55

Paul Watson
how do I migrate 1000 pages of my Wikimedia powered wiki to Socialtext. - 27:23

Twitter Tips the Tuna

On Wednesday, Twitter tipped the tuna.  By that I mean it started peaking.  Adoption amongst the people I know seemed to double immediately, an apparent tipping point. It hasn't jumped the shark, and probably won't until Steven Colbert covers this messaging of the mundane.  As Twitter turns 1 on March 13th, not only is there a quickening of users, but messages per user.

Twitter, in a nutshell, is mobile social software that lets you broadcast and receive short messages with your social network.  You can use it with SMS (sending a message to 40404), on the web or IM.  A darn easy API has enabled other clients such as Twitterific for the Mac.  Twitter is Continuous Partial Presence, mostly made up of mundane messages in answer to the question, "what are you doing?" A never-ending steam of presence messages prompts you to update your own.  Messages are more ephemeral than IM presence -- and posting is of a lower threshold, both because of ease and accessibility, and the informality of the medium.

Anil Dash was spot-on to highlight "The sign of success in social software is when your community does something you didn't expect."  A couple of weeks ago it became a convention to start messages with @username as a way of saying something to someone visible to everyone.  Within the limited affordances of the tool, people started to use it not only for presence, but a kind of shouting at the party conversation.  Further, when you see an to someone who isn't in your social network, you find yourself inclined to go see who it is or add them if they are a friend who just joined.  This kind of social discovery goes beyond seeing friend lists on profiles, aids network structure and quickens adoption.

While the app is viral (you have to get others to adopt to be able to use it), mobile social software has great word-of-mouth properties.  At Wikimania this summer, a buzz went off in my pocket when I was having dinner, which prompted me to get Jason Calacanis, Dave Winer and the brothers Gillmor to adopt.  Wednesday was the first day of TED, so a bunch of A-listers spread it.  At SXSW it seems to be the smart mob tool of choice, and there is even a group for it with a feature I've never seen before, JOIN. UPDATE: Judging by this SXSW Twitter screen, Obvious is embracing obvious group forming to further adoption.

Most recently there has been a rise in fake identities and even celebrities. Partially because people want to form more than one group, sometimes as integration points with other communities.  Some of the groups I've spotted include AdaptivePath, 1Password (release update), Barcamp, ArsTechnica, BBC (stories), Digg (stories), MarsEdit (release update), Technorati (a hack that begs people for blurbs in WTF), Techmeme (a hack that posts new top stories), Twitterific (release updates) and Wordpress (release updates).  Andy Carvin hypothesizes Twitter could save lives in a catastrophe, but group forming is already ahead of his theory with the USGS Earthquake Center on Twittter. If you come across other groups, please add them in comments.

This week most of my company joined Twitter and I set up http://twitter.com/socialtext for no reason in particular.  I posted the login in a private wiki page to let anyone contribute.  But when Moconner saw how simple the API was, he wrote a bot to let us post from our IRC channel.  Now we have a low threshold way to express group identity that fits with the way we work.

Liz Lawley well addressed the differences of this form of presence and criticisms of mundane content and interruption costs.  She highlights "exploring clusters of loosely related people by looking at the updates from their friends. There are stories told in between updates." 

However, I do think the the interruption tax is significant -- especially with the quickening of adoption.  You use your social network as a filter, which helps both in scoping participation within a pull model of attention management, but also to Liz's point that my friends are digesting the web for me and perhaps reducing my discovery costs.  But the affordance within Twitter of both mobile and web, that not only lets Anil use it (he is Web-only) is what helps me manage attention overload.  I can throttle back to web-only and curb interruptions, simply by texting off.

Good thing too, because back when it was called twittr people held back believing what they posted would be interrupting on mostly mobile devices.  Lately I think people just go for it, and most consumption is on the web or other clients.  I'd love to see some research on posts/user, client use, tracking @username, group identities, geographic dispersion and revealing other undesigned conventions.

Doing Enterprise 2.0

It is as though he nailed it to the church door, so I'm quoting Euan in his entirety:

The 100% guaranteed easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0?

DO NOTHING

And then your bright, thoughtful and energetic staff will do it for you. Trouble is they will do it outside your firewall on bulletin boards, instant message exchanges personal blogs and probably on islands in Second Life and you will have lost the ability to understand it, influence it, and integrate it into how you do business.

The second easiest way is to find ways of allowing this to happen inside the firewall which can be as simple as sticking in some low cost or free tools and then making sure your existing organisation can:

GET OUT OF THE WAY

The third easiest way is to do the second easiest way and then engage those who would have done the easiest way and get them to help you:

KEEP THE ENERGY LEVELS UP

And the hardest way .......

 

.... you don't need me to tell you that!

DO NOTHING

And then your bright, thoughtful and energetic staff will do it for you. Trouble is they will do it outside your firewall on bulletin boards, instant message exchanges personal blogs and probably on islands in Second Life and you will have lost the ability to understand it, influence it, and integrate it into how you do business.

The second easiest way is to find ways of allowing this to happen inside the firewall which can be as simple as sticking in some low cost or free tools and then making sure your existing organisation can:

GET OUT OF THE WAY

The third easiest way is to do the second easiest way and then engage those who would have done the easiest way and get them to help you:

KEEP THE ENERGY LEVELS UP

And the hardest way .......

 

.... you don't need me to tell you that!

Gmail Storage and Unfair Bundling

Post revised: my Gmail is working again, thanks to the helpful work of others, so I edited the below to stick to constructive feedback.

When someone exceeds their storage quota in Gmail they should be able to pay to upgrade their storage.  Not require Google Apps for Your Domain (making you have a domain, buy one through them or convert your whole company). This bundling strategy is not what I expected when I signed up for Google as an individual.  I feel a degree of lock-in and forced virality that is sure to disappoint other users in the future.

One aside, when I called the Apps support line I got an educated young woman who tried to help using her knowledge of the system, not following scripts.  Not sure how it will scale, but I did not expect such quality support from the get-go.

Wiki Wednesday March

Tomorrow night in Palo Alto is Wiki Wednesday, with a talk by Bryan Pendleton of PARC on an in-depth study of Conflict and Coordination in Wikipedia

Wikipedia, a wiki-based encyclopedia, has become one of the most successful experiments in collaborative knowledge building on the Internet. As Wikipedia continues to grow, the potential for conflict and the need for consensus building and coordination increase as well. This talk examines the growth of such non-direct work and describes the development of tools to characterize and identify conflict and coordination costs in Wikipedia. The results may inform the design of new collaborative knowledge systems.

All day before we are having a Wikithon.  Unlike last month, most of our developers will be remotely participating so you can easily too.  This has turned into our version of 20% time, a day a month where people can work on their own projects.  Even non-developers are engaging in creating or participating in wiki communities.

SharePoint and the Best-of-Breed Wiki

Microsoft's Lawrence Liu shares the positioning of SharePoint's wiki offering and how it relates to the Best-of-Breed wiki, Socialtext:

As I stated quick emphatically during my "SharePoint Collaboration and Community Tools" session at the European SharePoint Conference last Tuesday, the wiki functionality in WSS 3.0 was not designed to compete directly with best-of-breed wiki products like SocialText, but rather, it's the integration of a plethora of collaboration and community features that make WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 best of breed as a whole. My presentation slidedeck is available for download here.

In fact, SocialText is the process of developing a new version of their SocialPoint webparts that will be compatible with WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007. The key competitive advantage of SharePoint has always been and will continue to be in the foreseeable future the breadth of integrated collaborative and community-based applications that are provided out of the box or can easily be developed with SharePoint rich platform services. I believe that the built-in wiki functionality is sufficient for a very large percentage of our customer base, and many customers have indeed standardized on the SharePoint wiki as part of their overall standardization on SharePoint as the enterprise collaborative application platform. More and more SharePoint customers who want advanced wiki functionality are looking to the specialized wiki ISVs like SocialText to provide it with an integrated user experience in SharePoint by way of 3^rd party webparts.

Mike Gotta's gut tells him that SharePoint will enhance its wiki and Microsoft will crush its erstwhile partners with a forthcoming release.  I too fear this waking giant.  Part of my job is an uneasy stomach.  But I did add this comment to his post:

Yes, we expect our value to erode release-to-release, if we don't continue to release ourselves.  Which we do in a timeframe measured by days, not years.  As first to market and first to feature, we have to keep moving to remain the best-of-breed vendor. And clients benefit from choice.

"It's easy for people to use "that function will be in the next release" to deflect support for business requirements that may result in tremendous short-term value."

Isn't that the opposite of what Lawrence did in his blog post?  I'm sure he could have, and your gut could be right. But I imagine it is based largely on an embedded reaction to prior FUD.

Interview with Sandhill.com

MR Rangasami of SandHill.com and the Software 2007 conference just posted an interview with me billed as The Next Wave of Enterprise 2.0.

I'm going to consider this my contribution to the blogosphere today and get back to work.