Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Culture Moves Apple Stock, Film at 11

This afternoon I had yogurt with Robert Scoble before he shot a video with me and Eugene Lee.  I mentioned that James Franco (actor, Spiderman's frenemy, and grew up in Palo Alto like me) was at Fraiche Yogurt yesterday.  An employee mentioned that Steve Jobs was there recently.  Robert asked if he seemed healthy, and the employee confirmed. Not just because the yogurt is healthy, I assume.

Discussion ensued on Friendfeed. VentureBeat picked it up and the uh, news, is making its way to China right now.  Perhaps it will move Apple's stock tomorrow. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Scoble posted the video interviews...

p>Part I. What will happen to both large and small companies during downturn? What are they seeing from their enterprise customers? (Hint: record sales so far this quarter but great uncertainty for next year).
Part II. Discussion of corporate pain of email.
Part III. Ross tells me about socialtext’s alumni network and how that can help both companies and workers who are laid off.

2009 Recession: Corporate Alumni Network offer

With record layoffs in the 2009 Recession, more former coworkers are turning to each other to get jobs and start new businesses. In less turbulent times, large employers would invest in hosting Corporate Alumni Networks for sharing connections, knowledge and expertise. Unfortunately, just when corporate alumni need to leverage these networks to find jobs and start new companies, HR departments find such projects stalled.

Almost four years ago PeopleSoft employees experienced a massive layoff similar to what is happening today (Yahoo began laying off 1,500 workers; Sony plans to lay off 8,000 workers in its electronics business worldwide. Bank of America may cut 35,000 starting in the beginning 2009. Google has been quietly laying off staff and up to 10,000 jobs could be at risk for layoff).

A grass-roots PeopleSoft Alumni Network was formed by former employees, both on LinkedIn and Socialtext. Community leaders used Socialtext to share job information, get organized and collaborate on events. They later gained permission to call their newly formed non-profit organization the PeopleSoft Alumni Network. To this day, over 800 recruiters tap the network of over 3,000 members.

I asked PeopleSoft Alumni Network organizer Steve Tennant to comment on his experience:

"Socialtext was an invaluable technology for team collaboration at a time of need. With Socialtext's Recession 2009 offer, I'm looking forward to sharing best practices from our experiences in getting organized, helping people find jobs or start new companies and staying connected."

Today, Socialtext is meeting this latent need with a free Corporate Social Network offer for the 2009 Recession. Any former employee and HR director of a company that reduced its workforce by 5% or more in the last year can create a private Corporate Social Network for free by applying here. Please note that this offer does not include free user support. We ask for an HR contact to be involved to encourage a constructive tone, enable the HR department to share informational resources and so the company can leverage the network over time for connections, knowledge and expertise. However, as was our experience with the PeopleSoft Alumni Network, the energy and participation will likely be driven by the grass-roots.

Socialtext is also building out a public resource for sharing Alumni Network best practices at http://socialtext.net/alumni-network. The site will also serve as a public directory of private Alumni Networks as they are established, with instructions on how to join them.

My hope is that this Corporate Alumni Network offer for the 2009 Recession helps people come together to help each other:

• Share job leads
• Share and collaborate on resumes
• Share and create events
• Share and document corporate history
• Share new business opportunities for the company and alumni

Please spread the word.

The End of Embargoes

You gotta love Mike's style.  TechCrunch is banning embargoes.  Now, bloggers are already notorious for breaking them, and at least TechCrunch is formalizing it.  And by doing so, I think embargoes will gradually go the way of the DoDo.

The value of an embargo is the big launch, with multiple journalists covering the same thing (same message) at the same time.  Often, an exclusive is given to one of the journalists, say a customer interview.

As I've said before, we are moving from a world of exclusives to inclusives.  Inclusives build the story in public, involving more people in the conversation.  This carries an observer effect, leading to a more engaging story that explores more angles in more places.

2009 Predictions: Collaboration and Social Networking

Forrester analyst Gil Yehuda offers a perspective of Enterprise 2.0 collaboration as either driven by IT, or from the bottom up by the Line of Business, what he calls tech populist.  And given the present recession, offers an outlook:

I predict that IT-driven internal collaboration initiatives will be squeezed tight: 1. they are usually more expensive than the Tech Populist options. 2. IT is being asked to sacrifice projects, and they would rather cut fat, not bone. Meaning, they’d rather protect their bread-and-butter IT infrastructure from being outsourced. And 3.The business considers projects initiated by IT to be less vital. Remember who pays the bills.

However, for business-driven internal enterprise Web 2.0 collaboration projects, I see growth. Why?  Because the business will find their collaboration needs to grow in 2009, while they see IT providing them with fewer services. Collaboration needs grow as a result of layoffs, mergers, and deepening external partnerships (requiring new infrastructure to collaborate outside the firewall with trusted, external partners).  And this happens while IT’s services shrink as a result of layoffs, a focus on streamlining operational costs, while not taking on new projects.

Who wins? The SaaS based collaboration vendors: folks like Box.net, GroupSwim, Jive, OneHub, PBwiki, SocialCast, Socialtext, and others who provide collaboration services in the cloud for about $5-$15 per user per month, give or take. These products range in functionality, where some focus on the wiki, others on the social network, and still others are more suited for file sharing within trusted groups. But these are easy pickings for business that are looking to circumvent IT and set up a small departmental solution. Especially in departments that are looking to collaborate with a few external partners.

Line of Business implementations not only experience growth, but greater success. According to this year's McKinsey survey on Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise, IT-driven implementations had 60% user dissatisfaction, whereas LoB-driven had 74% satisfaction.  Part of this is vendor selection, but LoB implementations have greater engagement and adoption.  I believe the best approach is to partner LoB with IT, what I once called middlespace, for the benefits of top down and bottom up adoption.

Gil also predicts a battle of 2009:

And now, the battle. The story above works for companies that are willing to move to SaaS based products to address near term collaboration need in 2009. But many organizations cannot, or will not, allow themselves to house their intellectual property on someone else’s servers – no matter what the vendor says to assure them. This means that organizations with hard-line IT shops will face a battle between IT and the business for a collaboration solution that integrates with IT’s existing infrastructure, but requires little IT involvement.

Okay, now I'm just tooting my own horn.  Socialtext is the only vendor with a SaaS Appliance, meeting behind-the-firewall policies with SaaS benefits such as right-sizing the application subscription.  I think Gil is right that LoB collaboration will grow next year through SaaS. As they are successful they will partner with IT and migrate the cloud behind the firewall as necessary.

Forums are Full Frontal Symmetry

Continuing the thread of Asymmetrical Follow, Asymmetry and Privacy and Continuous Partial Asymmetry I had two brief thoughts to share.  One is how very different this 2.0 stuff is and the other is what makes it actually works.

Consider a 1.0 community feature, Forums. Forums are topic-centric instead of people-centric. There isn't the notion of following people, or leveraging the social network as a filter. You have to sift through what everyone is saying regardless of who they are, which I find tremendously inefficient. This also means that if someone is truly obnoxious you can't unsubscribe from them.  When people can manage their subscriptions to people, the effect is generally self correcting.

Not being subscribed to everyone is a default that leads to reply-optional norms. At first, not being subscribed to everybody makes it difficult for some people to follow the thread when they are accustomed to other conversational tools like email and Forums. 

What makes these people-centric conversations work is something simple, links.  If someone happens upon this post, they can see the links in the first paragraph and follow them to pick up the thread.  Links, by form of URL or @reply, pull them all together.

Twitter is Reply-Optional

Replying on Twitter is optional, and is part of what makes it scale, even socially, quite well. It is a small part of how letting go helps you cope with overload. Following a few posts on Asymmetric Follow, JP blogged on continuous partial asymmetry. Its Sunday, I've quit smoking for a month, blogged twice now, and the present isn't evenly distributed, but I'll comment.  JP plucked three things from the thread:

Three in particular are worth emphasizing:

• People in a Web 2.0 network are not uniformly connected; some have more connections than others
• Connections have directions; the number of inbound connections may far exceed the number of outbound connections, creating an asymmetric environment
• This is particularly true of “default-public” networks such as Twitter; Flickr is also likely to evince similar behavior.

I spell checked the British out of the blockquote just to fuck with him.

He quoted Stu Berwick that "In IM, it's polite to be silent." True that. Jerry Michalski taught me the power of silence online, Steve Gillmor did online. Then Steve chided me for apostrophe usage, which I still see as blurred a line as post-enlightenment serfdom. That and how my English teacher aunt derided how email destroyed English.

But, really.

What makes Asymmetic Follow scalable technically is that its easier. Scalable businessmodelly, if that it is a word, is that its good for adoption. Scalable socially in that it doesn't create non-casual attention burdens.  Twitter is reply-optional in the 'verse.

JP:

What is this thing that works? Asymmetric follow. Why? Because I am no longer expected to reply to everything that comes in. People who receive a lot of snail mail or e-mail don’t reply to everything that comes in either, so what’s the difference? The difference is in the perception of polite behaviour.

The politeness issue alone is not enough either. This whole thing is exacerbated, beautifully exacerbated, by the 140 character limit of Twitter. Because we can now have “continuous partial asymmetry”. Someone who has 4000 followers can choose to reply to the @s of 400 of the followers, because of two critical things. One, the cost of replying to the @ is low. And two, you can vary the particular 400 you’re replying to. Yes you’re constrained, ostensibly by personal bandwidth, from replying to everyone all the time. But because you manage to reply to some of the people some of the time, nobody feels left out, the weak ties remain in place and everything works.

There is another thing that works. DMs. I don't subscribe to Scoble's linkbait raint on how Direct Messages suck. DMs blow. DMs are push attention modelled messages within confirmed ties.  What that actually means is they are like having IM between two people in that both parties confirmed the relationship (tie), but the modality is still new enough that you don't have to reply soon. 

Hell, Stowe is right that Scoble would like it all to turn into email. So familliar and comfort. Ben Gross might pipe in with media displacement theory (you can't completely displace a modality of communication, it stays with us, those habits and tools last waaay to long) here, but let's try to appreciate what is new.

Maybe the tools, and burden from tools, have created actually productive practices, and tools.  Where some channels have different burdens of reply.  Twitter has a near zero burden of reply.  DMs have a slightly less burden of reply, but still a cost to the sender in the form of relationship, initial and retention.  Some of the best and busiest people say to me today that DMs are the best way to get ahold of them, when 'elst fails.

But what is interesting implementing a Twitter for the Enterprise is the practices to encourage use of Socialtext Signals as reply-optional. As a toolmaker, you cast a tool into the world, but people can use it differently. You try to set the right defaults, but don't want to assume intelligent design. There will be a manager that will demand reply in the new modality, but the conversation that makes things really work is what modality works best for what kind of attention.

Asymmetrical Follow and Privacy

James Governor is right to highlight Asymmetrical Follow as a core social software design pattern.

Asymmetric Follow is a core pattern for Web 2.0, in which a social network user can have many people following them without a need for reciprocity. Asymmetric Follow is unlike email for example, which tends to be within small groups, with all users knowing each other (newsletters are a clear exception here). If you see a social network where someone has 5000 followers and only follows 150 back - that’s Asymmetric Follow.

His post explores the concept I've described as pull attention management vs. push (email), and gets enterprisey with @jobsworth:

...The technical approach that is most appropriate to support Asymmetrical Follow is well known in the world of high scale enterprise messaging- its called Publish And Subscribe.

But Publish and Subscribe also talks to the social aspects of Asymmetrical Follow. As @Jobsworth puts it:

“I think we would be far better off considering Twitter as neither Pull nor Push, but instead as Pub-Sub, as Publish-Subscribe. The first and most beautiful thing about Twitter, as far as I am concerned, is that I only see the tweets of people I follow, people whose tweets I subscribe to. It is up to me to decide how many people I can follow. For some people this may be a Dunbar number, stabilising around 150, perhaps finding a Twitter adjustment to that number and raising it. Others may be Scoblesque in their reach, dissatisfied unless they push the 5000 limit (as in Facebook; I must admit I have no idea what the Twitter limit is).

So one way of avoiding increasing noise levels is to avoid increasing the network beyond one’s capacity. I can choose to “follow” (or subscribe to tweets from) just as many people as I am able to cope with. This is not something you can do easily with BlackBerry or with e-mail in general.”

James explored further in his next post, getting Matt Biddulph to comment on if this pattern arose in Dopplr.

This graph shows the distribution of how many people share with more people than share with them, or vice versa. The hump is slightly higher on the right, indicating that there’s a bias towards sharing with more people than share back.

The peak is centred on zero, indicating that the average traveller shares with about the same number of people that share with them.

I think the hump is on the right because Dopplr is private by default, while Twitter is public by default. Defaults matter for social dynamics than any other designer intent.

With a default-private network, you share as a gesture, perhaps in hopes of getting sharing back to form a confirmed tie.  With a default-public network, you share by default, and you follow as a commitment of attention. With default-public, the hump is on the left, in the form of a power law. Both networks follow the Asymmetric Follow pattern, but they have different defaults reflecting the nature of the objects shared and how people socialized around them.

Socialtext also employs Asymmetric Follow, where people follow other people's Update Feeds to subscribe to events like edits, posts, comments and tags.  I actually think Asymmetric Follow emerged as a pattern designed for adoption, when you consider the alternative -- requiring a confirmed tie before sharing information.

One thing I've found fascinating about how this pattern works out in an organization, with its pre-existing social network and context, is what you can learn about someone from how attention is spent by them and to them.

To the right is how this feature shows up on a Profile in Socialtext People. Unlike Twitter, we needed to make it visually easy to discover who is following who (Adina would describe the design decisions better than me). What I can say is one of the greatest values is on-boarding new employees.  Being a new employee is joining a new social network and the greatest challenge is understanding how information actually flows and how work actually gets done.  By having a default-public network like this in place, on-boarding is accelerated and the strength of weak ties is leveraged.

Side note: yes, this should have been two blog posts

See 100 Million People Thrive

My friend Matt Mahoney launched his startup today, Daily Endeavor.  As the name implies, its just the beginning of a journey to empower 100 Million Millennials/NetGens to find their way in the world.  From his first blog post, Don't Settle, Do What You Love:

Here’s where the story starts. There are three parts that you need to know.

First, who? There is a tremendous force arriving on the scene, and at just about the right time. It’s the sheer creative force of people coming into their own. Maybe they’re 24, or maybe they’re 19. Maybe they’re your friend, your brother or daughter. Or maybe it’s you. This great wave of individuals goes by many names (Millennials, Gen Y, Net Gens, you name it). The labels are not so important, it’s the individuals that are at the center of the story — who they are, and what they choose to do. This generation is going to re-shape the world as we know it. It’s already begun, and it’s fantastic.

Second, have you ever wondered why is it some people truly thrive in their work life, while others do not? This is the question we set out to answer as part of a research project at Harvard over three years ago. The pattern we found isn’t a lack of talent (there is tons) or opportunity (there are more types of jobs today than ever before). We found most people never discover what they truly want to do. Too many people settle. That’s a problem — not only is there great cost to the individual (”wow, my job really sucks”), but also to their companies, colleagues and the economy.

Consider the alternative. What if more people found a career path of genuine interest, however they define it? What if more people were able to find work that lit them up — how would their lives be different?

In our experience, these people excel, and not just economically. These people have more opportunities to grow and more ways to — dare we say it — be happy. They make better colleagues, managers, entrepreneurs, and probably neighbors too. Because they’re working from abundance, not scarcity, there’s an unmistakable productivity that’s unleashed.

As a result, we set about addressing the unmet need — helping people answer the question “What do I want to do?” –  which led us to develop Endeavor Prep, the career search prep course.

If you know people just entering the workforce, please have them check out the service. It offers unparalleled depth and connecting with real industry experts.  Many of you may have met Matt when he worked at Socialtext and I'm really happy about the good he is doing in this world.