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ContentPlurk: Delivering on the promise of TwitterI joined Plurk yesterday.Twitter made a promise - stated or no - we expected it to be sort of like a mixed update channel where everyone could let everyone else know what was in their heads. It started out as a status update - I'm in Canberra, I'm in the business class lounge at LAX, I'm at work. Then it went to "I'm at work, my boss is an a**hole" and soon there was a conversation happening on bosses and other people at work. The trouble with Twitter (apart from the system performance issues) was that it became too hard to hold a threaded conversation - too many other things happening in the world to break out into a separate topic without involving everyone, and someone getting in the way of it all by live-blogging a blow-by-blow report of an event somewhere and filling the whole screen. Plurk solves this by displaying responses underneath the original plurk/post. It isn't perfect (there have been some system teething problems too) but it is overall a better service for group conversation than Twitter. A lot of the early adopters have been bloggers - several members of the Aussie Bloggers Forum have jumped in, and some have blogged about it. It seems to be a natural way to communicate about how everyone is going and what they are doing - with helpful commentary from their friends. You can follow my plurkings here. TweetWheel: Social Network Analysis for TwitterTweetWheel brings social network analysis to Twitter.It shows relationships between Twitter users that all have a common friend. Here is my TweetWheel:
Each 'spoke' represents one of my Twitter friends. Each line represents a connection between two of those friends to one another. The density of the bundle shows how many common friends they have with me, and with each other - the higher the density, the greater the number of common acquaintances. Myself, I have two main communities that use Twitter: the IA/UXD/webgeek community, and the blogging community (including many on the Aussie Bloggers Forum). There is some overlap between these two communities as many webgeeks are bloggers too. While TweetWheel is fascinating eye candy, I am not sure how useful this will be as a practical social network analysis tool to the likes of you and me. In the intelligence world, social network analysis is used to piece together seemingly unrelated information facets. Operation AIR used something like TweetWheel to narrow down suspects in the Belanglo State Forest murders - out of several thousand possible suspects, only a few dozen had enough points of similarity (that is, enough link density) to place them in the area for the time of the murders, show history of certain criminal behavior, and some other factors that the police thought desirable. These dozens of suspects were then placed under human surveillance. So - TweetWheel is cool: but is it useful? Google Sites: The (slightly odd) signup processI went to sign up for Google Sites just now and got this error message:
Here's part of the error message in detail:
What the? :) Here's what the help text says:
It looks like they are after people with their own domain names, such that they can create multiple accounts under the same domain. Good thing I own a domain or two :) It is a little scary that Gmail accounts don't work for Sites - to have full collaboration it would be good to have GoogleChat (which works nicely - I have it open more often than any other IM platform). Google are planning to have GoogleChat available to Sites users sometime soon, but this will not be as easy to use as a separate widget - at the moment, I open it by default whenever I have Gmail open. Social Computing: Implied social contractI believe that there is an implied social contract with the purveyors of social computing platforms - they improve our lives for free, and in return, we use their products and add value for their current/future shareholders. This is a mutually beneficial arrangement - they are not doing us a favour by providing the tools in a world where there are many alternatives, and we are not doing them a favour by using their tool over all others. We help one another to the advantage of both parties.It sucks when the platforms don't keep up their end of the bargain. Maybe I'm having a bad morning - it's early, I'm tired, and yes, even a little hung over. But after the WordPress 2.5 fiasco, I'm feeling a little burnt by anything free that doesn't work. Owing to multiple "hey, check this out!" notices from friends, this morning I'm trying diigo and Woopra. diigo diigo is a direct competitor with del.icio.us and mag.nolia in the social bookmarking space. Social bookmarking works like this: you find cool things, you pass them to your friends/colleagues, they assess them for worth, pass them on to people they know, and so on. Everybody loves it, everybody uses it, and the developers retire to Fiji on a yacht at age 22 after a successful IPO. That's how it works in theory. del.icio.us burnt their bridges with me a long time ago because it was something that I had to go out of my way to use - not their fault, but not easily usable - so I went back to email for "hey, check this out" dissemination of interesting URLs. diigo looked different - more blogger friendly - so I gave it a go. I went to the create account screen and noted that I could login using my OpenID credentials - which I did. OpenID then asked me to fill in additional profile information because diigo had asked for it - preferred name, profile photo, location and so on. I did this and granted diigo permanent use of this additional information. When I got back to diigo from OpenID, none of my profile information was there. It only took me a minute to re-add it, but why ask for it then ask for it again? No big deal, sure, but not a good way to start a relationship. Woopra Woopra is a blog stats program - it will tell you who has visited your blog, and what's happening right now. Lorelle on WordPress gave it a pretty good wrap: Woopra is a live statistics program. It tells you what is happening on your blog right now, this very second. When he showed it the crowd at WordCamp Dallas, I logged onto his blog, and there on the screen, the audience saw my name pop up in Woopra. The cookie created when I commented on his blog passed on my site information, information I had already provided freely when I left a comment. Those who have not commented or registered are just shown as anonymous visitors. I thought that with all the friend recommendations and this glowing recommendation from Lorelle that it was certainly good enough for me. So I grabbed an account and tried to add a couple of my blogs. Instead of live statistics, what I mostly saw was this:
That's the Woopra password screen. It's where I ended up 6 times just now when trying to add three blogs and change my profile. I got booted when clicking on the add a website toolbar menu option, adding blog details, and clicking on the My profile toolbar menu option. To add insult to injury, once I'd added the blogs, I was told that approval would take up to 7 days.
I won't hold my breath :) So what could they have done better? Some basic software engineering could have helped in both cases (and WordPress too, no doubt). Testing is universal - it happens before or after release. You always test, one way or another. Guess which is more efficient in the long run? Additionally, responsiveness to user issues is a good thing. To be fair, I only raised these issues with the diigo and Woopra folks this morning. The WordPress crew are certainly notable for their lack of response to user-generated issues - there is a pattern of abuse being directed toward anyone who raises issues around WordPress 2.5. The New Marketing concept, if it has any basis in fact at all, would dictate that responsiveness is the number 1 positive act that any organisation can produce - sadly, the social computing world is struggling under the illusion that they are in the software business (not the service business). What are the implications of the platform makers breaking the implied social contract? People are less trusting of vendors now - they are more willing to vote with their feet now than at any time in history. If Ford makes a bad car, people stop buying Fords and look for alternatives. The world is full of social bookmarking applications, blog statistics mechanisms, and yes WordPress, even blogging platforms. My guess is that the early adopters will adopt every new thing anyway, but the rest of us are looking for a real relationship - a platform that we can trust, and recommend to our friends without feeling foolish for having done so. Aussie Bloggers Forum is born!The secret can now be revealed: Snoskred, Meg and I (and a team of very helpful moderators) have been working on the Aussie Bloggers Forum over the last couple of weeks. It has been an exciting time, with a lot of community-in-action networking (and a lot of hard work, including a sterling effort by Snoskred's partner as forum administrator).So what is the Aussie Bloggers Forum about? Here is what the front page says: Aussies, and bloggers, can be really nice people :) Put the two together and you have the potential for a wonderful community. I encourage you to register today - it is free, fun, and a great way of sharing what you know about blogging and life in general. If you need more convincing, watch the slideshow. The Social PeaTwitter is going green pea crazy in support of a good cause. Artist Susan Reynolds is being treated for breast cancer and uses bags of frozen peas to help with post-operative pain. This has inspired the Frozen Pea Fund - a group that is raising money for Making Strides, the breast cancer campaign of the American Cancer Society.I've seen friends go through this terrible disease - several in the last 12 months. Despite it being a high profile cancer (and therefore the recipient of much funding) there is still a long way to go before it can be considered an inconvenience rather than a life-threatening and incredibly painful condition. I applauded the efforts of the Boobiethon crew and like to help out wherever I can here in Australia. Chris Brogan writes: Social media is a lot more than blogging, podcasting, and social networks. It’s effective at reaching the people beyond the keyboards and microphones and connecting them to important things. Works for me. If you want to contribute, change your Flickr/Twitter/etc avatar to a "pea" version and let people know about the Frozen Pea Fund. Andrew 
The Twitterian Conspiracy: How Social Media becomes pervasiveOn this day... 17 December 2007, two Twitter-related things happened:
We're stuck with this:
I have this private theory that social computing isn't about the social at all, but about the ubiquosity. That is, the pervasiveness, the property of being everywhere at once. I spoke to my lovely Donna on the phone earlier - but knowing that she (and everyone else) is cut off from Twitter at the moment was, well, weird. My world was not as complete. About half of my Twitter friends are in my mobile phone address book - and most of the rest are available this very second via email. So it isn't as if I couldn't reach out and touch them if I wanted to - it isn't as if I can't fulfil the need to communicate with them - but I am left feeling bereft, lost because I can't see their little text snippets floating past me. I think that social media is about pervasiveness, penetration, headspace, eyeballs. I think that 'social' is only the delivery boy - the transmission mechanism, not the end goal. We're consenting to raise someone's stock price. We are social beings, we need to communicate - and Twitter/Jaiku/Digg/Facebook are taking advantage of that in the same way that fast food chains prey on the obese. Will they be the cigarette companies of tomorrow, doomed to pay for the massive profits they are raking in now? How companies can make the most of user-generated contentNo big surprises:
Who'd have thought? :) For full details, read the McKinsey report (requires free registration). The Permaculture Approach to InformationPermaculture is a system of sustainable agriculture. My late father was a big fan of it, and I've designed my own gardens along permaculture principles in the past. Two of the principles that apply themselves nicely to information architecture and information management are:
Imagine a fence dividing your chook (chicken) pen from your orchard in a suburban back yard. You grow beans and other edible creepers along the fence. The creepers get a little overgrown so that the chooks can use them for shelter. You eat the chooks and the eggs they produce. You eat the beans. You use the manure they produce in the compost that feeds the next generation of beans. The chooks go into different yards that contain the vegetable beds lying fallow for next year. You supply the chook-feeding and -watering labor. Everything feeds everything else. Everything contributes, and everything benefits. It is one big holistic system, and fractally expands in scope to include every energy transaction on the whole planet. How does this apply to information and to Information Architecture? Think of a small closed information system, like an spreadsheet sitting on a thumbdrive. It is perfect, and wonderful, and there are hundreds of millions of such little spreadsheets like it on thumbdrives all over the world. To be of any use to more than just the originator (even to the originator in the longer term), it needs to be shared - that is, it needs to be part of a system. To form a useful part of that system, the spreadsheet needs to be updateable, mergeable and findable. Without access to the data, and the attachment of meaningful context, it will never make the jump to being information, and beyond it, knowledge. Dan Saffer wrote: The biggest leap forward in computing came when the designers and engineers at Xerox PARC stopped thinking about the computer in this way and instead started thinking about it instead as a communication device. And we've seen what this led to: email, networks, the internet. The network is the computer now, and if you don't believe me, do what I did a few weeks ago and unplug from the internet for a few days and watch yourself squirm. I agree. Without effective sharing, whatever is created is lost. So what do we do about it? At CeBIT Australia's eGovernment conference I learnt that the Queensland government has done an information audit and determined that 85% of government documents can be covered by Creative Commons licensing - in effect they are saying that a large proportion of their information is publicly releasable. For a government to admit this is pretty remarkable - they are shifting from a "tell 'em nothing unless they plead for it" paradigm to a "unless there are security/privacy/commercial sensitivity reasons, let's give them everything" mindview. Sounds very new-age, but I believe that Information Management is changing, slowly but surely, to concentrate more on effective dissemination than control. Time will tell. Note: This article was originally posted on Facibus Reviews. Social Computing: If not us, our competitorsAccenture is adopting a social computing paradigm. This quote says it all - referring to Accenture's CTO, Don Rippert:He had looked at YouTube and wondered why a teenager can find an amateur video on YouTube quickly and easily, while finding a video of a corporate presentation in a business’s archives is next to impossible if you don’t know the exact title of the file. Like Matt Hodgson, I am wondering when I get my social computing tools at work. Like Steve Collins, I'm wondering whether I should be standing in front of the steamroller trying to stop progress, or whether I'd rather be driving the change and profiting from it. If we don't embrace the business advantages of social computing, rest assured that our competitors will. Because they are. Note: This article was originally posted on Facibus Reviews. |
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