Author: JP

I can remember a time when people thought e-mail was a complete waste of time. I can remember a time when spreadsheets and storyboarding software were similarly disdained. In fact, I can even remember a time when no senior executive would be seen dead near a computer. You know something? It wasn’t that long ago, maybe 20 years ago?

[Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin, the co-inventors of Visicalc, at an Indian meal recently in Cambridge, MA]

I can remember a time when people thought the internet was a complete waste of time. When browsers had no future, when search engines were nothing more than toys. It wasn’t that long ago that Google was something that a few people played with, and the rest thought…. that they were wasting time. I can remember a time when people thought eBay was a plaything, someplace that people went….to waste time. I can even remember a time when packages marked Amazon or Fedex were unheard-of in enterprise mail trolleys. You know something? It wasn’t that long ago, maybe 10 years ago.

I can remember a time when people thought social media, software and networks were a complete waste of time. When Facebookers were fools, Twitterers were twits, when even blogs and wikis and IM were viewed with deep suspicion, when everyone thought that the people who were using them…..were wasting time. You know something? It wasn’t that long ago. Maybe it’s still happening now.

I can remember a time when people thought Cluetrain was a joke, that the authors should have stayed in the Sixties and kept their mouths shut. That reading Cluetrain (and the books that followed it) was a complete waste of time.

[Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Chris Locke, caught wasting time at Defrag in Denver a couple of months ago.]

Wasting time on things that have no commercial value. I know I’ve written about it before, but I feel there is a point still to be made. Is it a new point? Perhaps not. Let me remind you of some of the things that have been said — said by powerful and important people — in the last century or so:

“Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.” —Marechal Ferdinand Foch
“The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?” —David Sarnoff’s associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.

“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” –-H.M. “Harry” Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” —Western Union internal memo, 1876.

“But what … is it good for?” –Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.

“The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a ‘C,’ the idea must be feasible.” –A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith’s paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. (Smith went on to found FedEx.)

[My thanks to this site run by JD Paul for conveniently collecting a bunch of such sayings].

Let me illustrate something. The figures above represent a Mobius strip (on the top), a Klein Surface (in the bottom left) and a Fibonacci Sequence (on the bottom right). While all three concepts are intriguing from a theoretical viewpoint (especially to amateur mathematicians), the practical application of those concepts has always fascinated me. When I learnt that people had figured out that conveyor belts should be designed on Mobius strip principles (in order to even out the wear and tear) my heart sang. When I learnt that Fibonacci sequences could be used to predict the number of leaves on a tree, the number of branches on a tree, or even the growth of rabbit populations, I was spellbound. In fact, when I was a young insomniac, I used to count sheep in Fibonacci just for the hell of it, and landed up staying awake enjoying the counting! Now, while I haven’t yet heard of good “commercial” uses of a Klein Surface, I remain intrigued. Intrigued enough to read the Wikipedia entry while writing this, and delighting in finding out that what I used to refer to as a Klein Bottle is actually a misnomer, it was meant to be a Klein Surface and got corrupted, in the original German, from flache to flasche. Intrigued enough to be willing to be delighted as and when I find out that someone has found a sensible use for the Klein Surface.

I am not a fan of technology for technology’s sake; while I am curious about many things, I am not suddenly recommending that knowledge-worker businesses start large-scale experimentation with emerging tools. But. And it’s an important but. That does not mean we do not experiment at all. So, when I see emergent tools with the following characteristics, I get very interested:

Low barriers to entry, in investment costs, running costs and prerequisite skills
Low TCO, open architecture, no proprietary lock-ins, either overt or covert
Evidence of take-up by Generation M
Emergence of a community of participation in an open multisided marketplace around the product or service

The *possibility* that knowledge work can become more effective and more efficient, not just in the enterprise, but in health, education and welfare. Globally

These are the things I see when I write about Facebook or about Twitter. When I play with YouTube or Flickr. When I play around with Dopplr or Vodpod or BlogFriends or School Of Everything. I see possibilities. Possibilities of improving our lives. Possibilities that excite me.

That’s why I get really interested when I see fire departments using Twitter. Manufacturing concerns using YouTube. [My thanks to Brian Humphrey for the LAFD Twitter info, and to Alan Buxton for pointing me towards MFGX. See, I don’t just read comments, I follow trails to see what the commenter’s blog is about, and often branch off from there, meandering, serendipitously, and learning from it all]

And it’s not just to admire from afar. I have been rejoicing in watching people where I work use the web first, that is so refreshing. When I ask for a demo of something I get a YouTube link, when I ask for an explanation of something I get a Flickr link. Web first. As long as it’s open, global, real-time. Web first.

An aside: I remember a time when I used to play a lot of contract bridge; there was a bunch of us who met regularly, my father would join us every now and then, and we learnt a lot. Me and my friends, we revelled in sophisticated modern bidding conventions, based around a modified Precision with a strong “phony” club, four-card majors, Stayman, weak twos in the majors, a splinter “multi” two diamonds, that kind of thing. And we spent a long time getting very precise messages to our partners using these sophisticated techniques. One day we were taken apart by some of our younger friends, who had hit upon a far better system. They just showed their cards to each other, quietly, while we were pontificating on our complex bids. Illegal, but highly effective.

Using YouTube or Flickr is a bit like that; instead of the complexity and sophistication underlying Powerpoint, you just take a photograph or a video and post it. If the goal is excellence in communication, we should bear it in mind when we work in design.

That’s why I enjoyed using RippleRap at Le Web. Of course I was biased; after all, the tools had been built by colleagues of mine; but I would have used it even if someone else had built it, because it fulfilled the “webness” test. And that’s important. [What’s RippleRap? I wanted to use TiddlyWiki as a collaborative presentation tool, a place where I could put up brief text and graphics and allow people in the audience to make notes while I spoke, and, more importantly, to share the notes they made. I’m really grateful to the team as to how quickly they came up with something that worked, and worked well. So here’s a screenshot of RippleRap below:

It’s not just the Osmosoft team that think like this; it’s been very encouraging to see “commercial” uses of YouTube, as evinced by the number of instructional videos out there, and for that matter promotional ones as well, as shown below:

Some of these issues take me back quite a few years: it was probably 2004 when I first read that IBM were the single biggest “user” of eBay. Today, for example, you can go to eBay to learn about IBM’s leasing and financing options. Web first. [There was a time when I used to tell people that IBM had a System 38 series because they had at least 37 other proprietary architectures. How they’ve changed. Amazing.]

My apologies for the rambling nature of this post, it gets that way sometimes. Where am I going with all this? It’s simple. There are many people who criticise social media tools because they perceive them as ways to waste time; these criticisms in turn enter the consciousness of large enterprises and form part of enterprise immune systems, ably and effectively shutting out the pioneers who are seeking to derive value from the tools.

We haven’t figured out a way to solve the problem of low knowledge worker productivity. [Sometimes, I get the feeling we spend more time trying to figure out how to measure knowledge worker productivity, rather than concentrate on raising productivity levels. We spend more time mutating benchmarks to our purposes, throwing away the opportunity to make quantum improvements as a result. In fact that’s my First Law of Benchmarks: If gains are so low that you need benchmarks to prove the existence of the gains, they’re probably not worth having in the first place.

While the competition was busy protecting proprietary architectures, IBM transformed itself around Linux and services. And the competition sank without trace. The same thing is about to happen, with social media tools. A few companies will become big winners, the rest will disappear without trace, to be replaced by a new order. When I see Facebook, I see Bloomberg. There’s a new “buy side” in a new set of digital markets, and they’re setting the rules. Markets where information is liquid. And digital.

As William Gibson said, the future’s here, it’s just unevenly distributed. That description is apt when applied to the implementation and take-up of social media tools. So when you next decide all this is a waste of time, think IBM, think Bloomberg, think eBay, think Google, think Amazon. Or even think Goldman Sachs. Think why Goldman Sachs has a very high percentage of employees using Facebook. Goldman Sachs, wasting time? You better believe it. And making money while they do it.

I’ve written two posts about capillary conversations so far (linked for your convenience here and here), and they seem to have elicited a reasonable level of comment and question.

Three questions seem to repeat themselves:

How often should I tweet?
What should I tweet about?
When should I take the conversation offline?

These are not simple questions, and we will throw away a lot of value by trying to answer them prescriptively. Let me try and answer them “provisionally”, let me share where my thoughts currently are. On the question of tweet frequency, I think that it’s a subtle negotiation between each person and their followers. One tends to get some sort of feel, a sense, of what the right level is. I tend to go up every time I learn to do something within Twitter, and then, once I have learnt enough, I revert to some prior base level. At least that’s how it feels to me.

Tweet frequency by itself can become an irritant to others. I have had at least one Facebook friend, someone I’ve known for 20 years (but not particularly well, we were nodding acquaintances who met maybe a dozen times over the two decades) comment that he couldn’t handle the level of updates he was getting in his Facebook mini-feed when I started tweeting my status. So far I haven’t had to unfollow anyone; I have blocked a few auto spammers, and I have gone for turning Notifications off for many people; it was part of learning how to use the tool.

For some people, tweet frequency is inextricably linked with tweet topic; this can have positive and negative effects. So I’ve had some people tell me I was tweeting too often about what I was listening to, while others have engaged with me more often as a result of the music tweets. Some are interested in discussions about restaurants or meals, some not. Some are relaxed about sharing domestic details, some less so. What should I do?

The answer, for me, lies in the third question. When should I take the conversation offline? If I turn that question around on its head, and ask When should I share something? When should I use twitter public rather than a DM. Now I get a clearer answer. I should only share something when I think it will be of value to the group. This is even true of @person tweets…. they should be DMs unless there is some benefit for the group in seeing the @person tweet.

So far so good, but all this is theory. I spent some time looking at what I did, and what I saw other people doing, in Twitter. And I began to realise that there are maybe three legitimate uses:

1. For the benefit of the group, the followers.
2. For the benefit of the tweeter, as in a hoosgot or similar question.
3. For the benefit of both, as in when a new feature or function is being trialled.

Now all this has been stated from the perspective of the person doing the tweeting; there is a lot we can learn from the alternate view, that of the follower, the watcher, the listener. And here the only analogy that comes to mind is a mixing desk or a graphic equaliser. For each person I follow, I’m going to need one of these, so that I can “turn up the volume” for the things I am interested in, and reduce volume for the things I am not interested in.

I have seen people make the mistake of thinking this is about topics of interest and preferences, I wish it was that simple. You see, I may be interested in person A’s book taste but not his music taste, and in person B’s music taste but not her book taste. Which means that I can’t just have a topic-driven set of preferences. They have to be by topic by person.

At least that’s how I’m thinking about all this right now. The tweeter has a duty of care, a duty to his community of followers, to adjust the tone, the frequency and the topics in response to community feedback. But that’s at community level. In addition, the tweetee needs some slider controls per tweeter, set a bit like the privacy controls in Facebook, indicating what kind of information is wanted and what is not wanted.

We are going to make mistakes as we play with these tools. We are going to see a lot of value generated from these tools. But much of that value will go to the early adopters; not because there’s a secret sauce, but because the early adopters will have one advantage the rest won’t have…… they’ll be able to attract the cream of the crop of the new generation entering the marketplace. [I thought of saying the workplace, but changed my mind and went for marketplace].

In the end it’s all going to boil down to choice. Choice made by the follower, the tweetee. Choice made both physically as well as logically; as the tools get better, capillary conversations will become more and more sophisticated.

Regular readers of this blog will know my views on enfranchising those that are currently disenfranchised, be it for physical, economic or social reasons. More specifically, I try and do whatever I can to push towards a goal of ubiquity of access to information, to information tools, and to connectivity. Which is why the very concept of the Digital Divide concerns me greatly.

With this in mind, you can imagine how I felt when I saw the ClustrMap for this site as of this morning; I know it’s very unscientific, and that my readership is infinitesimal, but for some reason the sample seems representative of the Divide.