Author: JP

Don’t worry, I haven’t suddenly gone senile. Nor have I decided to endorse traditional shoplifting.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly like shopping. [Except at bookstores, particularly when they’re full of second-hand and musty books just waiting to be discovered.] For me the web was a dream come true, allowing me to get most of what I needed without going into a store. Otherwise, the minute I get into a store, I start looking like Birdman looking for new feathered friends. Strangely trapped.

In similar vein, I don’t like crowds. Except in sports stadia and concert halls and out on the street and in parks and in the countryside and at home. In fact, come to think of it, the only place I don’t like crowds is in shops. Which figures, given my position on shopping. And given I was born and brought up in Calcutta, which was a teensy bit crowded. Like cholesterol, I think crowds come in two kinds, good and bad. And the shopping kind is the only bad one.

So a part of me curls up and hibernates at this time of year. But that’s not the point of this post. I was reading the New York Times this morning, and I came across this story: Anarchists in the Aisles? Stores Provide a Stage.

I quote:

Shopdropping, otherwise known as reverse shoplifting, involves surreptitiously putting things in stores, rather than illegally taking them out, and the motivations vary. Anti-consumerist artists lip replica products packaged with political messages onto shelves while religious proselytizers insert pamphlets between the pages of gay-and-lesbian readings at book stores.

I had come across limited variants of this, in the rebellious name of art, as in the case of Banksy doctoring Paris Hilton CDs. You know something? I’d never actually considered buying a Paris Hilton CD. But I’d be prepared to pay real money for a Banksy version: who could resist listening to tracks named Why Am I Famous?, What Have I Done? and What Am I For?. [Incidentally, you will notice I have explicitly avoided placing a photograph of Paris Hilton in any form or shape here as part of this story. That’s not the way I want to attract readers.]

Anyway, it looks like that one strand of Banksian art is going mainstream, and we don’t yet have the words to describe what happens next. What happens if I pick up something that was shopdropped? There’s no price on it, and it could be argued that I’m doing the store a favour. Does the shopdropped thing become the property of the shop once it has been dropped?

Which reminds me. Over twenty years ago, I laughed like a train when I read the story of the drunk and his fish-and-chips. Apparently there was this drunk. Gently rolling his way home, no threat to anyone. Hungry as hell. Spends his last few pounds buying product from his local “chippie” on his way home. Needs to tie his shoelaces, places his food on the nearest flat surface he can find. Which happens to be the “open” shelf of an ATM. While he ties his laces, the ATM’s protective screen comes down, trapping his treasured food. He goes berserk, tries to beat up on the ATM, but it’s made of sterner stuff and refuses to budge. Cops patrolling by see him, take him in. He sues bank for “stealing” his food. Doesn’t quite win, but he achieves one thing. The bank is instructed to reduce the time between the completion of a legitimate transaction and the closure of the transparent cover. Apocryphal? I have no idea. But I loved the story.

As shopdropping becomes mainstream, so will its virtual equivalent. Soon we will see mainstream “parasite” advertisements, leeched on to “legitimate” ads on “legitimate” sites. Clickthroughs that do not get paid for at the Googlebank.

We haven’t even sorted out First Life rules for electronic “intellectual property”, and now we can expect to have this. Electronic shopdropping. I’m waiting to see what happens next. With some relish.

At first I had no idea what was happening; suddenly, a raft of messages with the letters PEA (in capital letters, as shown) started appearing across my Twitterspace. Laura Athavale Fitton, who’s usually clued up on these things, filled me in on what was happening. [Thanks, Laura].

Short version: Susan Reynolds, “author, painter, designer and Relationship Media Maven,” was diagnosed, unexpectedly, as having breast cancer. Read her story here and here. Make no mistake, this story is not about Twitter, it’s about Susan, her family and friends, her community, how she responded to the crisis, how they responded. Twitter helped, helped by providing a web-based low-cost infrastructure that could mobilise support quickly and effectively. All communications related to Susan’s situation were preceded with the word PEA; if you wanted to know how she was, all you had to do was to follow PEAple, an avatar set up for this purpose. Susan’s description of what she needed to do to allay the pain, using frozen peas, led not just to this, but to a Frozen Pea Friday Flickr group and to a Frozen Pea Donation Fund.

Note: If you want to help with a donation, please go to the Frozen Pea Fund here.

I don’t know Susan personally, but I learnt about her and about her condition via Twitter, more specifically via people I followed on Twitter who knew her and her story. My thoughts and prayers are with Susan and her family.

As you may have inferred from the above example, Twitter seems to have merit when used as a communications vehicle in an emergency. What makes it different from other emergency communications vehicles? I think three things stand out.

One, it’s non-hierarchical, based on networks of people rather than command-and-control structures. Two, partly because of this non-hierarchy, and partly because it’s based on the web, it’s fast. Three, again because it’s based on the web and uses web standards, it’s cheap, efficient and platform/device agnostic.

Not surprisingly, Twitter proved popular during the California wildfires in October 2007, for all the reasons cited above. But perhaps a little surprisingly, the Los Angeles Fire Department decided to set up and use a Twitter feed as part and parcel of its emergency communications processes. I shall watch their usage with great interest. Thank you, whoever in the LAFD decided to be open about using such technologies.

To be continued.

It’s been one of those truly lazy days, so I think I’ll start seriously sideways.

Twitter. Hmmm. The first time that I can remember coming across the word “twitter” was when I was reading Wordsworth as a boy. [Yes, I know, I have been Confused a looong time]. Here’s the first stanza of the poem in question, Written in March While resting on the Bridge on the foot of Brother’s Water

THE COCK is crowing,
The stream is flowing,
The small birds twitter,
The lake doth glitter,
The green field sleeps in the sun;
The oldest and youngest
Are at work with the strongest;
The cattle are grazing,
Their heads never raising;
There are forty feeding like one!

Twitter. A phenomenon. Just over a year old. If you don’t know what it is, you should. You could do worse start with the Wordsworth poem. Think about some cocks crowing. A flowing stream. Some birds twittering. A glittering lake. Some quiet, some peace and harmony. A diverse group, young and old, weak and strong. Some herd instinct behaviour. And the ability for forty to feed like one.

Twitter. “A service for friends, family and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”

Twitter. Still haven’t got my drift? Then take a look at this definition in Wikipedia, or, if you want to get a real and fresh taste, this recent post by Ed Yourdon.

I’ve been watching Twitter almost since it started; initially, that’s all I did, watch. Some of my friends were early adopters, and I thought I could learn by watching them. [It was unusual to be learning fof my friends rather than off my kids, I’ve become so used to the latter]. Earlier this year I started playing with Twitter, but not seriously. It was only a month or two ago that I really got involved, as I sought to understand more about the beast.

I think of Twitter very simply:

First and foremost it’s a bulletin board with a difference, with many differences.
For one thing, the bulletin board has a publish-subscribe capability built into it. Anyone who joins can publish to it, but publishing alone means nothing, a tree falling in some Amazonian rain forest. This bulletin board has meaning only when someone reads your tweet, when someone subscribes to the stuff you publish. In Twitter speak, when someone “follows” you.
The first difference, therefore, is that you choose which parts of the bulletin board you read. You choose who (and what) you read.
When you follow someone, you can get that person’s tweets in a number of ways, directly off the web, read into some other application (like Facebook), via SMS to some mobile device or even via some IM system or the other. You can choose to receive an individual’s tweets via mobile or IM or direct through web only.
The second difference, therefore, is that you choose the device and the delivery method. You choose how, when and where you read.
And that’s not all. There is a hard constraint on the size of the message you’re reading, set currently at 140 characters; I have assumed that the remaining 20 characters available to any SMS-based service are being used by Twitter for message-specific information.

Short, brief, to the point. Where you want it, when you want it, how you want it. And limited to messages from the people you choose to “follow”.

Now that’s all very good, but why would this be of any value to the enterprise?

To answer this question, I need to take you on another ramble. Do you remember the days when you visited your parents’ friends, then had to wait miserably while they showed you their holiday photographs and films? Maybe you were even more unlucky, and you had to live through the next generation, when your own friends bored you with their films and photographs? And then surprise surprise, along came Flickr and YouTube, and suddenly you were interested in your friends’ holiday snaps and films.

So what happened? Did the holiday snaps suddenly become more interesting? I don’t think it was that, the change was more fundamental. You chose when you saw the photographs. You chose where and how you saw them. And when you did see them, there was something participative you could do: you could tag them “your way” and share what you’d done.

Twitter’s success, at least in part, is because of this “Martini” effect, anytime anyplace anywhere, augmented by the participative value. But that’s not all. I think there’s something else at work here, something subtler. Sometime ago, when I was tangentially involved in helping design workflows for a new building, we started looking at the best ways of organising coffee-cooler areas, in order to encourage people to chat. Most of the designs suggested were of the Alien Mushroom category….. you know what I mean, where you have these strange not-quite-tables, I guess you would call them pods, sprouting everywhere randomly. Some of the designs, on the other hand, were of the Wild West Bar variety, where instead of a pod you had a long narrow counter.

Gut feel told me that the long narrow counter worked better than the pod. I have no idea whether I was right, I was only peripherally involved in the planning, and soon it became irrelevant, I changed jobs; what I do know is that I’ve thought about it since, and I think I know why my instincts said what they did.

When you see someone standing at a pod, you need to come face-to-face with that someone in order to start a conversation. When you see someone at a bar counter, you only need to come side-by-side. It’s the same at an art gallery, when you stand next to someone and break into conversation. The moral of the story is that side-by-side makes conversation easier, face-to-face can be threatening at the start, especially with strangers.

There is something about Twitter that is side-by-side empathising rather than face-to-face confronting.

So that’s what I think. Let me summarise, having taken you for a wander all over the place. Twitter has a role to play in the Enterprise, because:

1. It allows you to impose a publish-subscribe model on top of a bulletin-board-like system, which reduces noise and improves the signal as it were.
2. It allows you to publish (and to subscribe) in a platform-agnostic device-agnostic way, which keeps the communications process simple.
3. It supports teamwork and participation as a result, in a non-threating not-in-your-face way

As a result, there are many ways to get value out of Twitter in the Enterprise, ranging from problem-solving through to education and training, while improving overall communication and collaboration. Of course there are caveats. As with any other form of communication, Twitter can be misused. As happened with bulletin boards, it is theoretically possible for Twitter to degenerate into idle gossip, pump-and-dump, smut, whatever. But this time around we can stop it, far more easily than we could stop the desecration of bulletin boards. All we have to do is to stop following someone; all we have to do is to block that someone at the next stage.

Publish easily, from any device, anytime anyplace anywhere. Subscribe easily, again device and location and time agnostic. Keep the messages short. Watch each other, learn from each other. That’s what we can do with Twitter in the Enterprise. But we will only do it if we want to share, and if we have the discipline of learning.

What is the first thing that comes into your mind when you come across the word “platform”?

For me, there is only one answer: Howrah Station in Calcutta. Where I first learnt the joy of “platform tickets”, the practice of paying to see your family and friends off somewhere, or that of paying to welcome them back. When I was young, we didn’t think twice about piling into a car and taking a long journey (by Calcutta standards in those days), spending interminable amounts of time stuck in traffic crossing the bridge, queueing up to buy said platform tickets, then finally skipping daintily over questionable (and often smelly) wet patches. All for what? For the privilege of being pushed and jostled while waiting for a friend or family member to arrive or depart. We loved it. There was a “just for the crack” carefree madness to much that we did, and I will never forget those days.

Howrah Station platform: Picture courtesy of www.anothersubcontinent.com, a site I wander into every now and then.

Not everyone is as confused as I am. When you see the word platform, perhaps you see what Dave McClure sees:

Dave blogs over at Master Of 500 Hats, another site I wander past every now and then. My thanks to Dave for the illustration.

Maybe you’re not like me, and not like the others either. Maybe you’re like Hugh Macleod, who visualises platforms this way:

Note to self: Never trust a techie who shouts in capital letters…. (and thanks, Hugh)

People mean many things when they use the word “platform”. In days to come, we are going to have to get more and more used to seeing some other terms crowd around the platform. Terms like open and multisided; terms like apps and widgets; terms like community. Older terms like architecture and component and reuse and standardised will still continue, will become even more important, but will have morphed into something less central-control and more democratised.

That’s not going to be easy.

For people who are used to terms like proprietary and business model and billable event, it’s going to be even harder.

But just for now, we don’t have to worry. The path to the platform is blocked, by people fighting over what it means to be private in public.

So if you get bored over the Christmas break, here’s something to ponder about:

What does it mean to be private in public?