Did you know that there are more folks practicing Hinduism in Vatican City than there are folks in the Enterprise Content Management community that blog?
Great stuff from James. Turkeys, kitchens and Christmas.
Author: JP
All dressed up with everywhere to go: More musings about Facebook in the enterprise
There have been a lot of comments about Facebook in the blogosphere, and I think some people are missing the point. For some reason, all the talk is about the applications.
It’s not about the applications. It’s about the people.
Facebook is first and foremost a collection of people, a community. Many communities. Yet one community. What the core platform and the applications do is to extend and enrich the ties within that community. Within those communities.
The applications are just things that attract the people and bind them together. The applications enrich the relationships, not the other way around.
We have to start thinking of Facebook not as a “social operating system” but as a society. One representation of society. And it’s different from other cyber-communities in a very real way.
How come? My guess is that Facebook friends see each other a lot more often than was the case in other communities. It is rooted in physical relationship rather than just electronic. The interactions are therefore a lot richer.
And this phenomenon, of a physical community being extended and enriched by electronic ties, is something that is a lot closer to real life, be it at university, within a residential areas, amongst a group sharing a common hobby.
Or being at work.
I’m looking forward to seeing how we see two things develop within the Facebook environment. Collaborative filtering. And prediction markets. Now both of these are really Wisdom-of-crowds plays, and need market liquidity, a critical mass of active and passionate users. Which Facebook have got. In spades.
This line of thought has some interesting consequences. One of which is this:
The success or failure of Facebook will not be measured by a rise or collapse in the number of applications on the platform. For sure we will see the number of applications rise. And crash. And consolidate. And when they consolidate, the final “stable” number may well be measured in the low thousands, because these apps will represent a long tail of usage. Amongst a couple of hundred million participants, this is to be expected.
So expect the doomsayers. The doomsayers who will look at a collapse in the rate of apps getting on the platform and claim it is the end of Facebook. The same effect will be seen in Groups. And whatever else.
It’s not about any of these things. It’s about the people.
The metrics that will continue to matter are: How much time does a Facebook participant stay online every day? What is the Just Joined rate? What is the Gone Dormant rate? How many groups does an average participant belong to?
Applications are important. The platform’s “openness” to new and changing applications is important. But let’s not make the same mistake that the IT profession has been making for decades. It’s not about the apps, it’s about the people.
Facebook is a community of people. All dressed up with everywhere to go. The world is their oyster. Or maybe I should now be saying “worlds are their oysters”…..
Global digital inclusion and debt and corruption
If you haven’t seen it already, it’s worth taking a look at this Maplecroft map of digital inclusion. Just for the fun of it, choose the indebtedness option (choose Debt under Maps Alphabetically on the upper left hand side). Isn’t it amazing that there is so much correlation between “extreme” indebtedness and high digital inclusion? Then choose the corruption option (choose Corruption and Transparency under Maps Alphabetically). By now you should not be surprised at the high correlation between extreme corruption and low digital inclusion.
Maybe it’s just my perverse way of looking at things.
My thanks to Smart Mobs for the pointer to the article. Always a site worth visiting.
Build versus Buy versus Opensource
There’s a saying in the US that goes “unless you’re lead dog, the view never changes”. For some reason, between flights, my reading material contained that phrase twice, and it’s not something I would naturally come across in Europe. And it set me thinking.
In the old days, the guys who ran Management Services Divisions just had to build everything, there wasn’t a software industry around. Then the guys changed, and they ran Data Processing Departments, and there was a burgeoning software industry. Soon they called themselves IT Directors, and in time there was a well established software industry.
So, in the days before we had high-faluting titles like Chief Information Officer, there were two alternatives. Build. Or Buy. Now, with the advent of opensource, we have three choices: Build, Buy or Opensource.
The question is, how do we decide? And this is where the “unless you’re lead dog…” phrase comes in handy. It’s all about perspective, and the value of having a different perspective on things. When a difference in perspective matters. When different perspectives are more about illusion than about reality, and therefore dangerous. How to figure out which is which.
And the way I think of it is this:
For common problems use Opensource.
For rare problems use Buy.
For unique problems use Build.
An “internal” IT department (or whatever it gets called nowadays) should concentrate the bulk of its resources on solving problems that are unique to the enterprise that pays them. A smaller number of people within the department should concentrate on buying (and thereby paying a premium for) rare solutions to rare problems. And the entire department should work on opensource principles, participating in the community for problems that affect the community.
You see, the primary reason why “proprietary” companies get upset with things like opensource is because they’re fighting a losing battle. They want us to pay a premium for the solutions to our common problems, because that’s their business model. The trouble is, the opensource movement is bigger and more effective in solving common problems, that is what Linus’s Law is obliquely about. And this creates an artificial tension. With only one winner.
Build unique solutions to unique problems. Buy rare solutions to rare problems. And participate in the opensource community to solve communal problems. Esther Dyson used to sign off her e-mails with “Always Make New Mistakes”. And I think that’s the sort of principle that should drive the internal IT department.
So what I’m saying is, figure out where you’re lead dog. Use your unique perspective to solve your unique problems. Don’t waste your time and effort solving problems where you don’t have a unique perspective. Maybe this way we can all stop building solutions that look like the rear of a lead dog….
more FaceBook musings
At the airport with the family, flight delayed by 3 hours. Such is life. Everyone else is either asleep or listening to their iPods, so the lounge is an island of serenity. Which makes a change.
I did something I hadn’t done for a long time…. I picked up a copy of Financial News to peruse at leisure while I had a cup of green tea. And on page 43 I found a story that intrigued me.
It listed a number of investment banks and showed the percentage of staff on FaceBook. The top five looked like this:
Goldmans 5510 employees or 19.7 per cent
Deutsche 7636 employees or 11.3 per cent
Lehmans 2951 employees or 10.4 per cent
UBS 8101 employees or 10.4 per cent
Morgan Stanley 5689 employees or 10.3 per cent.
My thanks to Financial News for the research.
It’s been a long nine months since I left investment banking, and much may have changed since then, it is a volatile industry. But when I left it, people like Goldmans were not known to employ large numbers of unintelligent time-wasters.
When one in five Goldman employees use FaceBook, it makes you sit up and think.
I accept the numbers may be flawed: they may include contractors, duplicate aliases with legitimate mail addresses, whatever.
Even if I discount the figures by 50 per cent, they remain formidable.
I haven’t the time to do the research now, but my gut feel is that the FaceBook usage league table looks remarkably similar to the M&A league tables.
Relationship before conversation before transaction.