Musing about things I can do with Twitter that I couldn’t easily do before Twitter

Whenever I come across a new social media tool, I don’t tend to jump in just to be cool, I’m way too old for that. [Sometimes I have to wait anyway, because the thing is in private beta and for some reason private betas find it hard to cross the Atlantic, even in the 21st century.] Most of the time, I sign up and then watch. I try and see what people do with the tool. Which is not necessarily the same thing as what the tool was originally designed for. [I guess that comes from having children, and observing them as they develop, flower and come to maturity. A wonderful experience… ]

When I watch, there is some method to my madness. Once I get the hang of what people are doing with the tool, I start playing with it myself. And then I place three gates in the way, gates that must be passed before I really get engaged with the tool:

Gate 1: Is it a Martini thing, anytime anyplace anywhere?

Gate 2: Are the barriers to entry and participation sufficiently low?

Gate 3: Is there at least one thing I can do with this new thing, one thing I couldn’t do before with anything else?

This post is about Twitter’s Gate 3.

Someone started following me a few days ago, can’t remember who it was. I did the usual thing, a quick check on the person’s Twitter profile, a flit through to that person’s blog, a scan of the people being followed, a minds-eye snapshot of recent tweets and a courtesy “Return of the Follow“.

While doing that, I noticed a tweet from someone I hadn’t connected with for a while, Halley Suitt. Yes, a Suitt Tweet.  [Try saying that quickly after a few drinks.]

What Halley said was interesting. She said “Best thing I’ve read all week”, while describing an article in the New Yorker. [And thank you, New Yorker, for not sticking the article behind a paywall”.]

Now that’s useful.

Blog Friends and equivalents let me know what a person’s surfing, Facebook mini feeds show me what someone’s sharing, there are many social bookmarking tools and RSS readers available, there are even shared readers available.

But so far none of them gives me this kind of information as succinctly as Twitter. Now of course the value didn’t come directly from Twitter, it came from Halley. I know Halley. I know she reads a lot. And I trust her opinions, without having to agree with all of them. And when she says “Best thing I’ve read all week” I sit up and take notice. I take a look. I wander over to where she points.

And boy was I glad I did. This is the article she pointed me towards: Twilight of The Books: A Critic At Large.

Fascinating article. There’s a lot I want to say/ask/share about it, but I’ll leave it for a separate post. Tomorrow.

In the meantime, maybe some of you out there have similar examples of stuff you can do with Twitter you couldn’t do before. In this particular instance what got me excited was how person A could let others (others who were interested in Person A’s opinions on a particular subject) know about an object and its rating simply and efficiently.

Comments and views?

Of dreaming dreams and seeing visions

And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions:

Joel, Chapter 2, verse 28 (The Bible, King James Version)

I can convince myself of anything, and often do. But I have a safety valve: I don’t take my own propaganda seriously; I don’t mind being wrong; I don’t mind “failing”, as long as I learn; I’m happy to “lurch from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm”

For example, I can convince myself that Liverpool has a real chance of winning the Premiership for the first time this year. I can say to myself: it’s nearly the halfway point of the season, Liverpool is nine points behind Manchester United, but with a game in hand; give Liverpool a win in the game in hand and all that separates Liverpool from Manchester United is six points. Which means that if Liverpool had won the game against United, they would be level on points with the league leaders at the halfway stage. And since I watched the game, and I know how close it was, I would have been able to convince myself.

If. What a word. [My father used to intersperse his quotes from Kipling with terse reminders like “If your aunt had [testicles] she’d be your uncle!]

That’s how it was at half-time at the Ataturk Olympic Stadium in Istanbul a few years ago; I was there with my son Isaac, and Liverpool were looking down the barrel, 3-0 down to AC Milan. But there was hope in our hearts. [Hope that was not misplaced, as Liverpool came back to win.]

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Hope. Not just my youngest daughter’s name (for completeness’s sake, my eldest and firstborn is called Orla), but something I have been privileged to have for most of my life. Sometimes forlorn, sometimes misbegotten, sometimes misplaced, but always there.

Over the years, I guess I’ve learnt to temper my hope with pragmatism; not by stopping hoping, but by having a feedback loop and a learning mechanism to train and modify the hope, and to replenish it regularly. You could say I’ve moved from being a young man seeing visions to an old one dreaming dreams.

So. On to the Melbourne Test. How can I make myself believe that India can win, having to score 499 runs after managing less than 200 last time around? Here we go:

  • Someone has scored over 499 before, in an away Test match, against difficult opposition. England scored 654 in their 4th innings against South Africa, in Durban, in 1938-39.
  • Of the ten highest 4th innings Test scores ever, FIVE were against Australia.
  • Of the ten highest 4th innings Test scores ever, an amazing EIGHT were scored by the away team.
  • India scored TWO out of the top five. Ever.
  • Six of the top ten highest 4th innings scores were achieved in the last 30 years.
  • The last entrant into the top 10 was a year ago. Against Australia. In Australia.[It was Sri Lanka].
  • India already has the second-highest 4th innings winning total ever.
  • Both India and Australia will remember this Test. Nine of the players currently in Melbourne played the Eden Gardens wonder test: three Australian, six Indian. [Hayden, Ponting, Gilchrist, Dravid, Ganguly, Tendulkar, Laxman, Zaheer, Harbhajan]
  • It boils down to being able to bat for two days.
  • It boils down to dreaming dreams and seeing visions: What dreams do those nine players have? What visions do the other 13 have?

Convinced? Well, I tried. I shall follow the last two days with hope in my heart. Hoping that there is a last day. [Incidentally, people laughed at me when I bought tickets for the 5th day of the 5th Ashes Test a few years ago, for September 12th at the Oval. I was there. With hope in my heart.]

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I am sure my Australian readers, led by Aqualung, will revel in pointing out to me tomorrow how wrong I was. If they get the chance. But then there’s no point my writing this after tomorrow’s play, that’s not blogging.

Blogging is provisional. It involves making yourself vulnerable, taking risk. Otherwise it’s reporting.

[Incidentally, Ric, I know you really appreciate cricket, that you mean what you say when you comment on “wanting to see play on the fifth day”. I know that with you, this will not become a jingoistic conversation about cricket or football. And I appreciate that].

This post, in case you haven’t figured it out, isn’t really about cricket. Or about football. Or even about sport.

It’s about seeing visions. And dreaming dreams. And not being scared.

On the verge of another new year, I’d like to wish all of you everything you need to dream dreams and to see visions. MSM is characterised by reportage on doom, gloom, cataclysms and disasters, failures and crashes. Bad news sells. And I’m not prepared to buy it any more. [Reminds me of how moved I was, as a youth, when I first heard 7 O’Clock News/Silent Night by Simon and Garfunkel all those years ago].

We have an opportunity. For ourselves and for the generations to follow. That we will use emergent media to build each other up, to encourage each other. That we will look at emergent media in the context of what we can do with them, not what we can’t do. That we will critique ourselves and our tools in order to improve and not to ridicule.

This world needs visionaries and dreamers. So let us start the new year with a resolution to help our youth dream dreams and see visions. It’s up to us.

enough of fear and greed

A few days ago, I saw this story about people being advised to return their library books on time in order to avoid their credit ratings being affected.

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I think this is wrong. It’s like telling people not to do stupid things and stick them into Facebook in case their job prospects are affected. I understand that we all have to learn about the consequences of our actions, but I think we have to be careful here about the unintended consequences. If we carry on this way, all we are doing is enshrining the importance of the Eleventh Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Get Caught. It’s worse than that: we are making sure that Fear and Greed remain the only two motivators.

I want to live in a world where people return library books on time because it’s the right thing to do. I want to live in a world where people do things because they’re the right things to do, and don’t do things because they’re the wrong things to do. Right and Wrong are far better motivators than Fear and Greed. So let us concentrate on teaching our children how to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong, rather than learning to differentiate only between orange conical edible objects and wooden weapons.

And in any case I’m not sure that fining is the right thing to do. There must be a better way.

[My thanks to Feibao Production for the illustration].

Tweitgeist

Couldn’t resist this. Tweitgeist. A word cloud formed from scraping the words off the last 250 Twitter “tweets”.  Again, something I can see as having real value in the enterprise, especially if I can have multiple clouds, each showing a different population of tweets. Thanks to Pistachio for the tip-off.

Harold Leavitt RIP

It must be all of thirty years since I first read one of Harold Leavitt’s books, Managerial Psychology; since then, I’ve dipped into the book a number of times. But not as often as I’ve dipped into a more recent book of his, Hot Groups. Or, to use its more formal title, Hot Groups: Seeding Them, Feeding Them, and Using Them to Ignite Your Organisation.

Written by Leavitt and his wife, Jean Lipman-Blumen, the book encapsulated a number of studies they’d done in the 1980s and 1990s, looking at how social networks behaved in organisations, leading on from earlier research on group decision-making and small-group behaviour. [Incidentally, I’d read some of the works of Dr Blumen without ever realising that I’d also been reading her husband’s books. Her 1996 book, The Connective Edge, is brilliant.]

To them, “hot groups” were small, passionate, idealistic groups who, for a brief period, exerted disproportionate influence on the strategy and direction of a firm. They took care to look at how these groups formed, what made them tick (an overwhelming sense of shared passion, purpose, belief), why they operated at the speed they did, what made them die out.

I think their work on “hot groups” is greatly underestimated, something I am trying to put right in the book I am writing with Chris Locke. Over the years, I have watched these Mayfly Marauders arise and die many times in large organisations. Every now and then I’ve been part of such a group, and learnt the hard way how the immune system of the firm crushes such change agents.

More recently, however, I’ve realised something quite valuable. That “Enterprise 2.0” tools actually help hot groups survive and thrive, that we finally have immunity from the attacks of enterprise immune systems. But more on this later.

In the meantime, do go read the works of Harold Leavitt and his wife; they can teach us a lot about the human aspect of complex adaptive systems; the world is a poorer place for his passing, and my condolences go to his wife and family. I learnt valuable things from what Dr Leavitt wrote, and I’d like to acknowledge my debt.