Thinking about Push and Pull and Twitter in the Enterprise

There have been a number of comments on my recent posts re Twitter and the Enterprise; I thought it would be worth while spending a little time answering them in some detail. First, let’s take a look at the questions:

  • How can a system that uses messages restricted to no more than 140 characters be useful?
  • What’s in it for a Tweet consumer?
  • As the network grows, won’t the noise cancel out any worthwhile signal?
  • In a corporate environment, what’s wrong with e-mail and BlackBerry?

I’m going to answer them in a roundabout way, as part of a narrative rather than in some specific request-response manner. If you feel I have failed to answer the questions, do feel free to comment vociferously. [And no, I will not be restricting myself to 140 characters. This is a blog and not a TweetStream].

Let me start with terms like “Push Technology” and “Pull Technology“. They may mean a lot to many people, but for me they’re dangerous terms, helping to cloud the issue. Other than the architects of the systems in question, who cares whether a request for information originates from the client or from the server? Most people don’t know that the device in their hands (or on their desktops) is referred to as a client, and most people neither know nor care where the servers they use are located.  Yet, for some reason, every time the conversation moves to different forms of communication, we start arguing about push and pull.

I think we would be far better off considering Twitter as neither Pull nor Push, but instead as Pub-Sub, as Publish-Subscribe. The first and most beautiful thing about Twitter, as far as I am concerned, is that I only see the tweets of people I follow, people whose tweets I subscribe to. It is up to me to decide how many people I can follow. For some people this may be a Dunbar number, stabilising around 150, perhaps finding a Twitter adjustment to that number and raising it. Others may be Scoblesque in their reach, dissatisfied unless they push the 5000 limit (as in Facebook; I must admit I have no idea what the Twitter limit is).

So one way of avoiding increasing noise levels is to avoid increasing the network beyond one’s capacity. I can choose to “follow” (or subscribe to tweets from) just as many people as I am able to cope with. This is not something you can do easily with BlackBerry or with e-mail in general. There is a second way as well. I can choose whose tweets get sent to my mobile device of choice. For every person I  “follow”, I have a further choice I can make. Do I want to “turn notifications ON” for that person? What this means is this: Would I like to receive tweets from this person in SMS alert form as well? So again I can throttle the messages precisely.

And there’s something else about all this stuff. It’s easy to do. A child could choose to “follow” someone, to stop “following” someone, to turn notifications on or off for someone. Try it for yourself. Stop “following” me, I won’t be offended.  Add me and then subtract me, no problemo. The point is, managing your twitterspace is easy. When you compare it with the effort you have to make in order to create mail filters, it’s apples and oranges time.

Actually, when you compare e-mail with Twitter, there is also something quite different about the mode of communication. You send e-mail to a person or a group of people. You send a tweet to Twitter, not to a person or people. It’s less intrusive, less in-your-face. The recipient always chooses. It’s side-by-side rather than confrontational.

As in the case of Push and Pull versus Pub-Sub, memes matter. I think we risk losing some of the value of Twitter when we use terms like “consumer”. Twitter is part of a different mindset, an altogether different paradigm. A paradigm of creation-participation, not production-consumption, democratised and not elitist. In Twitter everyone’s a participant, everyone follows and is followed. Everyone tweets. No one forces you to tweet, but once you get used to what is going on, you’ll find yourself tweeting away.

And don’t worry if it doesn’t come easily. Think of every one of the new communications vehicles as if it was a new musical instrument: you’re not going to be able to pick it up and play straightaway, you need to experiment, you need to learn, and you need to practise.

Some people try and answer the twitter-defining question “what are you doing?”. Some will use twitter to alert people to other things they’re doing, such as posts on their blog. Some will use the facility to push their wares, their opinions, their ideas, even their urls. There is no right or wrong. If you like what someone is tweeting, then maybe you turn notifications on for them. If you don’t, then maybe you stop following them. It’s up to you.

If I’m a participant rather than a consumer or producer of tweets, I still need to answer the question “What’s in it for me?”. If I don’t want to share, then I don’t need to share, and what I will get is precisely nothing. There is nothing in it for me unless I share.

Once I choose to share, a number of potentially valuable things can happen, depending on what I share. Let me try and classify them simply:

I can share what I intend to do, as in: I am about to take a cab from Midtown to Upper West Side. Other participants can then comment by saying “Avoid Broadway, the traffic’s awful around 72nd St, best to take West Side Highway and Henry Hudson Parkway“. Or by asking “Let me know how the traffic is, I need to go uptown later.” So when I share what I intend to do, people can share their relevant experience, or ask that I share mine. So in an enterprise context I could say “Planning to get a bunch of people together to discuss identity” and others could comment, write directly, offer advice, signal their interest,  commit to participating, and so on.

In similar fashion, I can share what I am doing; I can share what I have just finished doing; I can share what I am thinking of doing. In each case the value propositions for the enterprise are simple:

  • people who are interested in the same things as you can reach out to you
  • people who have information that may be germane to what you are doing can give you that information
  • people who have experience in what you are doing can share that experience with you
  • people who can learn from what you are doing can “watch” you

All this happens in process haikus, restricted to 140 characters. All this happens in “real time”. All this happens in a pub-sub way.

As David Weinberger said, hyperlinks subvert hierarchies. Assembly-line thinking was never meant to enter the knowledge-worker industry. Tools like Twitter will help us define the new enterprise.

All we need is to keep our minds open and be willing to experiment. I am constantly amazed by the enterprise’s immune system in this context: too often, there is a clamour for change from the grassroots and from senior management, but it can be resisted all too easily by a large and fundamentally moribund midsection.

Continuing with the theme of Twitter in the Enterprise: Twitter and Agile

[Note: This post is a follow-up to my two previous posts on the subject over the last day or so].

I can hear the doubters and scorners now. “We don’t need another tool”. “Why don’t you concentrate on new business models instead of all this tripe?” “I have enough information already”.

So why am I intrigued by Twitter? First and foremost I think it’s about the question that Twitter poses:

What are you doing?

I know, I know, people use Twitter to pose questions, not just answer them. And they ask and answer a whole slew of questions, not just “What are you doing?”. But just for a moment, I want to concentrate on this Twitter-defining question. In fact I want to refine it a bit:

What are you doing right now?

Why do I think this question is important to “the enterprise”? To answer that, I need to take you on a little wander, to something that John Seely Brown and John Hagel said some years ago:

Push systems — characterised by top-down, centralized and rigid programs of previously specified tasks and behavior — hinder participation in the distributed networks that are now indispensible to competitive advantage.

More versatile and far-reaching pull systems —characterized by modularly-designed decentralized platforms connecting a diverse array of participants — are now starting to emerge in a variety of arenas.

As pull systems reach center stage, executives will have to reassess almost all aspects of the corporation.

Don’t get too hung up about the push and pull; while it is important, the really important bit is the decentralized platform with diverse participants. Which is where Twitter comes in.

I heard the two Johns speak some years ago at Supernova, when they were just about to publish The Only Sustainable Edge. At the time, they were fresh from a study tour of China, mainly looking at manufacturing there. And something they described stayed with me: it was the way teams collaborated in a motorcycle factory that they’d visited and studied. The teams were agile, collocated, with line-of-sight of what was happening around them, and the empowerment to participate and assist their colleagues.

This concept of collocated line-of-sight is something that permeates a lot of Agile thinking. But sadly collocation is not always possible, and sometimes not even desirable. [More on that subject later].

What I see in Twitter is this: The ability for members of a distributed peer workforce to describe precisely what he or she is doing, and to share that description.

Out of this, I can foresee enterprise magic happening. Geographically dispersed team members are able to help each other out because suddenly they have line of sight of each other’s tasks, activities and processes.

More on this later. Comments welcome as always.

Making rash predictions

One of the great advantages of the web is the way it provides ubiquity of access to long-tail information.

Take cricket for example. I am spending Christmas and New Year in New York with my family; on Boxing Day something momentous (well momentous for me anyway) is scheduled to happen, the start of a Test series between Australia and India, in Australia. Before the web, I had to rely on being able to buy Indian or English papers in New York: cricket scores between Australia and India were not the kind of thing that one would expect to find in the New York Times.

Now I don’t just have the web, I have ubiquitous metro wi-fi, and if push comes to shove, I can use my Blackberry to check the scores out; and if that doesn’t work, I can always send out a Tweet to my cricket-loving friends in the UK; and if that diamond ring don’t shine, I can always text my brother in Mumbai and ask him to keep me informed. Freedom. Options. Re-enfranchisement. In a non-threatening, low-cost way. That’s part of what makes the web magic.

Which reminds me. The point of this post. You know something? I really fancy India’s chances this time around, not just in winning a Test, but in winning a series in Australia. The Border-Gavaskar Trophy was never won by Steve Waugh’s team during a time when the Australians conquered everyone who dared to challenge; Ricky Ponting’s team avenged that status and now hold the trophy. I think India have a very good chance of bringing it back.

Why? A whole slew of reasons. Both teams have some excellent players, some entering their prime, some gently exiting that status. Both bat deep. To most neutrals, Australia have the upper hand in two critical aspects, bowling and fielding. And they’re at home. So where is my slew of reasons?

I think it’s to do with the batting. Of course I’m biased, but in the last few years, I have seen three of India’s key batsmen taken out of the mix in unfortunate ways. Tendulkar had an appalling series not that long ago, with a number of very poor umpiring decisions going against him. This, at a time when he was not quite recovered from injury. Dravid had a similarly appalling series against Pakistan, again an execrable sequence of decisions. Ganguly, on the other hand, just had to put up with fallout from the politics of cricket.

Now all three are back. And with Dravid likely to open, there is space for Yuvraj to stay in the side. Dhoni and Pathan have matured. Laxman is showing consistency. These are people who like a big stage, and one day they will have the rub of the green. Like Laxman and Dravid had in Calcutta, against the same opponents, many years ago.

So I predict an away series win. I’m sure my Australian readers will ensure I eat enough humble pie if I am proved wrong.

Shop till you drop? Maybe it should be Shop till you lift

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.

More on Twitter in the Enterprise: Susan Reynolds and PEAple

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.