Tech IT Easy » Internet

The Annual Kari Silvennoinen is out!

Kari Silvennoinen — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 07:21:16 +0000

I’ve been on the road recently with very spotty wifi access and that’s when Twitter really breaks down. You’re left without context because most tweets aren’t self-standing but a link to a URL shortener giving no idea what’s going on. If you’re not knee deep in the “social”, Twitter seems like a mish-mash of ideas and links and bot posts. Then again, that what the web is: links to other places. However, how we use it and what we link to seems to have changed.

Yo dawg, I heard you like news aggregation so I put a news aggregator in your news aggregator so you can read social media while you read social media.

People are using services that make Twitter a duct-taped-together activity stream. I prefer to hear people’s ideas instead of being carpet bombed with bot notifications from the social media service du jour. But this isn’t exclusive to Twitter, Facebook took this further with web-wide likes and Facebook Connect. Your activity on the web is a feature on Facebook and they encourage you to dump everything there. Fortunately I can’t control what other people do, but a little bit of the Web dies every time someone publishes that stuff. That’s how I feel, but that’s the beauty of the Web: It’s a playground for experimentation. Too bad it feels like there’s not that much experimentation going on except on the business case side of the Web.

I rarely cross-post what I share/do on the various services. I don’t assume you’re stupid, if you want to know what links I find interesting, don’t expect them on my Twitter feed but on my Google Reader. If you want to know about my runs, I’m on Nike+. If you’re interested in what I read, or something else – well, there’s an app that isn’t Twitter for that. Sure, that’s more work for you if you want to know about everything I do but I don’t expect you to be. I don’t have to promote myself on the web – I have a nice day job and as a Finn I’m quite introverted anyway.

Also, if you guys haven’t yet figured it out – Google’s social network is the Web. And it will fail on your usual Web 2.0 metrics, because people don’t want platforms – they want applications. This is what happened with Google Buzz.

I ran a mile! Then I spent two hours promoting it on the web.

As I alluded previosuly, people use Twitter and Facebook as a make-shift Activity Streams because they just work well enough. Google Buzz was an early attempt to the next gen, but it failed miserably. It was complex, it was a platform and no one got the point. It offered advantages over Facebook and Twitter only on infrastructure level, not for the user. I’m quite certain that Google continues on this path, because there’s no reason to make a yet another Orkut when it seems that the future of Facebook and Twitter are activity updates. Better to control those updates than the services where they are published. Also, most of that stuff is just noise. In the future, the real business is filtering and exploiting those little snippets of information, not just dumbly showing them.

This hopefully could also mark the end of the dark age of “social media”, where we ignored the complexities of human social behavior and assuming that before “social media” everything was asocial. When someone can go and say that the end of social gaming is near because all gaming will be social – are you fucking kidding me? At what point in time were games missing a social aspect? Or did these guys only play Solitaire and Minesweeper? The Internet is after all a tool. It’s a delusion to believe we have required social enlightenment through Facebook when a compelling case can be made be against it. Repeat after me: you are not how many friends you have on Facebook, you’re not your LinkedIn profile, you’re not your fucking tweets, …

For example, Facebook gives us just one identity. This is by design and Mark Zuckerberg believes this is the right way to go forward. He and Facebook prefers that identity is our most low common denominator identity, probably so that they can sell more eyeballs to “targeted” ads. That might be reason why Facebook is boring, everyone is just showing their most bland identity they are willing to show to strangers.

On the web, people don’t always want to be “themselves” – or even social. Play some multiplayer games, preferably a FPS on a console – like Call of Duty: MW on PS3 – and you’ll quickly see the dark side of human psyche, also known as Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Blizzard tried to solve the problem as an engineering problem and attempted to force people to use their real names, this was very quickly shot down by users. On the internet, some of us want to be DeathSpank, the Orc slayer.

The Internet does not make much sense… On pricing digital goods and other illogicalities

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 09:14:49 +0000

“From my cold, dead hands…” It’s something that came to mind as I was thinking about writing this post. The part that doesn’t make sense about the Internet, today and perhaps since ever, is that American concept of “Freedom,” of independence and lack of governance.

In my post on piracy, my point was not complete. YES, historically, there has been a trend in every industry towards eliminating inefficiencies and yes, in some ways making things digital is just another step down that line, but NO, as @ksilvennoinen pointed out in the comments, digital goods do have a value greater than zero, the question is how to find a way to recuperate that value from customers.

To me value equals investment, but that is not the way pricing works. Unfortunately, I managed to misplace my pricing bible some months ago and can’t seem to recall most of the rules of pricing, but there is a strong psychological component to it. And the psychological part is what I am confused about. To get another book in here, it’s just like “Positioning: the battle for the mind,” if online goods are ‘positioned’ against a never-ending slew of free content, how do you position yourself to be priced at a value greater than zero?

On the one hand, it’s not so hard. You position yourself in such a way that a comparison does not make sense. Let’s take digital books, an area I actually don’t consider as threatened as publishers and media-outlets would like you to believe. The reason is that as soon as you download a digital book and view it on a PC, it immediately becomes an inferior product. Unlike a TV-show or movie, which I can frankly watch on a post-stamp (no matter what David Lynch says), reading and eyes work best together on either paper or e-paper (haven’t tried reading on the iPad, though I really like doing it on the iPhone). Of course the real threat to e-books in a PC environment is websites, but that’s a story for another day.

To get back to it, e-books work best in a dedicated reading environment, which immediately creates opportunities for platforms and putting walls around those. Platforms ensure that there is a network effect of content, walls ensure that there is no inter-leakage between the quality-controlled inside and the dark-waters-of-piracy outside. And that mechanism allows digital goods to be priced to recuperate investment and more. But…

Where it gets confusing again is how very open the Internet is. This openness allows you to create an app in a day, it also allows you to jailbreak an iPhone (now with US-gov. support), and it allows for me to get a movie that Chinese kid 107-xg46-*** released 5 minutes ago on the torrentZ. Amazon was built on this openness, as was OS X, as was pretty much anything that was stolen out of the Xerox labs 35 years ago. While there is a trend of eliminating barriers in general, it is even more prevalent on the Internet.

So, what I am asking myself here is the following questions:

Is this 1969 again, where hippies roamed free, sex was consequence-less, and there is an Aids-epidemic on the horizon, which will make us go back to the 50s in terms of promiscuity?
Are platforms doomed? I’m just talking platforms, not walls around them. Twitter is an example of an open platform.
Are the walls around platforms doomed? So: iTunes & iOS-devices, Amazon & Kindles, Facebook & human relationships, every online retailer in the world…
Is pricing digital goods a logical thing when taking into consideration how it is positioned against other digital goods?
Should digital goods be free and prices be set for things that cannot be spread digitally: iOS devices, Kindles, Disk-media, other consumption-devices…
And many more questions…

Getting back to value equals investment in my third paragraph. In any chain that leads from idea to the user, there are value points, which come from some kind of investment. In the embroidery example, a strong value point appears to be the creator. Without that person, there would be no creation. And, of course, there are plenty of examples on that. In the case of iPhone, strong value points are both the conceptualisation (R&D expenditure) and the production costs. In the case of Amazon, the website (presentation, distribution, etc.) is a strong value point. The end-product can still be digital, as it is in the case of the embroiderer’s designs, the iPhone apps, and the Kinde-ebooks, but the investment in certain parts of the chain is very much real.

And the value to consumers, which the crux of the matter, is equally real. If I compare 2010 to 1995, we live in the era of digital convenience. From e-banking, to restaurant-reviews, to TV-shows, to software, we undeniably live in a better world, but one where, ironically, we are less willing to spend as much on it. But there is another side to this as well. Let’s say, everything that exists is walled off. You’d have to pay to get access to every blog-post, to every youtube-video, to everything else that is already being charged for. I would sincerely start to question whether it was all worth it.

The Internet continues to be confusing to me, part shopping bonanza, part free-for-all utopia. Writing this has brought a little clarity, but if you have stuff to add that clears it up even more, please feel free to share it in a comment.

Can we accept piracy as a necessary evil already? [Cranky Rant]

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 10:39:59 +0000

I have a general philosophy on the evolution of the B2C and B2B relationship, one that is inspired by history. Let’s look at some examples. Money first took the form of barter, then gold, then coins, then paper, and now bits and bytes. Transport: on foot (great shoe-sales), animals (great stable-sales), cars (great garage sales), planes (great duty free sales), and finally tele-conferencing (great device sales). Books: handwritten, handprinted, printing-press, mass-media, internet, iPad / Kindle. At every turn, something was replaced, an industry was destroyed, yet it was for the purpose of evolution. Don’t get me started on evolution itself, as that is all about destructive replacement.

The point about all of these is not about destructive replacement. It’s about improving a product in the eyes of the consumer. And what enabled this improvement? Common standards, collaboration, user-feedback, guts, ruthlessness, innovation, progress, etc. Why producers don’t like to cooperate with that? Because every technology requires an investment to make it work.

Think of the poor embroiderer, which is what inspired this post (bound to get a lot of flack). It’s a funny industry. I wasn’t aware that needlework designs are being sold over the internet and thus at the risk of piracy. I suppose I always thought an embroiderer embroids, then sells their product and ships it to consumers. Instead, they seem to go to the simplest side-product of their work, the one that becomes a foundation for potential mass-production, the “design-chart,” which is then being “shipped,” via download, to customers. Interesting! It kinds of makes sense from a distribution standpoint. Customers are not willing to pay for the shipment of needlework, instead they prefer producing locally, which really is a great idea. The only problem here is the way it is distributed.

In a B2C relationship over the internet, I think, it always comes down to eliminating as many barriers as possible. When you buy from an online shop, you really want the product in your house as quickly as possible. If I could reach my arm into the screen in front of me and pull out the product that I just ordered, that would be just perfect. It’s worse when the product is digital, because the customer knows that it’s just bits & bytes really not worth anything tangible (I’m just talking about the 1s & 0s here) and it could be in the customer’s home in a millisecond. Instead, business erect as many barriers as they possibly can, whether it’s a big ‘copyrighted’ sign across a picture, an overly complex signup/payme page, or the somewhat convoluted iTunes-model, where it really is easier to pay than to pirate.

But in the light of evolution, these barriers are bound to be broken! The same reason why gold is no longer a form of payment, because it’s really heavy and annoying to handle, the world of commerce has a way of evolving towards something easier and easier and easier, until finally I pay by waving a magic wand (eh RFID chip) across a panel.

Let’s get back to embroidery. The problem is two-fold. 1. fragmentation, because any solution that I am about to propose will not get blanket acceptance. 2. the silly notion that selling designs, which seems like the most valuable thing an embroiderer has to offer (actual IP), is something that should be done in a direct B2C relationship. In the light of consumers constantly wanting to break barriers, this offering of valuable IP seems like an industry-defeating purpose.

So what are possible solutions?

consolidation & protection. Basically the iTunes model, where everything is placed behind a secure window that can preferably only be accessed via a specific device (my personal belief is that anything bits & bytes will eventually be free as that is not where the real value lies).
selling designs via local shops. If the problem is distribution, why not partner with local shops that keep your designs behind bars and just print out the end-product for consumers.
selling designs via the machines that produce needlework. No idea what they are called, but they have a strong incentive to keep their machines being used and have a direct line to consumers.

I’m sure any of the above is a solution with problems, but my point is the following:

Piracy will continue to exist and will become worse if you make it easy for people to pirate.
Consumer products evolve in a fashion that keeps pushing out inefficiencies and piracy is one of the quickest ways online to remove these inefficiencies.
The only way to prevent privacy is to not distribute anything that can be distributed via bits & bytes.

Case in point: the idiot that just walked into an Apple store and jailbroke every damn iPhone 4 on display.

Last point: I am not advocating piracy. I run a company myself, I have a business degree, and I believe in getting paid for your work. But I do believe silly strategies deserve to get punished. And there are plenty, plenty, plenty of them that I have mentioned on this blog over the years.

The future of online music: not just about access, but about continuous entertainment

Vincent van Wylick — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 13:45:58 +0000

I feel that something like this does not need to be said, but Spotify a relatively new service here in the Netherlands and selected countries, while cool, is missing one key ingredient: suggesting new music to users that feels somehow related to what they want.

Spotify knows what users want. There are few songs that I haven’t been able to find on Spotify, which in itself is awesome. But it ends there. When I look for the “Baby got Back” song, which I tend to do, it plays EVERY song that has those terms in the title (luckily fewer than you might expect). Instead of saying, hey, it’s “Baby got Back,” it’s a 90s song, it’s a hip-hop song, it’s funny (to some), it just plays the list of whoever decided to use those terms in the title (no seriously, there’s only 72 tracks).

Why it doesn’t need to be said that such a feature needs to exist, is because it already has for some time. Starting with Amazon, which suggests products to you based on what other people with similar tastes like, to Pandora Radio, which unfortunately (grrrr!) doesn’t work outside the US anymore, to Last.fm, which also plays some funny regional games since CBS took it over, iTunes Genius, which rocks (though iTunes as a music-player is way too bloated), Netflix, another US-only service (I’m sensing a pattern here…), etc. etc.

It’s called collaborative filtering, it’s not a new thing and I don’t at all get why not all (music-)services have it. It leads to more user-engagement, it allows listeners to navigate a musical world that has become increasingly diverse and fast-moving, and it has drastically improved my music-listening experience.

So my question is: why doesn’t Spotify have collaborative filtering? Is it expensive to implement, does it require more data than Spotify has, is it an up-and-coming feature, or is it a hidden feature that I haven’t discovered yet? In any case, it is the No. One Reason why I don’t open Spotify as often as either of us would like.

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The last retail store on earth—a fantasy story

Vincent van Wylick — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:41:46 +0000

The door slid open slowly, all that was visible from inside the store was a wide beam of light that slowly expanded into the shape of a door. The automatic triggers kicked in and the other security-panels in front of the windows slide open also, illuminating the last retail store left in the world 2020.

He entered. The last ever retail-clerk left on earth. A wide smile on his face, from years of practice, a swing in his step from his regular work-outs. All part of the routine.

The camera-system, also the lighting system of the place, followed his every step—one tiny camera in every tiny light-bulb, giving combined resolutions beyond that of any screens in use today and filming whatever was in the store with more dimensions than the holographic output to date would require. As he reached the music-rack, the one closest to the door, the one most geared towards impulse buying, he passed the security threshold and the system was forced to react—was he an intruder or an insider? Always a fun game to play with this flaky system… He passed the test and personalised systems started turning on all around him.

It started with the music-rack, a 50 metre (150 feet) long pathway surrounded by holograms of artists’ heads performing—sometimes in group-form, if it was a band—and tiny beams triggering the sub-dermal speakers behind his ears to play a song, just right for his mood and of course just out in the charts that week. He sometimes felt he was his best customer, because he rarely left that isle without purchasing at least one song. Another credit down from his, well , limitless credits that he could spend on these things. One thing caught his eye, the Beatles hologram was slightly off-colour, the yellows not quite as yellow as they should be. He knew banging the holographic projector would only make it worse, so he made a mental note to call the mechanic, who could probably calibrate it from his home office.

Next up, the movie isle. He loved how movies had evolved over the years to become a hybrid of a blockbuster movie with great effects, a great story-line that was essentially limitless and could be changed by the viewer as he or she consumed the movie. The movie isle was a mini-experience of such a thing, also targeting his past taste, his current mood, as well as plenty of other variables of course. The result was that as he moved onto the platform, he saw Disney-bunnies playing in the grass around him, and walked along a couple of prehistoric hunters in their furry outfits with, in the distance, their attractive female mates waving at them and cheering as they got closer. He could smell the food as he drew closer, another marketing gimmick, and he was happy that after this came the food isle.

At this point, it should be said the last retail store in the world (also the name of the store) was in fact a great big mall. The difference to other stores that came before? It was run by a single man and everything else was automated or remote-controlled. A consumer would enter and would first be entertained through music and movies, and could then choose to fulfil his primal needs: food, hygiene, etc. The second-smallest section in this store that had everything was the electronics section. People basically had electronics implanted into their bodies or they ran everything off a terminal. There was no hardware differentiation, everything had already been invented, and every software could run on the hardware that people owned from the day they became an adult or when their parents gave them permission. The smallest section of this store was the payment area, in that there was none. Why pay when every credit you need is stored on your person and you can just swipe the product you want and get it?

The clerk had said his goodbyes to the women in his personal film and started down the food isle. Again, a moving platform, on which he could sit this time, with choices flicking across the tables next to him, sushi-style, until he identified his favourite, grabbed it, and munched it down. The platform, measuring his progress and seeing that there were no impatient customers trying to get by, basically came to a standstill, allowing him to eat and enjoy.

This was a typical start of the day and arguably he had the best job in the world. The rest of the time would be spent on support, on dealing with customers that “didn’t get it,” take care of the technical issues that arose even in his technology heaven, and, even, doing some sales, though that was highly unlikely with the kind of data computers already had on consumers, making every product suggestion the perfect one.

The clerk didn’t care where his customers came from or where they went, but he suspected that they lived very much like he did, in an overcrowded apartment block with a big postal area designed specifically to receive all the UPS shipments people ordered online or in his store (mail and those inferior small postal boxes were out-innovated years ago).

The first customer came in and he smiled in anticipation of having to do absolutely nothing, while the customer spent at least 20% of his disposable income that month. Typically, people only came in once a month, if ever, just to get that personal, immersive touch that systems at home and elsewhere would never be able to replicate.

Welcome to the last retail store on earth.

This story was inspired by a recent Macworld article on comic stores vs. iTunes, my blogging on food and retail, and thinking about the future of the physical retail store. Pictures courtesy of the movies “Clerks” and “Thomas in Love.”

Prefer to have me blog in fantasy format? Let me know and I’ll continue to do so!

Is “Great artists steal” still a good mantra for Blogging?

Vincent van Wylick — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 12:42:37 +0000

I’m bearish on blogging and have been so publicly since the publication of the Techmeme 100. The “problem” (more of a natural phenomenon really) is as follows: in order to compete in today’s ‘blogosphere,’ you need a high volume of news being published. What this means for a blog: you need to do a lot of writing, which means a ton of research (sometimes), a ton of time, and a ton of output.

You’ll need to have multiple people on the team to hit the magic timeframe of where people in your market (usually the US one) read news. You need to pay these people somehow. This already represents a barrier to blogging on a professional level, as to pay people you need traffic and to get traffic you sometimes need to do things that are out of your ethical sphere. Gizmodo’s questionable appropriation of the next iPhone comes to mind.

It comes down to being newsworthy. Gizmodo’s actions are nothing new to media, as news usually comes from 3 sources:

good research, leading to original IP
copy-pasting other stories (hopefully combined with some value-adding research)
wallet-based reporting—you pay sources for original IP.

As mentioned, this is nothing new and what the Techmeme leader-board made clear was that the leading blogs are actually no longer “blogs,” they are digital newspapers. And, I assume, because blogging still has this cool ring of independent news reporting to it, those sites decided to keep the title.

So what does that mean for an up-and-coming website? Take TheNextWeb, which I’ve been aware of since the days of Friendfeed—Zee, the editorial director of the site, had a very high-profile presence on FriendFeed (incidentally, it makes for an interesting case study of how early adopters on social networks can rise to the top and use that to leverage their relevance in other areas) and it was interesting to see how they went about making their site a significant news source. And, sadly (but perhaps realistically), their strategy at the beginning appears to have been to simply report the same news that others have been reporting. This year, there was of course the TheNextWeb conference, which made some headlines and which perhaps means that there will be a shift in strategy of news reporting by the site.

I think that, bearing the economics of news reporting in mind, which largely depend on producing large quantities of timely news, copy-pasting news is a realistic approach towards growing a blog to professionalism. On the other hand, it represents a big problem. Back when my Twitter-feed followed Techcrunch, TheNextWeb, and some other tech-blogs, I was bombarded by the SAME news coming from different sites within 20 tweets. It got so annoying that I complained to e.g. Zee at TNW, and I finally ended up unsubscribing from any newsblog on Twitter, instead subscribing to their newsfeed via RSS, which is more manageable.

It sounds like a cliche, but we live in a highly transparent real-time web. Every online news source is trying to profile itself as the most relevant and they do so by trying to be quickest, loudest, but not necessarily by being the most unique. It’s easy to copy news, because there are no pay-walls to prevent this from happening. The problem is how this affects people, and as a consequence other blogs (I’m a firm believer in survival of the fittest, so in principle blogs that do not make it simply do so because the nature of the blogosphere is pushing them out).

I think that people react to the bombardment of news in a way that they prefer to stick to a few sites that give them enough news to be informed (this is ignoring aggregators like Digg and YCombinator, which adds another layer of complexity). Ultimately there will only be a few professional blogs serving news for a given industry (arguably, there already are just a few relevant ones with many, many irrelevant ones), and they will benefit from network effects for both access to news, access to advertisers, and access to other factors.

To answer my question of “Is “Great artists steal” still a good mantra for Blogging?”, it is a great startup strategy, which leads to more visitors, more advertising revenue, better research/writing, and ultimately (HOPEFULLY!) a better blog. But it requires a shifting of ethics that usually comes with running a business. Instead of serving your own interest as a writer / creator, you serve business interests of generating traffic which ultimately leads to a better quality blog (again hopefully), but not without its compromises.

URL as a metric for social object’s value (Weekend rambling)

Kari Silvennoinen — Sun, 30 May 2010 07:13:13 +0000

A part in the series of just writing out an idea and rambling on it on this blog.

One of the core architectural big ideas of the web is that each resource, or web page has an URL or a link, and other pages can link to them. However, in the “social media” reiteration, these links are called “permalinks” in a strange doublespeak way as the ordinary Web 0.1 links were meant to be permanent as well and, instead, “link rot” seems to be more prevalent as ever with short-url services and other strange URL schemes.

I am of the opinion that we make a great injustice to discussion on the web by calling those things that hang on the bottom of web pages (and hence do have URLs) “comments” and, as non-entities of the web, only rarely have URLs of their own (even of the hash-variety). This is the second injustice. It is often that in these “comments” there are real gems, but you can’t refer to them with any direct link.

The worst offender, unsurprisingly, is Facebook, which from a cultural-historical viewpoint is going to be a huge black hole. It is in a stark constrat to Twitter, where each tweet has an URL. There are many social “objects” on Facebook that are completely inactionable and this is completely against the very nature of the Web. Technically, with stuff like Activity Streams, it’s possible to “like” a “like” and so on, but this isn’t possible from most social network tools’ user interface.

From the Web point of view, having URL for each tweet might be one reason why Twitter is gaining more steam and Facebook is struggling. Twitter is actively becoming a part of the Web, while Facebook is actively trying to turn the Web into Facebook (see Open Graph and Wikipedia-entry Pages) – this walled garden -strategy has always failed on the web, but it hasn’t stopped businesses from trying.

My thinking might be biased because I’m a firm believer in the open web and the idea that the web promotes openness and sharing of ideas, but not in the way Facebook has recently tried to open its users’ identities and “life streams” to the world. I believe the web is a great platform for collaboration and it’s a shame that while (as Tim Berners-Lee has pointed out) there is no shortage of URLs, we don’t give them out to all objects that live on the web.

However, the one exception that I’m willing to make are YouTube comments, which in number exceed the amount of information (with a loose definition of “information) in the library of Alexandria, but loss of which absolutely no-one would cry over.

The value of Twitter vs. the value of Facebook vs. the value of having Neither [weekend ramblings]

Vincent van Wylick — Fri, 14 May 2010 20:17:31 +0000

I think a value should always be weighed against the value of not having it, particularly when it’s hard to put a numerical value on something. This something is clearly Facebook and even more clearly Twitter, which still doesn’t compute for 100%. Why I love Twitter would be like saying why I love my dog or my Bengalese tiger, it’s hard to place a value on love. Not to say that I love Twitter, but there are few things that bother me about it. I tolerate it and it has nestled in a comfortable (but small) place in my life.

There are again ramblings against the status quo, or rather the status pecunia—the status of wealth. A few years ago, it was Twitter which seemed to show the Fail Whale more often then the “what are you doing now?” page. It lead to Friendfeed and various other me-too services that were dropped as soon as Twitter got its act together. There are again ramblings about evicting Facebook from people’s lives, though I’m here to tell you that if you want to have any kind of social life online, you’re probably better of keeping that account, though perhaps with less naked pictures or whatever you are worried about losing.

The value of Facebook is that it allows for richer connections between people that do not see each other every day. I care for my high-school friends that live in the UK, France, or Brazil, but since I can’t see them everyday, it adds value to my life to know that they are getting a kid or getting married. It does not add value to my life if people choose to leave Facebook, like some of my friends did at first when they were overwhelmed by all this publicity (something blogging prepares you for). And I’m really glad Facebook doesn’t delete accounts permanently as when people change their mind (they usually do), their friends are again there waiting for them (life is too exhausting to be-/de-/re-friend friends like most of the internet forces you to do).

The value of Twitter is like that morning coffee that adds a little (but not everything) to the quality of the moment you’re experiencing. No, NO, let’s not equate the value like that. The biggest value of Twitter to me is actually pretty much the same one as Facebook’s. I met up with a friend in Denmark a few weeks ago, who is also on Twitter, and I was able to finish his sentences because I read about his experiences ON Twitter. To me Twitter is more like a Second Life than Secondlife(tm) is. It allows for quick streams about people you care about or you “follow” because you respect them. If I had intelligent displays running Twitter on my sunglasses, I would wear them all the time while walking through life, that is how second life Twitter has become to (some of) my relationships. My business partner is going to China this week and I would love for him to update his Twitter-account while there to keep me informed of the cool stuff he’s researching for us (mobile operators better start catching up to this dynamic).

So, what, WHAT, could possibly be the value of Neither? Such a leading way to pose that question, as I’m clearly not on that side of the fence. I’m sorry that many of my friends decide against Twitter accounts because they don’t see the value of it. Those are usually the people that I see once every 6 months and our conversations are less deep because, well, we still have to get through the superficiality of “how was your day? What are you up to?” Questions that Twitter & Facebook both ask. And I’m sorry if my friends decide not to use Facebook as it not only allows them to post their thoughts, but pictures of their Bengalese tigers or their latest trip to hell, and even status updates about Farmville, which I previously stated, was an imperfect way of showing of your virtual garden to your friends.

The value of Neither is a type of emptiness that may be good for meditation, but it is no longer how the world works. It’s like seeing my parents struggle with emails or internet banking when no one sends snailmail or goes to a physical bank anymore. The world without Facebook or Twitter no longer exists. I don’t care about privacy issue 1 or 0, because it’s really your business what you put on the internet and what you don’t and you should never put stuff on there that you don’t want people to know about. I care about connections and about the empowerment that they bring to interpersonal relationships.

I have met 80 people on Facebook that I never expected to see again after graduating from high school, from university, or from leaving the coolest job I had as a tween. I am so grateful to the site for that that if Zuck were here, I could kiss him. Facebook isn’t perfect, and we should protest against these imperfections until they are fixed. Whether we should leave social networks and abandon all the possibilities they have brought us, that is like starving yourself in protest against war: Nobody cares!

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On PirateBay [2Long4aTweet]

Vincent van Wylick — Sun, 09 May 2010 08:36:49 +0000

Introducing this ’2Long4aTweet’-tagged series on Tech IT Easy, which are a short sentence or paragraph (or two) that I want to express quickly but… can’t fit into a tweet.

Media’s pursuit of PirateBay is simply another example of ‘shooting the messenger.’ What message is PirateBay (and other grey solutions) delivering? It is right now quicker to get global (US) media-content via Bittorrent then it is to wait for a global (European/Asian/Canadian/etc.) release. Instead of wasting all this energy on what is simply an expression of THE PROBLEM, media-companies should work on THE SOLUTION, which is to STOP DISCRIMINATING BETWEEN COUNTRIES & start solving the legal obstacles that encourage it.

On making Global Package Delivery a little better [Weekend Ramblings]

Vincent van Wylick — Sat, 08 May 2010 13:12:39 +0000

I’m currently on a tirade against two things. Global package delivery, which, every single time, seem to have me waste my time waiting for a doorbell to ring. And software-updates, which for some reason are a pretty fragmented affair.

OK, there’s nothing to do about software updates and I already give up.

Global package delivery, on the other hand… UPS was founded in 1907. That’s right, gentlemen & ladies, it is over ONE ZERO ZERO (purposefully emphasised) years old! That means that people have been carrying UPS parcels around on horses, then on Fords, on ships, on aeroplanes, and will most likely carry them to space also. Unlike regular mail, the Package Industry is here to stay as well, ladies and gentlemen, all thanks to you for ordering from places like Amazon every single day.

Now, I don’t mean to pick on UPS. I actually have a problem with FEDEX (founded 1973) this week and with DHL (a German company, founded 1969), both of which like telling me things on their website that aren’t true, or are true, but so incredibly late to publish that truth that it’s just a false truth.

Dear companies that I just mentioned: we are in the age of real-time. When my best friends go to the bathroom, I know about it 5 min. before they even think about it, that’s how quick Twitter is. Sadly, that doesn’t bring a hot new gadget into my life, like your great service does. I appreciate your service, it allows me to be lazy and order to Visa’s delight. But it’s meant to be a service of convenience, and I don’t consider having to drool over my doorbell-phone by any kind of definition, “a convenience.”

Here’s what happened with DHL: Package shipped on the 6th out of Germany. On the 7th, at 4:30 a.m., package left Germany heading for the Netherlands. I sent them a mail asking whether if it doesn’t arrive today, they ship on the weekends. No reply! At 20:00, I found out, that package has arrived for sorting at a sorting centre at 17:42. I decide to call the next day to ask whether they ship on the weekends. The kind person at DHL the Netherlands informs me that a. he has no idea where my package is and b. they do not ship on the weekends. 2 hours later, the doorbell rings. It’s the mailman, who works for TNT (the Dutch equivalent to DHL) with the package from DHL. Status on the website on the 8th: “7th of May, package has arrived for sorting at a sorting centre at 17:42.”

Here’s what happened with FEDEX: Package shipped on the 5th from the US. Paris then somewhere in the Netherlands on the 6th. Estimated delivery: on the 7th at 6 p,m. I’m home at 3:30 p.m. At 20:00 I get a message that FEDEX passed by my house at 14:55 p.m. and no one was home. Status: sadly FEDEX does not receive phone-calls on the weekend.

We need a change, we need that thing you do with the tracing, not to be restricted to when it arrives in parcel sorting centre 42. We need it to have an RFID chip in the parcel, which is connected to a GPS device in the truck, which at all times tells a satellite to send me a tweet of where exactly you are at what given time. And when I’m not home, I can tweet back to said truck to give notice, to save fuel, to save the planet, and/or to change the address to my work-address. Saves your time and mine and the planet’s.

This is not rocket-science. GPS exists (globally since 2000), RFID exists (required by Wal-Mart since 2005), real-time web exists (Twitter since 2006). Yet for some reason, in 2010, I still have to wait 10 hours for an update about something REAL & RELEVANT that happened 10 hours ago. Sigh.

OK, all ranted out now. Now go fix.

Theory of social networking [2Long4aTweet]

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 04 May 2010 08:40:32 +0000

We should auto-follow the whole world but it should be hidden by default.
Relationships are too dynamic for an explicit follow, de-follow, re-follow relationship.

- – Vincent van Wylick (too long to fit into a tweet)

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The management toolkit for an interconnected world

ceciiil — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 07:12:59 +0000

Ever since the first time Andrew McAfee coined the term, the definition of Enterprise 2.0 has constantly evolved.

Arguably, the most appropriate has been : “The use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.”

Regardless of how good these definitions have been, none of them has given enough credit to a) the tight relationship between Enterprise 2.0 and Management and b) the reason why we need to adopt these social platforms.

Management

Management here is considered here in its most generic sense, i.e. applied to people, managers, knowledge, innovation, business, customer relationship, IT, communication or human resources.

This is a critical dimension since while importing social platforms from the Internet into the workplace, we also import an underlying electronic culture that profoundly impact the workplace organization.

Interconnected

We are passing from an era in which things were assumed to be controllable, able to be deconstructed and then assembled into a clear, linear, always replicable and thus static form, to an era characterized by a continuous flow of information.

(Jon Husband – Will Enterprise 2.0 drive management innovation)

In The Future Of Management, Gary Hamel (the most influential business thinker according to The Wall Street Journal) asks how relevant it is in the 21st century to use the same management techniques as the ones we used a century ago.

How appropriate these techniques are in a world where changes have never been so fast nor happening to such large a scale, where barriers of entry have never been so low, where strategy cycles are shrinking, and, last but not least, where customers and employees have never been so informed and interconnected.

In the conclusion of this book, Gary Hamel states that a) to survive in such an interconnected economy, companies have to be extremely adaptable and b) adaptable eco-systems are not reduced to mere vertical top bottom flow of information and processes but are peer-to-peer democratized flat systems.

Toolkit

Gary Hamel conclusion : Internet is the best metaphor for 21st century management.

The Internet happens to be the foundation of our interconnected world and Social Platforms have naturally emerged as the best way to connect people and get things done on the web.

This is the very reason why we HAVE to import these tools behind the firewall.

It is not because they are new, trendy or because our competitors have implemented it. It is because they have proved on the web to be the most appropriate tools to leverage a continuous flow of information in order to create value.

Definition

Hence the proposed Enterprise 2.0 definition : the management toolkit for organizations in an interconnected world.

Bit Bang – Rays to the Future now online

Kari Silvennoinen — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 07:45:27 +0000

A quick note letting you know that the book I was involved with is now available online for free as a downloadable PDF.

If you’re interested in what’s in the pipeline technology-wise in the coming decades be sure to read this report. As previously mentioned, this report is a compilation of articles written by the PhD students of Aalto University (previously Helsinki School of Economics, Helsinki University of Technology and University of Art and Design Helsinki).

The topics include

Future of IT and hardware
Future of Telecommunication and Networks
Printed electronics and nanotechnology
Future of Media
Future of Living
Future of Globalization
Robotics and artificial intelligence

Also, in the appendix is a small diary of our meetings in Silicon Valley.

Normally these kind of reports would cost thousand of euros, but thanks to the Finnish educational system you can get the report right here for free (PDF; 2MB).

Social web for the long-term

Kari Silvennoinen — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 08:53:31 +0000

Now that the biggest waves of Buzz hype are hopefully behind us, it’s a good time concentrate what Google Buzz actually is and what it isn’t. I have followed Buzz with great interest and I’ve previously talked about Jaiku, feeds and discussions on the web on general here. I even pushed Plaxo at one point, but they are pretty much dead in the water right now. I was couple of years off and a technology wrong with my prediction of sort-of real-time web in 2008.

In a way I view Google Buzz as a reference platform, like Google Wave Preview, instead of a finished product. Of course, because Buzz is right there in Gmail’s interface, it’s Buzz deserves to get all the critical comments about its launch it got. It could be argued that without exposing it to the larger public at start, it would have been impossible to get all those great ideas to make it better. One interesting thing to note is that most requested features for Buzz are UI-related. However, I’m more interested in what makes Buzz work behind the scenes, because if Google can get the critical mass behind this, things are going to be great.

It was again a sad example of the sorry state of technology blogging when Buzz first hit the web. In that little world that’s so enamored with Twitter, Facebook and status updates, it never occurred to anyone that Google was aiming much higher. One of the worst offenders was the serial-troll Lyons. He was followed with lots of others who came up with as lame puns in their headlines without actually figuring out what they were looking at. Instead we got petty lists of “fails” in Buzz. Yeah, on the surface that these Techmeme all-stars barely skim, Buzz might resemble Twitter, but the differences are pretty obvious from the start.

The attention spans are so incredibly short that that they have completely forgotten that even in this age of agile Web 2.0 iterative processes, things take time. This was probably best illustrated by this post, where the author totally oblivious to the lineage of Buzz claimed that

As always, time will tell whether this is a game-changer or just another Jaiku, the Twitter competitor that Google bought but never found a way to leverage.

In their defense, even Ars Technica got it wrong.

The only reason I can come up with why people associated Buzz instantly with Twitter was the simple user interface. Much more interesting comparisons would have been with Friendfeed (which kind of tried to do this in simple way), Yahoo Updates (which kind of tried to do this in a difficult way) or it’s genetical ancestor Jaiku (which kind of did this LBS twitter thing in a pretty nice package a good three years ago).

While I agree that Buzz is a rather odd combination of product/platform/project, I do find it exciting that Google has the resources to just try things. We are so early to this social web thing that if someone pretends that they know what exactly works, they’ll be proven wrong in a fortnight. Sure, I do agree that Google might be forgetting that what people want are applications and not technology (a mistake Nokia keeps on repeating, and one reason why they are so incredibly lost in the technology woods. Or like Yahoo, which just pumps out nice web tech with no apparent apps or revenue streams). Google has the money to experiment and the mindset to test things on a large scale. That takes balls. That’s what the whole world wide web was about in the first place, experimentation. You have to be pretty clueless if you take anything on the internet right now as granted.

Seriously, take a long view here. Even on the internet, you need some time to lay out the groundwork even when you’re working in the application layer. If you think about the 2,5 year timeline between Jaiku’s acquisition and Buzz, there were little hints along the way in many of Google’s products. To be able to have something like Buzz, Google had to first come up with a friend/follow system and a location system. You know like following other people on Google Reader and Google Latitude? The ADD-riddled tech bloggers were pretty hyped about Google Latitude and how it was going to kill Brightkite, Foursquare and other LBS services, but somehow Google Buzz failed to generate a single comparison to these services?

But all this is just technology. What about the revolution that I hope Google can pull with Buzz? What’s the beauty in Google Buzz? You only need to check Google’s API page for Google Buzz and you’ll soon realize that all the stuff behind what makes Google Buzz work are open standards, which enable pretty ground-breaking integrations that could just solve the mess discussion on the internet is right now.

As a sidenote, when tech bloggers complain how they can’t add this and that twitter stream to their Google Buzz timeline or how the tweets are not in real-time and all that, they would only need to look at that API and realize that because Google looking at the whole thing at much higher level, it’s actually the publisher who needs to find a way to enable a thing awkwardly called PubSubHubbub, and in that instant all the content is pretty much real-time. Of course, I have no idea if it is at all feasible to use PubSubHubbub in the scale of Twitter, but the point is that Google is not planning to have custom pipelines to Buzz, but to play with common, open protocols and APIs. Another point is that once your content works with Buzz, it works with any aggregator/social app that has decided to have that same common, open infrastructure.

So, instead of trying to centralize every user, every piece of content to their site, like Facebook and Twitter, Google has had the guts to try and harness all the discussion on the web to their service. It’s going to be a happy day when this post right here and all the discussion and the comment this might generate are all happily syndicated in Buzz.

The open nature of Buzz is not all news to some creatures on the web. On Twitter and Facebook you can follow and be followed by inanimate products and abstract brands and they can have pages and whatnot, but right now, to be able to take part in Buzz you need to have a Google Account and that means that you have to be a natural, real person and you shouldn’t have more than one account. This is pretty bad news to all the “SEOs” and other “internet marketing experts”. It is also excellent news and pretty amazing on this forcing-marketing-down-your-throat in this “social” happy place we call the web 2.0. Simply, that means real people and real feeds that try to integrate the real discussion on the web. All those @’s and #’s? What about real discussion with real threading and real topics? What about a renaissance of long-form personal publishing? (If you didn’t follow any of the previous links, please read this. I’m totally with DeWitt Clinton here).

The trick to make all this work and where Friendfeed and Plaxo failed is critical mass. I’m pretty sure that the guys at Facebook are really looking at Friendfeed again and rethinking what parts they should chop off it instead, because if Google can truly pull this off and make this pipe-dream of semantic and social aggregation nirvana that plumbs everything out of what it can get it social graph on work, Facebook has no other option than to open up and that’s pretty much the end game for them right there.

The technical challenge is really complex and it’s going to take some time until all the pieces are in place. Google has put their thing out in the open and it is now the publishers’ turn to do some back-end changes so that this discussion utopia can get its legs. I’m not expecting the social web to turn on its head in a day, but this is some serious stuff for the long term. The reason why I think Google can pull this off is that Google just needs to show ads on the web to make this worthwhile, Facebook et al. need to monetize every inch of their userbase. Google can, and it is in their advantage, to utilize open systems and not lock people in. And, hey, maybe things don’t pan out. Google has the cash to try something else.

Single Purpose Browsing & Why Tabbed Browsing Makes for a Pretty BAD User Experience

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:19:35 +0000

When Firefox, previously called Phoenix and Firebird, launched tabbed browsing (well, after Bloatzilla), I was super-excited and pimping it to all my friends. It’s been a while since I felt this way and, with tab-saving in browsers (which I of course turn on), I tend to choose the browser with the least tabs saved in it. Apps like Choosy for the Mac, which gives me a pop-up with a choice of browsers whenever clicking a link, or which chooses the best-performing browser running at the time, are a life-saver, but they are just a piecemeal solution to a greater problem.

Firefox, in its latest version (3.6), introduced a nifty feature for a better tab user-experience, which I hope they expand a little more. Basically, when you click on the little icon on the top right (see screenshot), you get a nice overview, called “Showcase,” of all the tabs loaded in your browser at the time.

A similar implementation is of course Safari’s and Chrome’s start-window, which shows you an overview of your most viewed sites, making it a visual replacement for your bookmarks and/or history managers.

For some time now, you’ve also had the feature of restoring tabs after closing your browser, either voluntary, which makes sense as tabs consume an insane amount of ram and CPU (especially for Flash sites, but for plenty of other things also), and as a safety feature, when your browser crashes. Saft for Safari (Mac only) introduced a tab-recovery user-interface (see picture), where you see a list of tabs previously loaded and where you can tick or untick sites that you want to start up with. I believe Firefox has a similar interface for tab-recovery after a crash.

But it’s all still a hassle and I really haven’t come across a perfect implementation of dealing with several dozens of tabs. I wouldn’t mind having the option of starting Firefox tab-free, with option of restoring whatever tab I used previously, in its original state, via something like the Firefox Showcase interface. There are some Firefox extensions that do just that, but I’ve so far not come across something that is intuitively usable.

There is the other problem, which is that sometimes you want to open a browser for a single purpose, such as Google Maps, Gmail, or the weather, and it’s annoying to have to open a browser with 50+ tabs in it. Some sites have become applications rather than sources of information and just like it doesn’t make sense to open the full Office suite when opening Microsoft Word, it doesn’t make sense to open several tabs to go to one site.

Since last night, I’m experimenting with Fluid on the Mac, one of a few, I’m sure, applications that turn websites into applications that launch from your application folder. So I now have a Google Calendar app, a Google Docs app, etc. For Gmail, I really like Mailplane, which also uses Webkit, Safari’s open source sibling, as a basis for creating a service dedicated to one site, or in Mailplane’s case, multiple Gmail accounts.

So far that is the best user-experience for me if I want to go to a site that is also an application. Tabs, I’m sure, have a purpose, but they just invite information overload and the guilt for not being able to deal with it all. If you, the readers, have similar experience, feel free to share them, and if you found solutions, please let us know as well!

Addendum: talk about measuring the real cost of tabs… In the last weeks, I received 12 identical letters from the Dutch government regarding an access code I requested once. Turns out that it was one of my 50 saved tabs in Firefox that, every time I restarted the browser, requested a new code when the page loaded.

CeBit 2010: On 3D technology and its commercial potential

Vincent van Wylick — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:21:54 +0000

This year, I had the chance to visit CeBit 2010 for the very first time. It was an anticlimactic experience. Being raised with reports of CESs and Macworlds, you can’t help but hope to stumble on the next big thing, but what I was confronted with what had the air of a dusty town ripped out of a Western movie after all the gold diggers left for fairer grounds. In this case, the gold drought is the recession, and the aftermath (to me) appeared as a number of very empty spaces and the remainder seemingly under-budgeted, not “2010 innovative” but 2007 innovative, and with a big sticker on their back saying: “I’m under-confident, please buy something!”

To me, the most interesting technologies were 3D and a massage chair that took me under for 20 min. The biggest news story, however, was USB 3.0, a sad state of affairs if 2010 is marked by a tiny, soon to be in every computer, plug (no matter how fast that damn thing is).

Ignoring the massage chair, which I can’t recommend enough, 3D was the hot topic, inspired by, of course, Avatar. Everybody, from Nokia to Nvidia, appeared to have something related to 3D. They mostly had excuses for it—Nokia was pimping its high bandwidth infrastructure for 3D content aimed at TV & telephone providers; Nvida was pimping its 3D shutter technology for consumer PCs; Frauenhofer Institut was pimping its glasses-less 3D technology; and more and more and more—but my end-conclusion, also after trying to explore the potential for a revolution that was Avatar, was that 3D is an excellent gimmick that will draw a crowd to your stand or cinema, but will leave you disappointed 2/3 times.

Ironically, Nokia had the most impressive display of 3D, showing it off on a 15,000 euro JVC flatscreen. When asked for details, however, all they could tell me was the price of the TV and that their bandwidth technology was not for sale to the “likes of me.” Very arrogant, those Nokia folk and it wasn’t just the 3D guy either… Nvidia’s shutter glasses also worked well and I see a real potential for 3D gaming. Frauenhofer’s glasses-less 3D-TV… pah! The problem with 3D is that it’s so easy to do it badly and 3D without glasses is far from ready. 3D with glasses is far from ready!

I don’t get the obsession with not wearing glasses either. First of all, they’re roomy, which means that you can wear them over existing glasses, they won’t make the claustrophobic more claustrophobic, and they’re disposable. Putting on glasses in the living room is kind of like turning off the light when watching TV.

Last, but not least, I liked lcReflex, which developed an interesting, if not very portable contraption, that makes applications on a computer screen three-dimensional. It involves something they call a Stereomonitor, two screens joined together at a 90 degree angle (one front-facing, one on top facing down) and a semi-transparent mirror in the middle. Put on glasses and you can manipulate an image of brain in 3 dimensions, which should be very interesting for, eh, brain-scientists and playing 3D Tetris.

What’s fairly clear is that we are very close to having 3D in our living rooms, whether it’s for playing games or for watching (selected) TV-shows and movies. But 3D has the same problem that HD-DVDs and -TVs have, which is that it’s insanely niche. You can’t play everything on it and you need some pretty expensive equipment to play it. That combination doesn’t justify much of an investment in it.

The best chances for success belong to companies like Nvidia, which produce consumer-priced solutions for consuming content. Add to this that it is (relatively speaking) fairly easy to convert digital content from 2D to 3D. I very much see the next stage of gaming to becoming 3D.

I’m much more bearish on video-media. Great that cinemas have found a new revenue stream to subsidise their troubled existence. Great that 7 out of 10 filmmakers are considering to make their next film in 3D. I don’t think cinemas have to worry about living rooms competing with them on that level anytime soon. While the need for a big screen to enjoy 3D is a myth well-worth breaking (and it soon will be in gaming), it is still a powerful way to experience a movie and something you can sell at €/$ 15 a pop. Home-entertainment still has the expensive technology problem and the fact that BluRay DVDs simply aren’t selling to anyone except Playstation 3 owners.

As mentioned, 3D’s gimmick power is strong, but that will wear off after having 3D technology in your living room and hardly any media to consume on it. It’s much better off in cinemas where the growing few pay a few bucks more to see space debris floating above their heads, or on consoles where the price of a 3D add-on is hardly more than buying a Guitar Hero guitar.

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Why I look down on coding (and why I’m completely wrong about it)

Vincent van Wylick — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:24:41 +0000

I live in a funny world. My company, which is composed of several disciplines in the manufacturing, industrial design, and, yes, programming space, is one factor. I sometimes see people screw together contraptions in our workshop, and I see coders banging away at their PCs and Macs, and I wonder what the hell I am thinking calling programming low or high tech. There are different degrees to everything and just like metal and a few screws can lead to an amazing creation, so lines of code produces the amazing virtual reality I interact with most of my days.

This will be a short post. I think that the Internet has proven to be a two sided coin. It brought us freedom of information, but bits are also information, which makes it hard to gain value from them. Looking at it through a business lens (a flaw of mine) I can’t help but wonder if programming is a worthwhile direction to take, if you want to make money at least.

The other side is what I wrote about in paragraph one. Code produces wonderful things and I am grateful everyday for the fruits of that labour. So I sincerely hope that my world, the business world, will continue to allow for “the code” to reign free, and for those that produce code and its products, to reap the rewards and continue to do what they love.

So I apologise for whatever I wrote previously, namely that software is not high-tech, i.e. innovative, because it simply does not apply to all code (just to the 100s of 1000s of me-too apps and websites out there, which ruin it for the good ones).

This post was inspired by Fred Wilson’s post “Code As Craft” and by one of our interns producing “beautiful code.”

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Thoughts on the (iTablet) iPad – connectivity, apps, multitasking, integrating with Macs

Vincent van Wylick — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 10:54:10 +0000

The following is a draft I wrote prior to the announcement of the iPad, but which I didn’t publish because it was a series of hypotheses based on an as yet non-existing product. It’s a series of thoughts on how an interface of a touchscreen larger than an iPhone might look like. It is inspired by both my experiences with Macs and since recently with an iPod Touch. Here goes.

A couple of thoughts I had last night (written on 13.01.2010) about interfaces, the current state of development for the iPhone OS, how Apple could build a hybrid of Mac and iPhone OS, and how the company could build multi-tasking into its rumoured tablet. My thought were the following:

a. A new category: I don’t think the iTablet, if it exists, will be either a Mac or an iPhone. My super-superficial reason: it doesn’t fit in the Mac line-up depicted on the online Apple Store (see pic), but a more underlying reason is that I don’t see space for it in either a Mac-category or a Mobile phone/media player category. Which is not to say that it won’t do either well, but I think it will more fall into the class of Netbooks, though of course with the purpose of bombing those low-tech, low-innovation devices out of the water… just like Apple did with MP3 players and with Phones. Note from today: as it turns out, the iPad is depicted below the iPod, iPhone, and Mac lines, but time will tell where it will be once it’s on sale.

b. The Keyboard: I think that any 10″ screen will demand more connectivity to secondary (Apple) devices than the iPhone allows for. That means, an external keyboard and mouse, which transforms the tablet into a desktop. I have less complaints about the software-keyboard now, after working with a Touch for a while, but I still don’t see it as an alternative for longer texts, which a larger screen would warrant. Some months ago, I made a stupid mock-up of the iPhone + a keyboard (see pic), which is how I envision it looking (only better).

c. The App Store: 3 Billion Apps downloaded, Apple just reported, which also suggests a kind of lock-in. For better or worse, developers have accepted the App-store and I think it works for several reasons for both, namely more protection from pirates, more predictability for developers when developing for the black hole that is Apple, and more control by Apple, which is what Apple likes, not to mention new income streams for both. I think the App Store will continue to exist and will present new challenges when talking about a larger screen. Note from today: I don’t believe that what we will get to see in less than two months will be that what people were playing around with after the Apple keynote. iPhone apps inflated to a larger screen, come on?

d: The User Interface: I’ve written previously about Quick Look in Snow Leopard and how I also dug its slight innovation in terms of in-icon playing of media. Previously, OS X also introduced Dashboard into Tiger (I believe), whose interface, on the surface at least, resembles the iPhone. My view is that Apple will give developers the option to just keep the same resolution apps as they have offered before, though not exclusively of course. But imagine “Quick Looking” an app and still having it run inside its “Icon,” while the user does something else. For the rest, I of course think that full-screen Apps will exist, which is where Dashboard comes in, or at least a type of Dashboard. (Note: that was wrong. More below.)

e. Integration with the Mac: One of the most underused interfaces, at least on my Mac, is Dashboard, which allows people to have continuously open widgets on anything from news, to games, to radio, to system monitoring. It’s useful for those purposes, but not really something i spend more than a few minutes at a time with. Yet the first thing that came to mind when thinking of a “Tablet,” using both iPhone and Mac interface components, was Dashboard. It creates a new layer on top of a traditional desktop, allowing for user-input and information display. When I envision someone running the apps that would work on the “iTablet” also, I think of it either being that you open up a new layer on your Mac and run the very same apps on it through something like a Dashboard-like interface. Or, and the simplest solution is usually the best, through having the Tablet sync through iTunes with regular applications on the Mac.

Note from today: well, obviously this was wrong, but there have been several theories aired of having a type of Dashboard on the iPad for apps like calculator and weather, which don’t at all make sense to run in single focus on a larger screen than the iPhone.

Further thoughts from today: I do think that we will see a new OS update for both the iPhone and iPad before the release of the iPad. This will address the concerns that people have about it just being a larger iPod Touch. For the rest, to me the only downside to this device is the lack of a front-facing camera for video-calling, and some minor things. And I also think it’s the perfect “parent device!” What the Wii was to gaming, the iPad is to computing, addressing a very very blue ocean.

As previously stated, I’m still in line to get one this year, though only after trying one first.

Vincent

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My computing context and what I think about the iPad

Vincent van Wylick — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 09:31:53 +0000

OK, time to write a few words about the iPad. In true spirit of fanboyishness I started (and finished) writing this post in bed on my iPod Touch. Let me start by saying that with reservations I want the iPad. Reservations include that like you, I haven’t actually used the device, and that it doesn’t include a front facing camera which is a real shame. Flash… Pah! I really don’t care. Anyone who experienced the professional look, feel and support you get even from a €0.79 game on the Touch or iPhone isn’t going back to freeware flash (read my Farmville review as an example).

I’m not trying to provoke you by being so dismissive of flash, even though I feel a lot of people really really hate how the iPad turned out. I am only writing out of my own current and past context and reserving final judgement until it’s in my hands.

My context is several. I was born into an age when there weren’t any personal computers. As a matter of fact, Apple had only just been conceived when I was born. I grew up without computers, until I got a toy Amiga at 13, and a very buggy 1st PC at 15. It ran DOS mostly and crashed a lot in Windows 3.1. I mention this because people in my generation suffer from a curse. We were forced to learn a zillion crappy commands as teens, which made our parents and family members consider us computer geniusses and not a week goes by when I don’t get at least 1 question about a bug in a computer. Last week, I spent maybe 5 hours trying to get a Wifi card to communicate with an Internet radio, I will have to set up skype VOIP at my parents’ house this year and who knows what else.

My no. 2 reason for getting an iPad? To give it to my parents and save me future headaches (knock on wood).

My no. 1 reason is different. Last December, my MacBook was lost on a train. I’m using an older MacBook from work at the moment and digging this iPod Touch a lot. In many ways I do more on the Touch now. It has its flaws of course, and no it has nothing to do with “openness” or flash. The screen is too small and there are times (less than you would think) where I need a physical keyboard.

So picture my context. I travel a fair amount, I think the MacBook is not always neccessary but the Touch/iPhone is not always enough. The Touch meets my casual gaming needs (serious games, that’s what consoles are built for), it kind of meets my wordprocessing needs (still typing on the Touch …). So why on earth, for that price, wouldn’t I want an iPad?

Truth be told, I was considering getting a sleek MacBook Pro to replace my lost MacBook. But for years, I’ve secretely lusted after a shiny iMac as well, never being able to justify having both a laptop and a desktop. The iPad is not a standalone PC. It needs to be synced with one (every week or so). But it also gives me a chance not not restrict computing to a small 13-15″ screen and buy a “real” computer so that makes sense to me.

In my UNIQUE context, the iPad makes sense. In my less unique context regarding my parents, it makes sense. 2010 is hopefully a year of less computing headaches and more of just getting things done.

the end
Vincent

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Thoughts on Farmville, an addictive but flawed Facebook game

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 07:20:54 +0000

I quit Farmville yesterday, after 3.5 weeks of pushing it up to level 20. In the first week, I wanted to write a review of how awesome it was and how it changed the social dynamic of Facebook. Now after a few weeks of wintery downtime, my gaming habit is back in the closet where it belongs, and my opinion is somewhat different.

What attracted me to Farmville in the first place? Well, in true Web3.0 spirit, it was someone raving about it on Twitter (Fidji Simo, I believe). It made me check it out and when I found out that some of my friends were on it, it made me give it a chance. I also remember SimFarm being one of the first games I played on my first PC and there was the nostalgia factor.

Farmville = FunVille?
The fun part of Farmville was to me truly the social dynamic. You build experience by doing different activities, such as growing fruit and vegetables, herding animals, and also helping out your friends. You can also give gifts to friends who in turn gift you back. All of that leads to two ways of measuring progress: experience points, which leads to new levels and abilities, and achievements, which you get after doing certain activities enough. While helping friends fuels my socialist—we are all equal, blablabla—self, the latter fuels my competitive—I am better, haha—self. As such, Farmville gives me complex feelings of satisfaction that can’t be found in every activity or game.

Now, while I admit that the latter statement is a little weird, but hopefully sufficient to explain why I liked the game, let me get to the parts that made me quit Farmville. They are, simply put: money, Adobe’s Flash, and boredom.

Farmville = CashVille
Farmville was admittedly the biggest blockbuster on the Facebook platform in 2009 and I have no doubt it will do well in 2010 also. The reason it is what it is, is because of its way of making money. Yes, if you want the easy way to winning, which is measured by how beautiful your farm is, you have to pay! There are three ways to pay for stuff in Farmville: achievements, such as having many neighbours or growing many tomatoes, which gets you free stuff; fake money, which buys you stuff; and Farmville money, which you get by either levelling up or by buying it for real dollars.

You can do pretty much everything you want without spending Farmville cash. Except for two things: expanding your farm, which would lead to having more real-estate and thus more “fun.” And, buying fuel. You can buy vehicles that make farming an easier chore, but using those vehicles requires fuel, which is expensive to buy and slow to recharge. The fact that I couldn’t sustainably earn income and spend it (without spending real cash) was a real downer in terms of gameplay.

Farmville = FlashVille
Flash made headlines these last few years mostly because of three things. It got bought by Adobe, its Air-platform and the sheer ubiquity of Flash as a development platform on sites such as Facebook. And, its lack of support on the iPhone / iPod Touch OS. And the latter is the case because Flash really sucks! It’s bloated, it’s not as good as pretty much any other interfacing technology (for lack of a better term), and it reminds us all of badly designed Myspace sites.

For me, the lack of iPhone OS support was a real factor as I got a Touch this Christmas, which became my nr. 1 Facebook interface, minus the reason* why I mainly visited Facebook these last few weeks (*: yes, yes, I really did mean it when I wished my friends a Merry Xmas and Happy New Year, but that just wasn’t getting me the experience points to get me ahead on Farmville…).

The second factor was that Flash is simply a bad technology. 1. it was incredibly slow and I had to reload the page several times, also losing my progress. 2. the Farmville interface is split up into blocks, on which you can farm, build, plant trees, or herd animals. Doing stuff on these chunks required actual movement of my avatar/farmer, who wasn’t moving to swiftly because of “Flashville’s bloatyness,” and I also couldn’t drag actions across the screen, which I would have been able to do even in the 16 years older SimFarm! Flash sucks and was the no. 2 reason for quitting Farmville.

I think Farmville would make the perfect iPhone App, but I really think Flash needs a major overhaul and/or be killed of.

Farmville = FrustrationVille
I already mentioned how repetitive the actual playing part became, going from one block to the next to plant or harvest. Every level felt slower and more frustrating, which was mostly due to Flash, but also perhaps due to Farmville making it harder to get to the next level. In the end, I kind of started wondering why I was playing this game and if I was even playing and not just doing manual labour. The only real reward seemed to be Farmcash, which you could either earn by levelling up (1 Farmcash per level, while buying more farmland costs like 20-30 farm-dollars, seems frustrating) or by paying real money (and that would just be sad). I could also spam my friends to join Farmville and become my neighbours, but come on!

I did get some satisfaction out of reading the several strategy guides that exist for Farmville and there really is no shortage of community support. But in the end it seems like Farmville emulates actual farming too closely, by making it tedious manual labour to grow stuff on your farm (mostly due to Flash sucking!) and it also makes it feel like serfdom, by having to buy Farmcash from your “masters,” in order to have a great-looking farm.

Well, that’s all I have to say on Farmville. It was a fun experience during the holidays and I don’t regret trying it. But while I think social gaming has a strong future, I really don’t like business models that rely on making its users’ lives more frustrating. I know World of Warcraft has a similar model and is the most successful multiplayer game ever made, but that doesn’t mean that it makes it the best game ever made. I can name a dozen single player and half a dozen multiplayer games that aren’t as successful financially, but just work well in terms of gameplay. And games like Farmville have a long way to go before they get there.

End review.
Vincent

Must Use Twitter Tools for Corporate Users

Anand — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:32:24 +0000

If you are new to Twitter then it’s easy to get confused with so many twitter applications out there. Further, if you are a business user than you may have no time to do research on the applications. We really can’t deny the fact that businesses are testing out Twitter as part of their steps into the social media landscape. You can say it’s a stupid application, that no business gets done there, but there are too many of us (including me) that can disagree and point out business value. I used many of the tools available in internet to manage my old twitter account.

With this idea behind I am trying to categorize the tools which may be helpful for our readers to use according to their needs. Here are some twitter tools along with the snapshots which impressed me and according to me will be easy to use even for a newbie to promote his/her business .

Buzzom Premium http://premium.buzzom.com/

Buzzom Premium is very newly launched application which allows you to focus in your twitter growth. It has many functions to choose from but more essentially its spam filter, scheduler and monitor. These are the three basic functions over which the application is build.

Direct Message is full of SPAM and it is almost unusable now. Thanks to various gaming applications and welcome or thank you messages. I like Buzzom SPAM filtering for DM. It actually makes this feature usable.

Buzzom also provides a great way to visualize your Twitter growth and network’s activity such as tweets, Retweets etc. The service also has the auto grow and follow system to increase your network’s size. Scheduler allows you to schedule tweets at certain time and control it by specifying its repeat cycle for future tweets.

2. Twonvert http://www.twonvert.com/

Twitter is all about 140 characters of words. People are already got use to expressing themselves in 140 characters with shorthand notation and some ingenuity. But that takes time and when you are in hurry, its more frustrating. With Twonvert you can easily convert your tweets into SMS shorthand language and allows you to say more with less characters!

3. Wefollow http://wefollow.com/

WeFollow is the directory of all the people in the Twitter, who have added themselves to the list. It provides an easy way for you to find relevant people in twitter and connect with them. You can find all short of people from celebrity to technologist in the list. WeFollow.com helps you use your time efficiently by making your people search easy and fast.

4. Twitscoop http://www.twitscoop.com/

Twitscoop is the service which lets you search the real-time trend in the twitter. Twitscoop uses the dynamic tag cloud to show the most talked topic in an interactive way. You can also search for related keyword and finds its popularity in the Twitter network.

Overall, it allows users to “Mine the thought stream” provided by Twitter. Twitscoop’s algorithm cuts every English non-spam tweets into pieces (“tags”), and ranks them by how frequently they are used versus normal usage. Twitscoop can essentially be described as your real-time web’s monitor.

5. Twittercal http://twittercal.com/

Managing your calendar is very tedious. You may have to enter new task on the go and may not have access to web version of Google calendar. Now you can do that easily via Twitter, you just have to send a small tweet and it gets added to your Google Calendar.

It’s a free service that connects your Twitter account to your Google Calendar. Add events in a snap from your favorite Twitter client. Follow the 5 steps procedure to get started.

6. Socialtoo http://www.socialtoo.com/

Socialtoo is a paid service that lets you manage your twitter account by autofollow and unfollow tool. It also provides you basic statistics about your followers count and tweet count. It helps you manage your account and reduce the spam in your network.

It has interesting features like social survey that allows you to create survey that will allow you to understand your network much better.

7. StrawPoll http://strawpollnow.com/

Can you measure the sentiment of your network? Ets say you have 1000 people in your network, getting everyone’s opinion one to one is difficult. If you just want to measure if your network is Pro Apple or Pro Google, what do you do? Well Strawpoll is the tool you are looking for.

StrawPoll is the coolest way to follow the opinions of people onTwitter. It allows you to create poll and communicate with your network and understand their opinion.

8. TweetDeck http://www.tweetdeck.com/

Tweetdeck is the most popular desktop application for Twitter developer in Adobeair. It is very popular for its interface. It provides you a very easy way to maintain your daily twitter activities. Tweetdeck provides easy way to group your friends into different tabs and clean up the twitter stream. You can also search in the Tweetdeck and open a dedicated tab for the keyword; this allows you to track them easily. Recently, TweetDeck also has added TweetDeck Directory which is similar to WeFollow.

9. Stocktwits http://stocktwits.com/

StockTwits is an open, community-powered idea and information service for investments. Users can eavesdrop on traders and investors, or contribute to the conversation and build their reputation as savvy market wizards. The service takes financial related data and structures it by stock, user, reputation, etc.

User can add a set of specific stocks, save them to their own portfolio and limit the conversation around it or focus only on their favorite and trusted sources. Watch the whole stream or create your own filters. User can follow the best on the site, the best only in your areas of interest and in turn share your best actionable ideas. This is the best Twitter related financial site on the web does this in real-time.

10. TwitterSearch http://search.twitter.com/

TwitterSearch is the basic framework of the entire search engine that is present. It provides an easiest way to find out tweets related to keywords. It also has an advanced feature that lets you customize your query to find relevant tweets. It is small but powerful tool. Once you get hang of it, it can be your most powerful tool of all. Beside search, it was shows the trending topic which can be useful to get hold of the perspective of twitter.

To Actually understand how to use twitter to promote your business here is a link to an awesome article by Chris Brogan.

P.S : All the rankings and stats are based on my personal opinions and experiences while using them.

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How Enterprise 2.0 fosters Knowledge Capture

ceciiil — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:05:24 +0000

(Knowledge Capture in Enterprise 2.0 – click to enlarge)

Knowledge Worker : one who works primarily with information or one who develops and uses knowledge in the workplace (Peter Drucker – 1959)

If the definition above applies to your job then you probably are a knowledge worker. I personally am. And knowledge is the raw material we’re working with.

As opposed to the raw material manual workers deal with, knowledge is immaterial, it is just floating around. If we want to be productive we need to make sure this knowledge is harnessed, i.e captured and easily accessible.

Some studies show that between 25 and 50% of the communication between knowledge workers remains tacit and uncaptured. The question is how can we be productive and comfortable with our daily work if about half of the raw material we’re working with is wandering around ?

In the enterprise 2.0 presentation, I compare the knowledge capture in Enterprise 1.0 and 2.0. And it goes like this …

Enterprise 1.0

(Knowledge Capture in Enterprise 1.0 – click to enlarge)

Split knowledge

In the Enterprise 1.0 Microsofty world of the last century, the enterprise knowledge is split all around the place.

To start with, there are different types of document : office, HTML, mails. Even though mails are not supposed to contain information they do contain an awful lot of project related information.

These different types of documents are stored on different machines : mail server, intranet, shared network drives, knowledge management systems, local machines, etc …

Last, but not least, these pieces of information are accessed via different applications : Outlook, Office, browser.

Intimidating corporate policy

In the post about the conversation in the enterprise, I stress the fact that a knowledge policy based on Word documents and Knowledge Management bloated solutions is intimidating and discourage knowledge workers from capturing these units of knowledge. Therefore, a large number of units of knowledge (illustrated with color circles in the diagrams) are not captured and remain tacit.

However, some brave knowledge workers sometimes capture units of knowledge in Word documents. But they still don’t go the extra mile and share the actual document on the complicated KM system.

In the event where there is no KM system but a network shared drive they don’t store the document in the right location according to the actual taxonomy. As a result, these pieces of knowledge become hard to reach and find.

Knowledge leaks and productivity issues

From the whole enterprise perspective, just like tacit knowledge, this unreachable pieces of information are knowledge leaks. And lost of productivity.

This results in figures such as the ones reported by an Accenture study on 1009 middle managers from UK and US. It shows that managers spend about 2 hours a day looking for information and 50% of the information found is of no value.

There are tons of such studies : another one reports that knowledge workers spend about 30% of their time looking for data (Butler Group). Others show that

Looking at the different applications and data repository used, this hardly comes as a surprise.

Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers (Andrew McAfee).

Most people naturally focus on the term social in the definition above by M. 2.0. However, emergent and platform should not be underestimated.

Emergent

Emergent means that the system has gradually been adopted and naturally emerged as the best solution. The collaborative environment in which these systems have naturally emerged is the bigger there have ever been on the face of earth : the internet.

One can notice that there has been no manager or super architect that has defined up front which tools and how to use them to communicate. This has just emerged between the developers and project stakeholders.

The barrier entry for knowledge capture and sharing is just one click. It makes a huge difference. As a result, knwoledge workers capture far more knowledge.

Social

These collaborative platforms have been heavily used to develop successful and ubiquitous applications on the internet. How relevant these social tools are in a collaborative environment is therefore unquestionable.

If the system has emerged in such a darwinist environment as the internet, it also is because it has proved the most appropriate in a social environment.

Wiki, forums, blogs, etc … are straight forward, one click away from any browser. There is no intimidating corporate template to follow, no complicate KM system to master or Network Share Drive taxonomy to remember.

Folksonomy and social bookmarking have offered a new way to categorize the information. It helped in making the information easy to index and find afterwards. As I mentioned in the post dedicated to management in enterprise 2.0, whenever we put information in order, the objective is not to have an harmonious and logical tree of information which make managers feel secure, but rather it is for the information to be found quickly and easily afterwards by anyone in the community.

Besides, the natural conversational tone of these tools allow a more efficient communication.

Platform

Platform means that the whole set of collaborative tools is accessed from a single entry point. Blogs, Wiki, Forums, etc .. they can all be searched from the platform single search engine.

This is a key aspect of Enterprise 2.0 : having a single entry point for search is critical in this respect.

Enterprise 2.0 Vs Enterprise 1.0

Enterprise 2.0 knowledge capture is more efficient than Enterprise 1.0′s because :

It is easier and less intimidating for knowledge workers to capture knowledge on collaborative platforms (wiki, blogs, forums etc …) then on word documents and then knowledge management systems
Collaborative platforms offer a single entry point from the same application (web browser) to a set of tools and application where information has been captured

This enhanced knowledge capture has measurable results on knowledge worker productivity as reported by Andrew McAfee in his Financial times article :

The consultancy firm McKinsey has conducted three annual surveys on this question. In the most recent, published in September, respondents reported benefits that included better access to knowledge and internal experts, greater employee and customer satisfaction, and higher rates of innovation.

The magnitude of the gains was striking, ranging from 20 per cent (innovation rates) to 35 per cent (access to internal experts).

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6 reasons to encourage enterprise conversations with collaborative platforms

ceciiil — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 12:02:34 +0000

(Hi, it’s Cecil here. A french version of this post is available on Heavy Mental)

Bertrand Duperrin explains in a quite remarkable post the risk of backslash when using standard web 2.0 key words while presenting social networks to a new audience. The reason is : there could be some misunderstanding from the audience.

Among these key words : Conversation. Bertrand exposes the issue :

Just try to explain to a manager who has been struggling for years to reduce wasted time and productivity due to gossip, that time is now for team talk and conversation. And even worst : that his role is to stimulate this conversation. Then watch his face that slowly turns sour.

6 reasons to bring management and the enterprise conversation back together. And to use collaborative platforms to foster the latter.

1 – Conversation = units of knowledge

I have been working in the IT industry for about 20 years. Whatever the country, the industry or the size of the organization, I have always found myself facing this problem : how to capture these priceless bits of information floating around and share them in an efficient way ?

How to foster these coffee machines or telephone discussions where experts talk about the best way to solve a particular problem and help a customer within a specific context etc … ?

Management always has proposed the same solution : bloated Knowledge Management systems and well structured Word documents with corporate templates etc … Even though this tends to reassure management, nobody uses this system or write those documents because it’s frustrating.

It’s frustrating to write a 10+ pages document for one unit of knowledge. Not to mention the actual Knowledge Management system that is so complicated that most people are terrorized with the idea of logging onto it.

Reason #1: Within conversations lie many units of knowledge that the company need to capture. It is easier, more direct and far less intimidating to capture these on collaborative platform tools such as Wikis or Forums. And it’s then easier for other people to find them afterwards.

2- Knowledge Management != Documents Management

I was giving a training to some U.S call-center colleagues back then. One of them, Billy-Bob, told me this : Hey, when the client calls for a problem, depending on the area where the problem occurs, I forward them to the right document and give the polite RTFM Directive (Read That F***ing Manual). Because, hey, all documents are available online.

Except that, as part of the training, they have to configure a database. Billy-Bob encountered a problem and although the document describing the database configuration was open right before his very eyes on his PC desktop, he directly googled the symptoms (I.e error code) to see what it was. I asked him what he was doing and gave him some RTFM. Which had everybody laughing. Everybody but him, of course.

Reason #2 : When a knowledge worker looks for some information in the 21st century, he uses a web browser to search. Collaborative platforms offer single entry point and search engine on company knowledge (Wikis, Forums, Blogs, documents …).

3 – Conversational communication is more efficient

In one of her many unmissable posts at Creating Passionate Users, Kathy Sierra tells it all : Conversational writing kicks formal writing’s ass.

Kathy has been interested in cognitive science as she suffers epilepsy. So she knows what she talks about : you can see the result of her study on the topic in the amazing Head Firt Series IT industry self-teaching books.

In the blog post, she mentions a study published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, in which researchers found out that :

Students who learned with personalized text performed better on subsequent transfer tests than students who learned with formal text. Overall, participants in the personalized group produced between 20 to 46 percent more solutions to transfer problems than the formal group.

According to Sierra, when pieces of information are communicated using a conversational tone (using You and I) the brain thinks it is in a conversation and become much more responsive and involved in the communication.

Reason #3 : Communicating in a conversational style results in a much better quality of message transmission. Collaborative platforms have a native informal style and therefore nurture better quality communications.

4 – Conversational communication is key for leadership

We have already mentioned it here. Michel Crozier is a sociologist, expert in the study of the enterprise. His analysis (according to a french university lecture) of the tight relationship between the simplicity of the speech and the subsequent team support is rather interesting :

The more sophisticated and complex the communication, the more it sounds simplistic. While simple message appears as a source of wealth, because it allows individuals to make it their own and discuss freely. The involvement of experienced manager, the fact that everyone is convinced of his conviction helps to give considerable strength to a simple message.

I once had a great American CEO. He had a straight forward speech style, both bewildering and stimulating. During the open questions in General Meetings, he would encourage people to ask questions on and on, until the very last drop. He would then willingly answer, using this typically American laid back tone using We/You/I. This always resulted in giving a great feeling of proximity and stimulated employees engagement.

During my long career, I’ve hardly ever been so motivated and convinced by the company strategy than when I left his meetings. A feeling that was shared by my colleagues.

This is something that large companies are looking into. At Intel, for instance, most company executives have an internal blog, Paul Otellini – CEO – included. Thanks to this medium, they benefit from the disintermediation offered by the collaborative platforms and engage in conversations with potentially all employees, regardless of their role and position.

Reason #4 : Excutives speech with conversational tone help to establish leadership and contributes a great deal in engaging employees. Blogs is the perfect media for executives to engage into these company wide conversations.

5 – Fostering weak links

Thanks to collaborative platforms, coffee machine chats became global. In other words, the global conversation has started.

Rather than chatting with always the same colleagues, people we professionally hang out with, people we share the same knowledge with, we have broaden the conversation scope thanks to collaborative platforms on the internet. We now reach different people and roles. The exchange has become much more fruitful, for everybody’s benefit.

Mark Granoveter wrote a theory about this : the Strength of weak ties. The great benefit is innovation. While one confront ideas with always the same people, with the same knowledge and new innovative ideas seldom appear. On the other hand, these new ideas are much more likely to pop up when different people in the company, working in different areas, with different responsibilities engage and chat.

Reason #5 : The global conversation is encouraged by collaborative platforms. It leverages weak links and allows new ideas and new business opportunities to emerge.

6 – Make sense out of knowledge workers contribution

One of the great frustation and source of insecurity at work for knowledge workers is how difficult it is for them to apprehend the actual purpose of their contribution in large projects.

We have this excellent developper in our team who has been working his ass off for 6 months building a fully integrated Installer for our PLM solution. PLM is an enterprise complex system involving many servers, different components etc … It is was a nightmare to install and configure. Johnny Boy made a great work automating our solution installation, hiding all the gory details of the configuration behind a smooth user interface.

A couple of weeks after the release of this installer, we had Peggy Sue, our lovely Marketing Events Manager storming into the office asking Who the hell this Johnny Boy is ?

He rose his hand and she ran to him giving him the biggest hug in his professional career. She said : “Oh thank you so much. You made our life soooo easier with your great installer. You don’t have any idea how much this tool has changed our daily work in such a lovely way”.

No matter how much we, in the department, praised his remarkable work, nothing gave more sense to his contribution than this hug from someone he never heard of before, a person and a role he hardly knew they existed. The reason is : all of a sudden, with Peggy Sue hug and gratitude, he touched the reality of his contribution, his piece of software became a life changer. From that hug onwards, Johnny Boy dedication and commitment (which already were of higher standards) became unbelievable.

The global conversation on collaborative platforms facilitates this type of real life feedback from someone at the completely opposite end of the enterprise organization.

Reason #6 : The enterprise global conversation with collaborative platforms provides a company-scale perspective to employees actual contribution together with real-life feedback. To paraphrase the stone cutter story, it helps turning knowledge stone worker into knowledge cathedral workers. This is a key factor (arguably the most important) to employee well-being and commitment.

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Understanding The Green Future!

Anand — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 18:43:56 +0000

“For those new to Tech IT Easy who could obviously not remember the initial announcement, Anand Kishore Raju is a new blogger on Tech IT Easy, who will focus on providing you with analyses of greening the internet, carbon footprints, energy and power figures of the internet and web2.0. Anand, the floor is now yours…”

The debate on climate change has moved beyond an argument about whether it is happening or not, to a discussion about what can be done to tackle its root causes. Pollution and energy savings are keywords that are becoming more and more of interest to people and to governments across the globe, and the research community is also becoming more sensible towards these topics.

McKinsey & Co. recently reported that the world’s 44 Million servers* consume about 0.5 percent of total electricity productions across the globe and emits about 80 megatons of Carbon Dioxide a year, which is nearly the emissions of entire countries like Argentina or the Netherlands (Data needs an Update ).

Recent Studies have also estimated that power consumption related to ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) can be somewhere from 2% to 10% of the worldwide power consumption. This trend is expected to increase notably in the near future. Not surprisingly, reports also confirm that only 20% of ICT carbon emissions derive from manufacturing, while 80% arise from equipment use. With increasing penetration rates of Internet broadband in Asia and Africa these numbers are all set to scale newer heights.

One of the ways to be Green and lower the Carbon Footprint is to Just have less and Do less.

No houses, no cars, no travel, no PCs, no Internet, as seen from the night time satellite image illustrating power usage in North Korea and South Korea. Driving the society back in Stone Age is not the real sense of Going Green. North Korea as compared to rest of world may be emitting lesser Carbon Dioxide but definitely its not A Model Green Society. This scenario becomes clearer in the the second over night pic of the region . The black spot represents North Korea surrounded with developed neighbors like Japan, China and S.Korea.

By Green, I mean to be Sustainable. To be more specific its the ” development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. In my upcoming posts I would be writing more about various aspects of Greener Digital Ecosystems with focus on Operations with minimum environmental impact and having long term sustainability.

PS : Some data in the post needs an Update.

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Please welcome Anand Kishore Raju, a new blogger on Tech IT Easy !!!

Vincent van Wylick — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 13:20:14 +0000

Dear everyone,

I am extremely happy to start off this new year by introducing a fresh face on Tech IT Easy, Anand Kishore Raju, who will be blogging with us in 2010. His main areas of focus as a blogger will be greening the internet, carbon footprints, energy and power figures of the internet and web2.0.

Anand is currently working as a Research Engineer at Telecom ParisTech (ENST). His area of research focuses on the Energy aspects of the Internet, what the scientific community calls “Green Networking”. His efforts are directed towards making Computer Network Science aware that processing, moving and storing bits has a cost in terms of energy and in terms of the Carbon Emission Footprint.

In the past, Anand had also worked at Collaborative Systems Group (ColSys) at Bilkent University, Turkey, where he developed a taxonomy for user properties, influence factors for feedback quality in web 2.0, existing and novel models for deviation types and their detection. He also holds a degree in Computer Science and Engineering and aspires to join HEC in near future.

Anand joins a smart team of collaborators, some of which also work in green computing and many of which share an interest in this important topic for sure. As such, please join us in welcoming Anand to the team and I hope you enjoy reading his words on Tech IT Easy!

Happy New Year,

The Tech IT Easy team

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