Twitter’s not a waste of time (in defence of status updates)
Twitter is a tiny thing compared to some of the things we’ve seen before. But people get very passionate about it.

Updates status in two places – Twitter and Facebook. Done separately, not automatically, because they have two different audiences.

As explaining what she does, there are two responses: “Yeah, this make sense”, or “Is she mad?”. Some people think that status updating is really egocentric. Why do people update about what they are eating? Why bother?

Two or three categories of people who don’t get it:

– People who haven’t properly been exposed to it. Leisa didn’t like Twitter when she first saw it, but two or three months later she tried again, and suddenly started to understand, it made sense. if you only got to that first part of the journey, looked but didn’t engage, that might be why you don’t get it.

– A bunch of people who have engaged, have found people, have experimented, and still don’t like it. That’s fine. Two characteristics of people for whom this doesn’t work. Some people for whom being in a room is very important, much more than any other way of communicating. Or people who are upset by context shifting, they don’t like being interrupted and find that very disruptive and takes a lot of time to get back into what you were doing before. These technologies are distracting. As Euan says, all these tools are like an orchestra you are conducting.

Lots of people are doing this. Are we all egotistical showponies?

What Twitter is:
– tech support: you have never had better tech support than following the right people on Twitter
– product research: always check big new purchases with people on Twitter. Was looking for an external hard drive, got lots of recommendations. They say stuff you’d never find out otherwise. Check travel info.
– news: twitter echoes stuff, looks at stuff that comes up lots and lots
– conferences: people Twitter conferences that they are at, and that can be really interesting. can virtually participate in conferences that you can’t physically get to.

Mixture of stuff that she tweets about: dialling into conferences, visits from hedgehogs in her garden, sharing professional stuff, e.g. she’s doing an open design process for Drupal and so is talking about that.

Don’t have to watch Twitter all day. You can get it through IM, but also many clients. Uses Twitterific. Sometimes actually switches Twitter off.

Invest time to Twitter, and it gives back. Has saved hours of work. Also saved her from going to the wrong airport because of a Tweet from a friend.

It’s about being able to get in touch with people that you otherwise would have no access to. These tools tell us something very little bits about people that help us get to know them. Helps us see people not as a caricature but as a real person.

What we’re doing is transplanting a natural face-to-face behaviour, phatic expressiveness. Asking why people update their status is like asking “why do you smile at someone?” or “why do you ask how I am?”. It’s just social communication, there’s no meaning or information. It’s like that conversation when you meet someone and you want to ask them a favour, but you have to do a social dance first. You have to pay your dues socially, then you can ask what you want.

Ambient intimacy is like a perpetual handshake. We maintain this state of being able to ask for things right now. And people feel happy to take time to answer. And can do this to a whole range of people around the world at the same time. The effect if ridiculously rapid access to important information right when you need it.

Really busy at the moment, and the idea of not having a Mac for 2 days, it can’t happen. Couple of weeks ago, Mac’s logic board died. Genius Bar says they can give her a new Mac but need 24 hours to transfer data. So had to go home with new MacBook and dead MacBook and had to get data off one onto another. Asked Twitter, and someone from the US spent a lot of time talking her through how to do it. Why? What was in it for him?

Robert Wright, Non-Zero. Some games there’s a winner and a loser, some games everyone can win from just being in it. That’s Twitter. Everyone puts in to and everyone gains. Jeff helps with the Mac because someone helped him once, and Leisa helps someone else because Jeff helped her.

If you go away from Twitter you have to do some ‘gardening’, you have to give back what you want to take out. It’s not egotistical at all, apart from very minority of people. Most of us have carefully built up networks we are interest in. very diverse groups of people who get great value out of their networks.

Open or closed? Bored of things that have to happen behind firewall. But what’s important is that if you close a network, you lose diversity, and lose value.

Yammer – newish site, internal business version of Twitter. Seems like a useful tool. If you have a company email account, you can sign up with people of the same email type.

Drupal project. Using Twitter search to get a sense for what’s happening with the Drupal brand. Also use it to recruit people – anyone who mentions Drupal gets followed by the DrupalTwitter account.

Twitter not just for people, it’s also about machines – there’s the LovellTelescope. That has a star and a black hole as a friend.

“It’s not about being poked and prodded, it’s about exposing more surface area for others connect with” – Johnnie Moore.

Social software applied: in legal and professional services organisations
McKinsey survey showed how businesses are moving from experimentation to implementation.

Working with a law firm in NY, using a wiki. Worked with key user groups, implemented Newsgator and Confluence. Already had some systems in place, but no place for discussions. Trying to supplement existing systems with conversational systems.

Wanted to reduce number of emails – lots of blanket emails, newsletters, which weren’t targeted to individual groups. Questions repeated. People wanted to be more productive, wanted context. Wanted to find things quickly instead of wasting time searching or ending up reinventing the wheel.

Identified use cases. Knowledge sharing, co-working, internal comms. Place the system within user’s daily working life.

Look at how tools interact. Tools appear to the user as an integrated whole, so it’s seamless moving between one and another.

[Sorry, fingers tired and this is a hard talk to take notes of as it’s very visual. Officially giving up at this point. Probably will not blog everything today – there’s a lot of sessions left yet!]

Thinking out of the inbox – the changing nature of collaboration
Going to show you something I started around eight months ago. Been working for IBM for a long time, and have a traditional knowledge management background and for five years have been doing social media. Eight months ago told IBM that he was no longer going to use email. Uses social tools.

Average number of email is 30 – 40. Most people think that’s nothing. But have you thought what happens when you come back from holiday. Is it 30 – 40, or is more like 500, 600, 700. Many people just delete them and move on. Email is not the tool, it’s just a tool.

How do you live a corporate life without email? My company is drive by email. Most people don’t believe it’s possible to cut off email. Went from 30-40 emails a day to about 20 per week, and most of those are invitations to events and it’s hard to do that any other way.

Reports to two different managers, 6000k apart, and he lives in Gran Canaria. We work in a distributed, virtual world. Few people work with their colleagues in the same office. Always need to rely on someone in our work. We can’t do the job ourselves, alone. We have to collaborate. The reality is that we need to work distributed, so we need to start thinking.

Used to believe “Content is key – can’t do anything without content”, but now it’s rubbish. As soon as you press publish, it’s out of date. Because right after you’ve seen it’s published, you realise what you forgot to add, and your colleagues tell you what you’ve forgot. Before you know, you have to rewrite it. What is actually key is the people behind the content. No longer interested in documenting stuff, more interested in what’s in people’s heads, what’s not documented.

We are bad at documenting, so why not move to the heart of the matter, of tacit knowledge, communities, the place where we have and share a passion on a specific topic. Before he gave up email it was ‘me, my email, fighting the corporation’, now it’s ‘me, my community, using social tools to get the job done’.

Email does a very bad job. The strongest success factor in the adoption of social software is the community, it’s the group of people. You need people to share stuff with, you can’t do it on your own. That’s the power behind the community. That’s what most corporations have been neglecting for years.

Businesses are good, possibly too good, at tools and processes, but they neglect the people. They key is the people, if you don’t have people you don’t have nothing.

Most businesses have invested in KM systems for what? If they are unfriendly people are not using them. If you are harvesting, capturing knowledge, how much of your knowledge has been captured? 0%. Because it’s all in the head and there’s no time to document it. And now we have information overload, it’s not overload it’s abundance, and you decide how much noise you want to be exposed to, and before you get the signal, you need the noise and to learn how to filter it.

So, 8 months ago, said that he was not going to use email. Company said “What?”. Announced on his blog, and said which social software tools he was going to use. Triggered two reactions. In 2/3 days, had 70 – 80 comments. Reaction was: You are going to be so fired. Two weeks, and you’re fired. And actually did get a comment fairly high up “I don’t give you more than two weeks”. Reaction no. 2 was more interesting, was a group of people who said “Oh my god, someone who finally had the balls to tell people not to use email”. So I was getting much more exposure than social software tools. But had to take quantum leap in the way he works.

Had been thinking about doing this for about a year. Inspired by the younger generations. Summertime is busy at work because lots of people approach him doing their PhD, so interacts with people who are coming into the workforce in a few years. They do not use email. They think that email is for grandparents. It’s a formal way of communicating. Formality with youngsters doesn’t work. So watching these people interact with one another. They use IM and SMS. They live on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

In 2/3 years, baby-boomers are going to retire, with years and years of knowledge. People coming up will reinvent solutions, but they don’t work the way that the companies do.

These youngsters are going to be looking for companies that will allow them to use things like Facebook, and they will reject companies that don’t. Whether you like it or not, people are going to use these tools. Mobile devices can’t be blocked, so they can access everything. They aren’t affected by the firewall. There’s no way of turning it back. No way of turning it off. If you don’t catch this train, there’s no way back.

Decided to ditch email. Exposed to lots of social tools. Some from IBM, some from other places. Collaboration on email is hell. Emails go all over the place, people edit documents, someone has to merge all the different versions. Wiki collaboration is much easier – everyone has the same document, and put in the same effort.

If someone sends an email with an attachment, it goes in the bin. Collaboration has to be done on the wiki. Uses about a dozen tool, have diversified interactions, has specialised them. If he collaborates, he uses a wiki, if there’s an urgent question and email is not going to do – use the phone! So uses a number of different tools which allows him to specialise. Email is for one-on-one, private conversation.

No. 1 tool he uses is IM. If you get an email, you know immediately if you can help. So say if you are going to help or not, and if you don’t know the answer, admit it. IM allows you to respond to that straight away. People learn that he’s faster through IM, so they contact him via IM not email.

When someone is offline, he uses Beehive, an internal application. Allows him to leave messages on people’s profiles, which are public to both their networks. So if someone sends him an email, he leaves the answer on their profile, sharing it with their network and his network.

Uses a file share to store files. In IBM have email quotas, so any attachment goes in the file sharing site. Email is not a content repository, and has never been.

Also uses blogs and wikis. He documents repeated questions. Build up your own personal knowledge sharing tool. Good way to move away from email. So if things are public, someone else from his network can help people when he is away.

Creates lots of podcasts, screencasts, etc. where he shows how to use tools through stories.

How do you get started moving away from email. No. 1 killer is newsletters. So syndicate. RSS is not an email – email is mainly delegation, RSS is notification.

Last thing. Challenge your inbox. If it is making you drown, think, what could you move out of the inbox and start to rely more on other tools.

The Ecology of Web 2.0
Victor Shelford – ecology is the science of communities. This is relevant to the web.

Had the internet, people started to develop applications, starting conditions for Web 2.0. Started to grow, and was unconstrained. Put stuff up and see what people use – free to use was critical, if there’s a cost people won’t try it. If it’s free people will try and will leave it behind if it doesn’t work. Huge overproduction – too many for us to try them all.

Just like organisms coming into a new land, e.g. the UK after the ice-age. There’s overproduction – too many seeds, young bats, whatever. Those are our starting conditions. Each new site has novelty, which is the same thing that happens into survival of the fittest – it’s the novelty that’s important. So it diverges and we get more diversity.

In nature, and we can see it on the web, is that you get competition. Facebook competes with MySpace. Is it different? Should I use both? So start fighting for new customers. Some systems move into their own specialised niche. Flickr, Dopplr, are specialised apps and they try to hold that niche as early as possible. Some things co-exist. Facebook and Flickr co-exist, and try to interact as best they can. Also get domination and wipe-out. Some things come in, start to dominate, then wipe out the smaller ones. So small tools, as novel or as good as they are, they won’t survive in the face of big competitors. New websites start to inherit each other’s variations, e.g. feedback systems from Amazon get used by other people. Friends Reunited is starting to become more like Facebook.

Go2Web20.net, says that it lists every Web 2.0 application or site on the web. And it’s huge – there are page and p ages. There is huge overproduction, lots of diveristy. What happens next?

In nature, the system starts to constrain itself. Things that appear within that system start to control and direct. Not like management direction – targets and objective – it’s the feedback from above that directs what happens below. Start to get weak constraints, things that control the development of the system, e.g. we each have a limited amount of time to spend on these things. The knowledge we have is limited too, LibraryThing.com is great if you love books, but if you’re interested in developing then you go somewhere else. Energy is a constrain too – the system can’t keep getting bigger as there’s a limited amount of effort that can be put into it.

Cognitive bias of mind – and the main one is that we look at first fit, not best fit. Most of us are members of the systems that we first joined when we first started, so if you’re in Facebook first, you won’t move off it. you’ve got all your stuff there, so there is inertia, so you make do with what and who is there. It’s a huge amount of effort to move on, so if Facebook Ver. 2 displeases people, who’s going to move first? Early adopters, people like David, have directed us down a path and have it’s hard to change direction. Relationships are the main reason for us holding together these systems.

Set up a blog in April 2008, and was very careful because wasn’t supposed to blog at work, but wanted a history of interesting blogs, but didn’t want people to notice it and to get into trouble. Then in final week in his job, he sent and email to everyone at work and published his weblog address, and got lots and lots of visitors, and kick-started a huge wave of interest. Left an interesting trail, so Innovation Watch, track trends, and pointed to his blog.

Ants do the same thing when looking for a food source. Ants go out and see if they can find food, and one or two ants get ignored, but when a critical mass is reached of ants saying there’s food, they whole lot change direction and go off to see. Bees do the same thing when assessing positions for new hives.

Behind the scenes of Web 2.0, there is a real chemical trail. Oxytocin is an interesting hormone, triggered when you laugh with other people. It’s the bonding hormone that mothers produce when they have a baby, and that couples produce when they orgasm. That bonding hormone makes you more connected with the other people that you laugh with – or do other things with – so if you laugh together then it’s more likely you’ll connect with them online. So there’s a web of chemical connections in your head that are mirror images of the web, and which also limit you because there’s a limit to how many people you can have relationship with.

Lots of social networks, newsgroups, newsletters – and newsletters are a good trigger to remind you that you’re connected to something, that you’re part of something bigger.

Wordle of Wikipedia entry for Web 2.0, there are lots of technical words, but not many words that focus on the social. It’s the social connections that are interesting not the technology.

Science blogs, there are lots of scientists who are doing stuff that’s really interesting and you can see their thoughts coming through. ScienceBlogs has collected all the ‘good’ ones in their view, and packaged them up. Has emerged to become almost a magazine in its formats. It now has an editor and points you at the good pieces of research.

Respectacle and the OmniBrain, and then got together to form Of Two Minds. That’s almost sexual reproduction, because the best of those two blogs came together to form a better blog.

Interesting apps:

Alltop, like RSS, but you don’t have to set it up. Scan the interesting areas and see all the blogs that are about public speaking, and that gives a summary about what people are saying about it. Really gives you a taste of what’s going on.

ReadTheWords.com, put some text into it and an avatar reads it back to you, but you can create an MP3, put it on your iPod, and have a podcast made of text. Admittedly, it’s read by a robot though.

Text Mindmap – if you cut and paste indented text it will draw you a mindmap from it.

SenseMaker Suite – make sense of things like blogs, videos, audio recordings, text, and throw them into the system then pick three axis, so if you had all the people who have been in touch with Dave Gurteen, you can map attributes, e.g. satisfaction, location, and age. And it draws a 3D landscape, and you can then see interesting trends. Can home in on the negatives you might want to work on, or the peaks that you want to focus on.

Human evolution – we are designed to handle story fragments. Dunbar’s number of 150 – brain’s capacity to manage relationships. If networks get too big, the system can manage it to some extent.

I’m here at the Unicom conference, Web 2.0: Practical Applications for Business Benefit. This is the fifth social tools conference that Unicom has run in the last few years, and the third one that I’ve been to, I think.

Euan Semple: What’s “social” got to do with work anyway?
Interesting how many people aren’t allowed to access Facebook from work. Wary even of using the word “social” because it’s a loaded word. Has been given grief about using the word. But business employees people, and that means social. If you look at what’s going on now, it’s about relationships in business, and the juxtaposition of social vs. business is a false one.

A few quotes.

Peter Drucker, said10 years ago, that businesses have evolved to manage conscripts, not volunteers. and it’s so much more apparent now. the relationship we have with our organisations, and the relationship we have with our network. Was interviewed recently by a journalist and put up the interview tape himself in case he was misquoted.

Gets frustrated when people talk about the web as if it’s just technology, and with people talking about techies as if they are different and weird. The distinction is getting more and more blurred. It’s about “globally distributed, near instant, person to person conversations” (The Cluetrain Manifesto).

David Weinberger has a quote about hyperlinks. Innocuous thing that people take for granted by it’s very disruptive. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchies, the collective ability to point to stuff, “That’s interesting, go and look at it”. If you look at Wikipedia or anything else, it’s all about the hyperlinks, we can refer to and attribute value to things. In the past, it was people like the BBC who attributed value, but now we can do it ourselves.

Leo La Porte talks about how, when you grew up in a village, you knew people and you could use that info to attribute value to their comments. When we got bigger than villages we handed that over to the media, and we lost something in that process. We are getting back that village-y feel, we can start to make those judgements.

When [someone whose name I didn’t catch] was asked about whether they were worried about kids having access to Wikipedia, the response was that we need to teach them critical thinking so that they can assess their sources.

What is “Real work”? At a workshop, a manager was getting grumpy, and he said “I couldn’t trust my staff to use these tools, they’d all waste their time”. If you can’t trust people to make small minute-to-minute decisions, how can you trust them to do anything else? But, if they are wasting time, we can tell you from these tools, you can tell how long someone’s spending using them, and then you can manage that. But he still wasn’t happy. Yet he spent all his time going to meetings. Protestant work ethic creeps in, the assumption about what is real work – that it’s meetings, writing reports that no one will read etc.

First part of anyone’s job is responding to threats and opportunities. Knowing that something is happening is important. In old world, someone higher up tells you what to do, or internal comms tells you the things that matter. That’s very slow moving, very filtered, may not related to your daily job.

Discussion forums at BBC, got very noisy, all sorts of stuff, everything under the sun. Wanted noise because out of noise you get some signal. Don’t want clinical and managed and ‘safe’, because need everyone to engage and access to that collective.

Start to notice more, because you have somewhere to express your thoughts about the things you’ve noticed. And if you introduce that thing into the forum, others may think it’s interesting, and the best stuff starts to surface. Can look at which people are writing about it which provides with context. Very messy, but you can see people talking about stuff, and you get lots of signs about people as a person, their priorities, and that gives you context for the documents people produce. Helps you make judgements about information.

The reaction many people have to Twitter. You condition behaviour just by having the question “What are you doing?”, which steers the conversation. Now there is Yammer, which is a Twitter-like app for internal use. A whole bunch of useful, interesting things can come out of using Twitter. You need to be a part of it, though, for it to be interesting and useful – you can’t just ask Twitter for help and expect it if you don’t take part. It’s hard work putting effort into these sorts of networks. Network can be quite extensive, and feeding it allows you to do stuff. Did a seminar and broadcast a screencast showing how he works, and many people were shocked by it.

Increasing number of tools that help us to take all this noise and figure out what’s important to us.

Collecting data. Once you’ve decided to do something, how do you get the data to do it? One way is to put up a wiki and start to gather information in it. NYK, a shipping company, they started a wiki and all the boat nerds came out of the woodwork and started putting lots of interesting and valuable data on to the wiki about ship types, berths etc. One of the most enthusiastic guys left, but his knowledge was all left behind.

Metadata. Don’t throw out your taxonomies, but using tags helps breath life into them. Tagging is distributed, collective process. Using things like Delicious gives you an ability to gather information. Cogenz, is like Delicious for business, and it’s interesting to see what people feel is interesting to them in a business context. Can kick off useful conversation.

Running projects. Always wary of using the word ‘collaboration’, not sure what it looks like. There are lots of things to do to help work with other people, and many of them are helped along with the tools. But the important thing is the people and finding the right people to work with is a non-trivial problem. The part of ourselves that we show to others is what helps people navigate to you.

Example, used the wiki at BBC to come up with blogging policy, and about 200 bloggers helped work out and decide what the policy document should contain. Not a single meeting took place to achieve that. At the moment, you usually have recursive meetings that struggle to capture what’s really said.

Capturing knowledge. The trivial thing of having a blog. Richard Sambrook, head of Global News and World Service. Very senior. Spends time regularly writing about the stuff that he thinks is interesting. Silly things, personal things, serious things, whatever he thinks is interesting. Gives us access to the fabric of his life. Consequences: he now has a political platform that some of this colleagues don’t [because they choose not to], also has a way to discuss things that he has problems with or wants more information about.

Collaboration comes up in unlikely places. Met a washing machine repair man on holiday, and washing machines are really complex, and the manufacturers don’t give freelance repair men much support. So they started a forum online to collaborate and work out how things work.

Wikipedia. This business that anyone can go and change stuff and this is quite intimidating. Specially for journalists brought up with editorial standards etc. Inside BBC, people who produce formal docs are unnerved by prospect of people having free-rein. But What was interesting was that having created the blogging policy on the wiki, it was then moved to the more formal places. But invariably people checked the wiki first, because documents do die over time.

Trust. People trust live documents more – wikis feel more alive, more trustworthy, than some published, glossy document. Wiki feels more real.

Engaging people in using these tools involves an enormous amount of trust. Worry about an organisation that didn’t trust people enough to use Facebook to work. Some clients don’t receive emails that have the word “blog” in it because it’s blocked by their firewall.

People who engage in these tools find they have more influence. No one ever really has control, you have the appearance of control, but with these tools you can explain what matters, why, give people context and information, and that gives people more opportunity to be an adult and work in an informed manner.

Serena Software found that everyone was on Facebook, and they turned that into their intranet. There are some dodgy things about Facebook, but the instinct to be pragmatic is important.

But most workspace internet use remains rudimentary. Lots of people that we take for granted some people still struggle with. People talk about the digital divide as if it’s about class, or money, or 1st/3rd world. There is a digital divide, between those who get it and those who don’t. Some people in Surrey, for example, don’t have a clue, and someone in India with a mobile phone and a clue can be more powerful than someone in Surrey.

93% of Americans want companies to have a present on social sites. Good or bad, we’re going to have to work out how to do it.