mercredi 28 octobre 2009

Signs of productivity

  • I haven't shaved in a while
  • I haven't written anything in a while

mercredi 2 septembre 2009

Dataless Mashup

Next idea:

Creating a website doing nothing. I mean, it will provide (hopefully) a lot of information but it will not be producing it.

The only thing that I might use is a stat engine. I like to track things...

lundi 8 juin 2009

It's all coming up.

We managed at Etheryl to come up with a good idea (who said for once?). It's quite an exciting project.

The idea is to combine a bit of what I talked in my previous posts:

Community + Preferences = ?

jeudi 2 avril 2009

Collaboration is not intuitive in enterprises.

I've been defending that often lately in various conversations.

People do not take a job because they want to work with the community of the enteprise (I use the word community because it avoids confusion). Here are different reasons (not exhaustive) why I could take a job in large corporation:
  • The reputation of the company.
  • The job description.
  • The salary.
  • I need a job, whatever it is.
You may know who you will work for (the guy who hired you, the CEO that is on TV, the head of marketing that was in the last magazine...) but in most cases you do not know who you are going to work with.

And this where problems are starting. You are being told to work with people that you do not necessary like. Larry might be a total jerk, you still have to send him the report. Now.

Collaboration is not natural in enterprise, and one of the first task of people working in E2.0 is to understand that they will have to change that. E2.0 does not start with technology.

mardi 31 mars 2009

Please, Forget About Enterprise 2.0

More and more I see questions like "What is E2.0 ROI?", "Why is E2.0 not adopted yet?", "How can I get E2.0 in my company?".

I think that there is no answer to those questions.

If you think about Web 2.0 for instance, it is including a lot of different things: blogs, wikis, social networks, content sharing, questions answering, social bookmarking, document editing... And for each of those functions you have specialists (Typepad, Google, Twitter, Facebook...) and different measures used to assess performance and success. We realized that we can't use the same terms and definitions for all the actors of Web 2.0.

So why are we trying to do this with Enterprise 2.0?

If we were not trying to persuade large companies to adopt new working methodology by using a term that they never heard about (few CEOs of the Fortunes 500 care about it...) and if we were using a language closer to their reality we would be more likely to see success.

Don't sell the trend, sell the benefits relative to the business of the company.


I believe that changing flows of information can lead to huge benefits to Enterprise, I believe that giving the possibility to create worldwide business intelligence communities will create new leaders, I believe that bringing more collaboration into the Enterprise is the future and that it will definitely change the way we are working.

But I don't believe that over-using the word Enterprise 2.0 will lead anywhere.

lundi 30 mars 2009

Power of the mass.

With applications and websites like Myspace, Youtube, Facebook, Yahoo Answers, and the famous Twitter it looks rather obvious that the new trend today is to leverage the power of the masses to produce (more or less) meaning.

Today, I am pretty sure that I can find the goals of Yesterday's European Cup Match on Youtube. I'm also confident in getting an answer to a basic question from Yahoo Answers. And I believe that Twitter will tell me more about my host company's website being down than any newspaper at the very moment it happens.

Power of the mass.

But what about going back to the interest of the sole user? Wouldn't it be great to be able to know what does M. X is interested in? Of course we would have to respect privacy but I believe that this is one step necessary to make applications more intuitive, more intelligent, capable of pushing content (and not only ads) that are relevant considering my current interest.

How can you tell what one is thinking about? Through his action. Searching is showing what you are looking for. Reading is telling what you like. Writing is saying what you think.

Then, we would be able to apply this to groups of people. Does the interest of a group result from the sum of the interest of its members? I don't think so, and that's the challenge.

mardi 20 janvier 2009

Web 3.0: When applications will talk to each other?

Recently I came across a series of articles talking about a general dashboard that would manage all the website and services that we all subscribe too. Indeed, just like Irwin Lazar I’m experiencing the pain of having to log in, log out, copy, paste, relog, recopy, change status, go to the mailbox, open a new tab, go to the first tab, open twitter, check out status, open another new tab, re-re-re log in, check out asw, publish post, copy, publish again, AAARRGGG!

It never stops.

And I’m surely and not slowly loosing time.

Yes, today it is possible for me to save some time on reading by gathering all feeds in a single place (a big thanks to NetNewsWire and their smartboxes!) but when it comes to replying there is no solution. It is still a nightmare!

Marshall Kirkpatrick was talking about Marc Canter’s DiSO dashboard that would centralize all those applications and allow us to perform the same action in multiple websites at once (updating status, publishing article, updating personal info...).

I would not call this a dream like some others commented it because I think that it is pretty realistic. It supposes though that applications would have a common language they would use to talk to each other and share information. And this is what would be exciting. Easy integration, simple aggregation. New business models will certainly emerge out of this and maybe a differentiation between the companies specialized in dashboards and the one specialized in vertical applications. CNN and Facebook made a first step towards this kind of interaction. What about others?

Web 3.0: When Applications Will Share?

Is Twitter the essence of Web 2.0?

I registered a long time ago on Twitter but it is only recently that I started to really use it properly(?). Actually I decided to do so after reading Guy Kawasaki’s article about how Twitter made his website better. I got curious and decided to give it a try to see if I could see some benefit in using it. I’ll make it short here because Twitter’s ROI is not the topic of this article but after a couple weeks of use I found it quite useful, especially to find knowledge and interesting articles about themes that I like.

I decided to write an article about this tool because I came across Venkatesh Rao’s article about “The Last Page of Web 2.0” where he considers that the last page of Web 2.0 is http://twitter.com/public_timeline. I am not going to discuss about whether this assumption is right or not. The article is really good and says a lot of interesting things about what Google is and why it is so successful. Besides I highly encourage you to read it.

In fact I just want to talk about one phrase that I read: “The Ultimate 2.0 Question: What are you doing?”

I’m wondering if the question in Twitter is “What are you doing?” rather than “What are you thinking?”. I totally agree with Venkatesh Rao when he says that the Google question is “What do you want to do?” but when it comes to the Twitter question, even though Twitter is asking you literally this question I doubt that this is what people are writing down and that this is the essence of Twitter.

If people were only talking about their personal actions then how could they interact with each other. Limiting my expression to my own behavior is also limiting the influence that I can have on others. And by definition my actions are personal. I believe that Twitter would be nothing else than a worldwide reality show where you can watch people live without being able to interact with them if everybody was really just saying what they were doing.

From my point of view I think that Twitter is more about “What are you thinking?”. In this case you take in account the possibility that some people might react to other’s actions and other’s ideas. People talk about more than actions there. They give their opinion, talk to each other, express themselves, share their mind with the world.

If Google is “What do you want to do?” maybe Twitter is “What do you want to say?”.

By the way, if you want to follow me, just search for stenpittet.