On the Way to the Next Big Thing

This was written in April 2011 and a publication had interest in publishing it, but it didn't fit their editorial cycle so it sat. I have annotated this with an endnote to bring it current.

A funny thing happened on the way to the next big thing, the big thing was little. Many people are looking to build the next Facebook or Twitter, but those that are gaining traction and actually being used don’t focus on collection and aggregation of the masses, they focus on the small groups of people who know each other and really aren’t connecting or interacting in or for the public eye.

At SXSW this past year, 2011, the next big thing wasn't one thing, it was many things. It was these same smaller group interaction platforms that let people who know each other already interact. The funny thing is this really shouldn't be a surprise to anybody who has actually been following or connecting to the mainstream in the crowd using Facebook or any other large service. Most people are are connected to a small group friends or other label for the people they share information, status, and possibly location with. When Facebook took its service beyond the walls of the university and let any old Joe and Jane in many of the students had fear and cut back their usage of the service. They wanted a service to have more regular communication and more private interactions with out of the eye of the hoards. This isn't because they are doing things they are ashamed of or would cause them consternation if others found out, it is because that is how most people in mainstream interact and consider normal. Many of these students kept their Facebook accounts and use them occasionally, but this is not their social home, this is not where they check the pulse of the group of people they want to connect with.

When you consider how this plays out you see it really clearly inside organizations that have openly social communication and collaboration platforms up and running. Much of the interaction is often not out in the open, but in the more focussed less travelled (or even semi-closed) groups and forums. These are the comfortable spaces with permeable walls. But, this is often where much of the sharing and interacting happens in organizations.

For many who drank the Kool Aide of people want to be openly social, this is an odd trend. But, it isn't really a trend it is the norm and for most of time going back this has been the norm. There is something to Robin Dunbar's postulation of “theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships”, which is commonly known as “The Dunbar Number” and is approximately 150 (with bounds of 100 to 230 as reasonable lower and upper reaches for most people). But, for small very close knit groupings of friends you often see from a a few teens in groups up to 40 to 50. But, about 40 to 75 the dynamics shift and is repeatedly comes up when talking to people in digital services with the number of people where the service shifted from being fun and easy to use to being more work.

At SXSW this year the proffering of small social services, many for smart mobile devices only, like Beluga, Ditto, GroupMe, etc. were the talk of the event in Twitter and from the remote conversations I was picking up on. The question was, “which service are you on?” for those you deemed viable enough to connect with outside of the masses in Facebook and Twitter. These services are where people look for who wants to meet up for dinner, where is the good place to hang, or most importantly “where are my peeps?”

Invisible Communities

This past week I caught Chris Heathcote's presentation on “Invisible Communities” from February 2011 at Lift Conference. Chris talks about all of the unseen communities on the internet and web, which have nearly always been there and keep growing. These are the web forums where the “good” information is shared. These are the handled application based services, some with web presence, but very few are searchable or open to the public. Chris' talk echoed most everything I hear when I talk to the famed “millennials” in organizations who are claimed to be “openly social” and heavy users of these huge web social tools, but when I sit with them in organizations regarding social tools inside the organization (they are included as they are supposed to be the heavy users and the ones that really know this stuff well), but dang if I have ever run across one that has claimed this. Very few use Facebook or Twitter (the “Twitter is for old people” (over 25) is commonly stated) and they all state some different small social tool where they keep in touch with their good friends with.

Personal InfoCloud

Doc Searls wrote a real gem of a post, “The Sense of Bewronging”. Doc's post is about the need for personalization and putting things in context that “I” care about, or as talked about here in this site the Come to Me Web and Personal InfoCloud. A post that triggered Doc was a presentation and post by Louis Gray “The Third Wave of the Web Will Be Uniquely Personal”. Both of these posts talk about aggregating all that we have inbound and as well share out (our digital exhaust) so to filter and hone what it is we care about so to serve it up more to our actual interests and with out information overload.

Many of us have been aggregating our own information for quite a while in various tools and services, or on just pulling and archiving feeds. Phil Gyford talks about a new kind of front page, Steven Berlin Johnson talks about the need for a Commonplace Book, Drummond Reed discusses the Personal Data Store, Jon Udell has his Hosted Lifebits, and Kim Cameron says my Personal InfoCloud “I think a framework like the one he proposes - based on attraction - is probably an early harbinger of the identity big bang.”

Why Does this Matter?

All of this matters because for as much as we use ThinkUp, My6sense, Momento app, Summify, etc. for our aggregation of personal exhaust data and to filter to ease our attention focus as well as use and most importantly reuse what flows through this at some point. In using these services most are focussing on the big social stops like Facebook and Twitter, just like malls have big box stores, but most people are not going to the mall for the big box they are hitting the smaller stores or skipping the mall altogether for more personal customer service and supporting businesses of people whom they know. If the social aggregation and information filtering tools are keeping their focus on the mall’s big boxes of social web, they are missing where many people are actually spending their valued attention. Having a wonderful service like ThinkUp to provide a history of what I have shared and was shared with me (or the more impersonal fact, shared to many and my friend hooks, nabbed a digital copy of that sucker) so that I can search and pull things together later is missing some key valued elements.

While it is worth the time these services are spending (all pulling the same big sites and services and missing the less broadly known services) on the big box social web services, so we can pay a bit less attention on them but for some digests and pay attention to our more valued services. But, what looses out is the use and reuse of across all those services. You have a friend share a book she just finished she thinks you and your group would like, but shared it in your tight friend space you won’t have easy recall from a central place. A real personal aggregation and attention management tool needs to capture all streams we consider to have value. Being able to build a Granular Social Network that really works and that keeps our attention from being over taxed is where much of this really should head. We have been stating what this third wave of the web should be for a long time as a personal web, we now have the tools start getting there, but we need to ensure our focus fits our needs and our actual interactions.

Yes, for those of you that have made it this far and have been waiting to state all this is walling ourselves off from the rest of the world, well I think this aggregation, archiving, and filtering to keep our attention from hitting overload is needed so we can take a much broader look at what is outside our bounds. If we enable keeping what is valuable in front of us we can explore and interact even more.

Some things have changed a little bit in the past year, but largely not much has changed. Facebook has its Timeline, which has thin value for being able to scan the real volume of our activities and then be able to aggregate and reuse that information in more usable and valuable (for one's self and others) format. It is an interesting visualization, but the value of making deeper sense just isn't there and understanding things never seems to fit in Facebook's plans.

Cooperation, Coordination, and Competition

There has been a lot of discussion of late in the social media circles about cooperation and how all social tools and services and their managers need to embrace that model. What is really clear is they have never run or tried to run social environments at any scale that have a broad representation of a population.

In reality there are at least three interactive community types that show up in representative populations, like those you get in a town or a city, or an organization’s internal social platforms. The three interactive community types are: 1) Cooperation; 2) Coordination, and 3) Competition. These three all work in tension with each other. In smaller social settings you will likely run into cooperation and it can work swimmingly. But, the reason that it works so well is there are likely not differences of opinion, different, motivations, and counter purposed goals.

As any social setting grows in size the cohesion and common interests (homogeneity) are diluted with other inters and motivations, just as a hamlet grows into a village, they ease of cooperation moves into the dire need for coordination. As we move to towns or cities, or larger organizations with more than a few hundred people or across more than one location coordination is needed. Cooperation is often quite easy with small groups, but even getting more than two or three small groups to work easily coordination is needed as the ease, and often the pure ability, of cooperation is gone and there needs to be concerted effort and guidance applied through coordination. There can be coordination through agreement as much as their can be coordination through difference. The skills needed for those polar realities are different, but the ability to listen, negotiate, mitigate, and coerce is needed.

The underlying tension is related to competition, which run very strong in certain personality types, but also in various industries. The social interaction designs for competitive personalities are very different from cooperative or those who are comfortable in coordinated models. But, nearly all populations have some representation (small or large) of people (or organizations) who are highly competitive. Thinking that in a social environment, unless it is small and focussed, our community or social interactions are going to be purely cooperative is a bit naive and crazy (or a great way to go crazy quickly).

It really takes understanding humans social interactions at scale and working in them for a few years to see the realities. Humans are as diverse as they are similar and there is no generalizing how humans behave with out understanding the variety of social types (personality, social interactions, social roles, organizational types, and work role types among others). Talk with any organization of any size (above a few hundred people or even one hundred people with more than one location) and you see the difficulties of finding one solution and one way forward.

Social Reticence of a Click

A few years back I was talking about problems many people having problems with social interaction elements in their work social platforms (where it really clicked were many early adopter types who have used social web tools for many many years running into issues). The problems related to activities they thought were private were showing up in the public stream. People were finding that their own understanding of many social interaction patterns and use of features had many, and often unknowable, variations that made their intent for an action often broadly misunderstood.

As I have talked about this over the past four years or so at in client projects, presentations, and workshops there seems to continually be problems of interpretation. This isn’t really surprising that problems of misinterpretation occur as most understanding around activity and actions have meaning constructed by and within the culture the actions take place.

Problems of Favorites

One of the design elements from social web services that made its way into many social work platforms is the simple star for favorites. It is simple and innocuous it means the person favorites something. But, in many social web platforms it isn’t or was not easy to see these actions publicly. The act of clicking the star on Twitter often only was seen by the person who clicked on it and it put the favorited item in their collection.

The Twitter favorite star is now more problematic as it is now broadcasted and the person who has had an item favorited gets notification (if they so choose, and it is on by default). Looking at other people’s favorites has for years been public and likely has been from the day it was added. The reality is it required RSS or using a service that notified you when somebody (and who it was) favorited an item. Not having the favorites be easily found nor broadcasted created an easy environment for people to create their own social meaning of what the favorite does and means, much like the over all broadly correctly answerable questions, “what is Twitter and how are you supposed to use it”.

Meaning of actions is often a social construction by the community that uses a service. But, it also can have many sub-communities creating alternate and conflicting meanings and understandings. Where it really gets fun is when the service’s desired or stated meaning, “Clicking the star means you like it and put it in your favorites” directly next to the star or as a tool tip (hover notice), often is the second social understanding and the communities using the service opt for their own explanations and understanding of meaning.

Since Twitter made the notifications of favorites public, it has caused considerable concern and problems for many who had never considered their favorites to be public. The act and collection of their favorite items was theirs, not the domain of others.

Source of the Reticence of a Click

The problem isn’t germane to Twitter or any other service it is rather broad. It is one of the big reasons why use of social platforms inside organizations can take a while to get adoption going. Why things are stuck is unclear meaning. People are getting easily stuck with the lack of clarity around:

• What a interactive element on any of the pages does
• How broadly is the action shared (public or private or something between)
• What does the action mean
• Who is the action really interpreted

Three of these four need to be clarified much more clearly in services. Sadly, many services are people who do not understand the limited adoption and even more limited use of the services they are echoing the interactions from. All of this keeps people guessing, and not wanting to get it wrong they opt not to try seemingly simple features and functionality.

Why is Something So Simple So Hard to Grasp?

The action of clicking a star to favorite something is easy. Just as easy as clicking a “Like” button, which also has the same problems.

What happens after that simple click is where things get really goofy. These simple social services have stayed simple, but how people use them and how people think of the actions they take is far more diverse and complicated. There are four meanings that can be individually be construed by the clicking of the favorite star:

• One can favorite something so others can see it is one of their favorite items
• A person can click the star to note they have seen this and approve
• One can mean I have read this and is sharing that publicly
• A person can hold on to some thing for later review and doesn’t mean like or dislike nor approve

This variety of meaning is very common. The problem is that one button is used for many purposes as the service is simple with a simple uncluttered interface that doesn’t have options for alternate meanings, say an anchor to hold on to something, and a “+1” for things that are approved of or liked, which the star for a personal favorite for one’s own purposes can stand on its own.

What Could Go Wrong?

This is all just simple silly social software, what could possibly go wrong. For some of us it was clear that things could get muddled and muddy from the beginning. But, what could go wrong rather often has gone wrong, some with more problematic consequences than anticipated. Often these community and sub-community derived understandings lead to poor understanding and miscommunication through assumption. But, lacking functionality or means to account for the variety of meaning people intend socially or personally this will continue (see clearly labelled and hinted meanings above for reality of how social meaning works with only one option available).

In the past couple years the stories I would hear from my work or speaking engagements grew more dire. Until I talked with one company that had an employee fired things got so confused. But, not long after that first story another company had nearly the same thing happen, while other organizations have similar issues with out the dire outcomes.

In both cases a person saw something float through their internal microblogging service and it piqued their interest. They looked at what had been shared and saw problems, but were swamped with existing tasks and heavy workload so they added the favorite star to put it in their own collection and come back to it in a couple weeks to provide the needed insight and feedback. In both instances their companies rarely moved quickly on anything, as ideas would floated and draft white papers go around, with about a month or more for feedback. But, the social platforms had made the floating of ideas and getting feedback go much more quickly. Those who had floated the idea saw the person has put a “star of approval” on the idea and since many of the people who they wanted feedback from or approval from has responded with feedback or approval they started acting on the plans within weeks not the month plus that things normally took.

In both cases the people who had critical feedback related to gaps or large problems they saw in the proposal or white paper responded when they saw or heard actions were taking place based on those ideas. Both spoke up that they had critical information to provide, but people had been hired or received notification their job was changing and contracts for resources has started to be signed. Upper management was furious as the change had already started to happen in days with commitments behind them. Upper management liked the idea of being more nimble and agile so to move more quickly. But, this was not an “oops” situation it was one that somebody needed to be let go and somebody was let go in both instances.

Resolution?

The problem is not the the tools were use nor how quickly things happened and commitments made. The problem is the clarity of meaning and intent was lost because the actions and activities that have divergent meanings were packed into one design element. Understanding from a design and engineering perspective what people not only want to do, but actually do and mean by that action is essential. Our work tool have long been over due for cleaning up and focus on use so that they become more simple. But, good design and understanding that goes into it, or needs to go into it, can be short cut. Copying a service and its interactions without understanding the social interaction design and meaning of actions, be it intent or by social construct is essential.

It is best to start with a solid platform, which may require bringing in somebody to help frame what that is in context to the needs as well as the social and technical environments you have.

40 Plus Social Lenses

Lately, I've been getting asked what I am working on beyond client work, as there have been things popping up here and there that hint something is brewing. Well, there is and there isn’t something new, but something (one of my things has been drawing my attention). It started in Summer or early Fall 2010 with a blow off comment from me to someone else who was stating how difficult working with 3D was, and I blurted something like “try social software, which is 6D or 7D or more”. That was tweeted as an overheard (OH) and people started asking what the 6D or 7D were. At the time I blurted it I could roughly name six of seven different dimensions of social interaction that needed to be considered and design for. But, with each stating of the six or seven, the list started growing. This list of six of seven dimensions were coming from the frameworks, models, and lessons learned I have picked up since 1996 working with social software inside organizations and out on the web. By late October I was finally putting these social elements I used into a list, which quickly was into 20 high-level items and by November was about 40 items. I was also fleshing out the list for each item. I started calling the list my “40 Plus Social Elements”, but recently I have changed it to “40 Plus Social Lenses” as that is a much better term for how I have been using them over the past 15 years to see the “it depends” inflection points and enable thinking through them.

This is Needed?

Nearly every organization I talk to (or even web start-up working for on social interactions) I talk to is getting stuck or is hitting things they hadn’t expected a few months into their use with these tools. It does not matter if it is a platform improve internal communications and collaboration, a social CRM program, and/or a social media (marketing) effort everybody seems to be running into issues they did not see coming. Often I will start by asking how they are dealing with something (based on program type and tools) and I hear, “How did you know we had this problem? Who did you talk to?” They affirm they have these issues, some are manageable and at times they are really problematic. But, the big question is why did they not know these issues could arrive or would potentially arise. I have kept these lenses separate for years, rather than building into one big approach as each organization or services is different enough and has different enough influences that it is really tough to have one big singular approach. Taking small steps, monitoring, and then adapting or iterating is a really helpful approach, but so are mixing and matching lenses to get an improved perspective. Building solutions that address needs and having an overall big vision are helpful. Most often with social tools is it a more connected and free flowing means of doing things.

Lessons Learned

The continual problem for anybody who has been responsible for long-term management of social systems and/or communities who use them, development, design, and/or iteration of social software solutions is painfully confronted with, “is what I am seeing happen (often framed as a problem or issue to be solved) an issue with individual people, how humans are social, the culture(s) where the system is being used, the organization's needs and requirements or structure, or the tools themselves that are being used?” Often the answer is “yes”. These personal, social, organizational, and tools issues all interweave and quickly create a complicated, if not complex system where isolation of individual elements is really difficult. There is also a counterweight to this, which is we know that for use and adoption of these tools and services they need to be simple to use and get started (it doesn't mean they need to stay that way, Lithium's Community Platform is wonderful proof of this model and a I really need to devote a piece to why as it isn't plainly seen by most).

This thinking really started jelling in 2004 at Design Engaged with Mike Kuniavsky's lead-off monologue on complexity, which in his 10 minutes he focussed on the complexity in interaction design and urged us to “run toward the light of complexity”. This is an essential understanding for interaction design as the designer is working to make things that are rather complicated yet rather simple to use, which requires the designer to embrace the complicated and complex to master it so to work to make it simple. Where interaction design hits the individuals and their interaction with systems, social interaction design adds more layers with people interacting with others through the tools, which can be rather complicated just on its own and now you are throwing software in the middle. In 2007 or so I hit another big wake up call. I was working on the folksonomy book (no, it didn't get published, nor finished being written) and a couple months in I hit a sticking point. What I found was many of the common social models and foundations for Web 2.0 couldn’t explain the strong value that people were finding in places where Web 2.0 thinking would not lead one to believe it existed, nor could it explain the problems that I was repeatedly seeing. It took 12 or more months of deconstructing and reassembling the Web 2.0 models, the lessons I learned from years working with and building social software, as well as my formal education (in communication theory, organizational communication, grad school with economics, and social analytics) to identify the variables and components that had value and then build frameworks for thinking how this worked and why. I have blogged many of these as well have been presenting them publicly as well as using them in workshops and client engagements. They have proven to be really valuable, with feedback from many that is has saved them tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in cost avoidance and value derived from improved decisions.

What is This List of Lenses?

The list is essentially what I have been using and building upon for 15 years dealing with social software and the hurdles and headaches that can come from it. These 40 plus lenses (sometimes nearly 50) are questions, models, and frameworks I use when working with clients or in workshops. I hadn’t realized there were as many elements in the list as I often work conversationally and one answer from a client will trigger 2 or 5 more questions that are relevant based on that answer or insight. This progression gives better understanding not only to me, but also to them to see potential options, the possible benefits as well as possible detractors, and then think through them sanely. Knowing potential problems or issues, helps keep an eye out for them and be prepared, all while using lenses to know that these decisions may bring.

I have shared the list with some others with quite long backgrounds in social software on production, management, or research sides and all (well not the researchers) have the first response of, “Thomas, you are over thinking this there is no way there are that many.” But, as they go through the list they often find all of it is very familiar and things they think through and consider as well so to help their organizations, services, or clients. Many of us have built up this trove of tacit knowledge and I'm working on making it more explicit.

Where I am finding the list is having value is using the components as lenses to see the “it depends” inflection points and be able to think through them to solid results that match each organization as best as possible. Often there isn’t an optimal solution, but knowing a gap exists and to keep an eye on it has made a huge difference for organizations as well as those building products.

The list is still in flux a little but, but it is firming up and getting it organized in to a nice flow will help. Once that is done it is writing time. I have been presenting many of the items on the list in workshops and in client engagements and honing the understanding and getting solid feedback from real experience and use over the years.

I have been having many discussions around the list and thinking that is behind them, which has surfaced in Dave Gray's Connected Company and a Gordon Ross’ post on Connected companies, complex systems, and social intranets. There is good thinking and understanding that is needed so we can get more value and better understanding out of social software used in organization and on the web, but importantly it can help the products and services improve as well.

There are quite a few posts around here that are included in the lenses as part of them or the whole of a lens:

• Social Maturity and Scaling
• On Fire with Social Progressions
• Removing Trust
• A Conversation on Social Interaction Design with Adrian Chan
• Enterprise Social Tools: Components for Success
• Explaining the Granular Social Network
• Denning and Yaholkovsky on Real Collaboration
• Selective Sociality and Social Villages
• Getting to Know Collective and Collaborative
• The Elements in the Social Software Stack
• 5 Enterprise 2.0 Myth Mantras that Must Die
• Model of Attraction
• The Come to Me Web

What am I Doing with This List?

What I am doing with this list of lenses has been a big question. The list very quickly started looking like a book outline, so I am taking steps in that direction. Presenting on this, I have been using a lot of these lenses in presentations for the last 8 years and mix and match them based on subject of the presentation. Dave Gray has put together a really good presentation on the Connected Company that I have helped with and will be presenting that puts a nice wrapper around the ideas. But, being able to get the full list of lenses in front of people and help them use them practically, I think may be best done in a workshop model. I have done internal workshops using many of these lenses (I get very positive feedback about how much this has benefitted organizations and has saved them from selecting tools that didn't fit their needs and/or helped them realize they had a gap in their approach they had not foreseen), but I have yet to put one on that are open to the public. If there is interest in public workshops I have the material and they would likely be a two day for a full view and use, but also could be a one day intensive seminar approach. Please contact

Social Relevance in KM

Last week Luis Suarez posted a fantastic piece KM, Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business: One and The Same, which was not only dead on, but also brought to the forefront many discussions I have been having over the past  few years. The discussions revolve around depth of understanding the social tools inside organizations and the troubles many organizations run into about 6 months to 18 months in (I’ve had many long discussions with Stewart Mader about this, which he calls the One Year Club). This One Year Club continually triggers organizations to consider what tools and practices around them and deeply question if they made the correct choices. Often they selected tools based on initial interaction patterns with the tools and how the tools and services are considered in popular circles and memes.

Luis piece triggers these discussions as I have been coming back to some of my knowledge management (KM) foundations laid in the late 90s. By then I had a few years dealing with social software in organizations running into the usual headaches and questions around, “is it people, humans being social, the organization, and/or the tools interwoven into all of this that are the crux of the problem” needed to be asked with every bump and hurdle. When touching on KM I was finding solid thinking on not only information management issues (that echoed under graduate work in my major of organizational communication and communication theory, but also social networking and social interactions that were the underpinnings of my masters degree in public policy), but the intersection of how humans are social and how they communicate.

In 2007 I had the fortune to speak at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference on the subject of folksonomy and I found a good connection with people in organizations trying social software deployments and running into the same issues I had in the mid-90s. Those who were speaking and presenting who were laying out solid methods for thinking through the issues and the potential path(s) forward had one similarity, they had a KM background. I also was finding similar with some vendors who grasped the complexity of the issues around information, people, social interactions, and organizations. Here too, many of them had backgrounds in KM either having built KM tools that didn’t work optimally (KM tools in the late 90s to mid-00s were miserable piles of technology that rarely enabled people to easily get what they knew out of their wonderful minds and into a system to share it with others - having been responsible for more than a few flavors of these beasts they all were far from easy and kept people from sharing easily - it wasn't KM that was bad it was the tools). But, finding this pocket of people I who grasped the difficulties around tools, humans being social, and business felt like home, a little bit more like home than the pure Web 2.0 slice of social tools, as it required dealing with mainstream as well as early adopters (who comprised much of the Web 2.0 fan base then).

You may notice I didn't mention consultants in that mix for Enterprise 2.0 in 2007, I didn't as most (a rare few exceptions) really didn't have deep understanding, nor seems to want it, as they were trying to figure out how to get a jump on this new term and potential pond of money around a buzzword. In 2007 the people in companies trying to do things had the best understanding of needs, problems, and potential way forward with the vendors following rather close behind.

KM, Really?

The core of this understanding and seeing potential and problems at hand was a foundation in KM. You ask, “Why is that important?” One of the things happening in the mid to late 90s in organizations along with this increasing buzz around KM as another buzz around the promise of e-groups and e-collaboration. These “e” tools (far from being an “E ticket” to anything) were often put under the purview of KM people as these tools not only were aimed helping people work together in a digital environment, but they were key to a key aim of KM, getting the tacit knowledge people have out of their minds and in shared making it explicit so it can be found and used by others. This core tenet of KM was one of the key gems that was going to solve the organization’s problems, but the problem was the tools were not up to the task. This gap around the tools (which got increasingly worse as the tech solution was not to ease use and map to how people were social and interact, but was to make more complex and structured interfaces (more form fields and hurdles)) lead nearly everybody working with this social tools to have the common headache around is it the people, how people are social (culture), business, and/or tools that are the problem.

This became an valuable experience of trying to sort out what is and where are the problems that are holding the social and KM solutions back from achieving their potential. One of the things that came out of it was a rather robust understanding of how people in organizations are social (or are not) and how important the existing culture is to tool selection and development of practices. Not only is culture valuable, but the need for different interfaces for different uses of the tools as well as breaking down the wide variety of different social interaction needs for different phases and stages of information sharing, use, and reuse.

KM World 2009

In 2009 I was asked if I would be one of the keynote presenters for KM World 2009, I was honored and felt a bit out of my depth at first as this was KM, which I still held a deep regard for the practices and foundations that were put in place more than a decade back. I was humbled as the two other keynote presenters were Andrew McCaffe and Charlene Li. Much of my presentation focussed on lessons learned from the One Year Club and problems that seem common from social software use in organizations, which I was fearing a bit would dampen the hope and promise and way forward presentations that McCaffee and Li provided. But, having spent a fair amount of time talking and listening to attendees, I was realizing that there are many in the KM community running into these issues today, but many that have been dealing with these issues going back to the 90s. There is depth in the KM community that has long been there and many in the KM community are still sharing their incredible depth and experience bringing the whole community forward that wishes to come a long. As I presented many of the stumbling blocks I have seen companies hit and try to work through, as well as “did we choose the right tool for our organization, needs, and culture?” I saw near ubiquitous waves of head nods across the whole of the conference. The attendees are not just new to social tools, but know enough about the hype memes to have been bitten by them or run across them enough to look for ways forward.

This last year I was back at KMWorld, which also co-hosts the Taxonomy Bootcamp (which I keynoted this past 2010), Enterprise Search Summit" (I did a workshop on Enterprise Social Search this past year and will be keynoting the conference in May in NYC this year(2011)), and SharePoint Symposium where I found the offerings for organizations considering and using social tools inside the organization to be incredibly robust, with presenters and workshops by some of the best and most experienced in the industry (oddly they have never been at Enterprise 2.0 Conference, that really must get fixed). The sessions I sat in on were getting to the heart of real problems and people were sharing years of experience and pointing out the “it depends” questions and how to work through them (in my opinion there is no better aid than that). But, also heard people talking in depth about tools, their gaps, and where good fits for them may be. I also spent time talking with vendors who were finding the attendees to be incredibly well informed and asking solid questions that showed they understood not only their organizations well, but the type of tools that would fit their organization’s culture and needs. A couple of the vendors said this is a rare occurrence at other conferences.

There is a There There in KM

What KM World highlighted for me was there is and long has been a core and deep value that exists in KM. The depth of understanding that has been building and iterating over 15 or more years of experience learned (often the hard way), deep long research, and tackling the hard problems by going deep has incredible value. This value is deeply needed in other communities. As I pointed out in my last post, Social Scaling and Maturity social software in the organization starts out simple and relatively easy, but that changes quite a bit as it gets used.

There isn't a KM 2.0 as there is no need for it. The practices of KM have iterated and matured deeply and wonderfully and not that social software for organizations have started getting out of the way to allow people to get what they know out of their minds and share it more broadly, as has always been the aim of KM, we could start seeing real progress. Understanding the needs around the organization, culture, practice needs, and the tools that can best map to these needs, as well as more easily enable people to be social as humans are social can only give a nice spark to that promise and long vibrant vision.

Social Scaling and Maturity

In 2006 I started using this graphic to explain social scaling and functionality around social tagging systems (then the x-axis was “times an object tagged”), as it helped bring to light the reality of what was to come from use. But increasingly I also used it to explain general social software maturation that echoed social software development work I was doing in 2002 and even patterns seen many years earlier in my work with social software.

As the number of people using a service increases over time and the number of activities in the system increases over time the system changes drastically. The needs, frameworks, and interactions (both social and services) change drastically. Not understanding what is coming has so many organizations making tool and service choices that have them quite stuck as they try to progress past the second stage. Not only did they not see this coming nor did those whom they paid handsomely to guide them through.

Lack of Understanding Begins Where?

“We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” ~Albert Einstein

Much of the lack of understanding with social software today is mistaking what seem like simple Web 2.0 tools and not understanding the depth of thinking and understanding from a technical, interaction design, and deeper understanding from a social science perspective of what is needed. Many Web 2.0 services rarely get into the 3rd stage of “Mature Social Tools”. When you bring this understanding into organizations and their needs for vastly improved communications, social interactions, collaboration, and efficiency needed the Web 2.0 model doesn't really get you far, nor help you prepare for what will come. (It is not that Web 2.0 offerings are not capable, it is that if they are even moderately successful they are dealing with many millions of users and keeping their offerings running with more simple social interactions and needs has them completely occupied).

Claiming your tools and services are like Web 2.0 tools and having them actually be rather equal to the lack of depth Web 2.0 products like Facebook have, becomes a pill filled with poison that once swallowed will release over time. The problem is less with to do with Web 2.0, but how things progress within fixed populations beyond the capabilities and needs (limited by volume and scale of resources needed to handle the volume of Web 2.0 services). Think of the fishing industry and the practices needed for fishing at massive industrial scale and optimizing skill of fly fishing and sustainability.

The Axis of This Model

Along the y-axis is the number of people participating in the service. As this increases the need for individuals to manage relationships and interactions increases. Along the x-axis are the number activities, which can be: Conversations, media shared, ratings, documents, short and long writings, annotations, organizing (curating) what exists in the system, etc.

Optimally the service will have growth that progresses in a relative balance between people participating and activities over time. If the balance has many people and few activities (or range or activities around subjects or tool types, see the differentiation between collective and collaboration, which doesn't include community/group distinct needs) the system will be really narrow and seem like their is little activity or action and perceived value dissipates and the usual result is decreasing visits and use. If the services has a relatively low number of people participating and a lot of activity the outcome is usually a very narrow view and lack of breadth of understandings, which limits the perception of what subject matter or activities types happen there.

What Are The Scaling Stages?

Personal

This stage is firmly set in the simple (a passing or deeper knowledge of Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework will understand the framing help). All social tools and services start their useful existence with personal value. They are offering where people place what they know or see where they can come back to it easily, as well as share with others, who will / may eventually find it. This clarity of understanding the personal impact was really clear when Delicious started. Joshua Porter actually called this the “Delicious Lesson”. The personal also helps initially frame what you have interest in and captures it, provides seeing others to connect with to initial share with and follow, provides a means to hold onto connecting with people, and hopefully allow people to see this in their own contextual lens. There is very little social interaction as things start out. It takes work of planning, engaging, and managing the initial social interactions. Community managers (instigator and evangelists) are essential for helping people into this first stage and get the whole moving toward the next stage. Problematically many services under provide for the needs and capabilities of the personal needs, not only for enabling initial uses, but for more valuable needs as the services mature. Seeing and managing who a person connects with and why along with actions taken in the system (accounting for time, cycles, and patterns) is a real need which helps people not only use the services but see the value they get from it.

Serendipity

This second stage still has most of its focus on the simple, but toward the edges of the next stage that shifts. Once the service gets more people using it and the activities increase things move from a heavily personal focus to one that is more social. The social interactions are more serendipitous than planned interactions as people aggregate and interact mostly through stumbling onto are being guided to subject mater areas of interests, groups or areas where conversations and objects related to the subject are shared and conversations around them happen (social objects).

In this stage the interactions between people are often echo their connections to people and interests that exist prior to using the services. The information flows are still rather manageable, but start edging into flows with some serious volume and velocity at times, which creates and information density to me dealt with. As the activities increase, particularly across groups and subject matter affinities and needs the need for tools to help with various roles people have (either roles that emerged, take on out or need or adeptness, or are have been assigned) is needed. The roles, other than admin and guide, are still mostly light. The managing of information and connecting it to where it is needed is what surfaces here as activities grow.

As time increases and the people participating and activities increase (as expected) things shift to being simple to more complicated given the number and variance of people interacting with each other. Managing connection and what is shared with whom starts to be seen, as does the reality that open social platforms can greatly hinder social interactions (no matter the culture) as the realization that there is something to Robin Dunbar%s [magical] number. As this happens the impact of the organizations overarching culture starts to have an impact and the selection of the tools and services for the social interactions comes in to clarity, whether the right choices were made and implemented to easily integrate with it or clash.

Mature Social Tool

The mature social tool stage the complicated realities of human social interactions comes into play, as well as the need for managing and filtering information flows. Most often organizations hit this stage in 6 months to 2 years. The lovely “if information is important it will find you” theory falls from a working practice to myth here as does they never valid 1/9/90 rule. Information and connections with people get lost and fuzzy. Keeping what is needed and valuable near is essential. It is here most often that people managing the services and tools in organizations state, “What they hell did we do? Do we have the right tools and services?” Many times the answer is no they don't have what they need as they didn't see this part of the picture and reality coming. Also they didn't plan budget and resources for this (it was supposed to just work, right).

It is also in this stage that it is really clear different parts of the service have matured at vastly different rates. Some of it is individual people maturing at faster rates. The accelerated maturity is not only with individuals but groups, subjects, use patterns, roles, etc. This inconsistency of growth is normal, yet it continually seems to surprise people. The reality is there are various types of people, whom these tools hit a need and map tightly to their activities and perceived way forward. Rarely does accelerated maturity of use have much to do with age (the myth that it is young people who take to these tools really becomes clear here as well). Matching lack of resources and pain because that with other solutions is a much stronger driver when the services ease those pains.

The mature social stage is also where the “best practices” considered and possibly used earlier surface as possibly not the best way forward and may have lead to things more problematic than not optimal outcomes. Each organization not only has its own culture, but sub-cultures, but its own ways of doing business on top of the social environment and cultural behaviors. Understanding what the levers and myriad of potential options the possible outcomes that come from their use is an incredibly valuable approach. Combining approaches and methods from these many options will enhance the complications, which needs the ability to have people who can understand and see the components and break down what influences can be attributed to where. It is very much an iterate, test, monitor, and iterate practice all while realizing what doesn't work in one scenario may be brilliant in others.

The value from much of the social web understandings derived from what people thought they saw in Web 2.0 offerings runs out and the practice of copying features and functionality from that realm has run its course due to limitations mentioned above. The practices and services are similar, but the massive scale that Web 2.0 services handle has them focussing on volume and quantity of interactions, not the honed qualitative needs in organizations. Facebook doesn't care that people are sharing important knowledge for other to benefit from as long as people are interacting and using their service. Sharing and honing those understandings and being able to refind them as needed in an organization is an essential and has deep value over time.

The mature social tool stage is where search is needed to find things and social search (in theory) should work well (that often isn't the case as search for the most part hasn't caught up yet). There is enough content and enough people interacting to see a rich ecosystem ready to see the benefit of these service become really valuable. This can happen, but it becomes difficult. There are no best practices that work here, there are guides and series of “it depends” scenarios and lenses to work through to good (if not hopefully better) outcomes. The number or roles and tools matching those role's needs are needed for many using the service, but at the same time keeping the interfaces easy to use as they were in the earlier stages (think of most role playing games that start with simple interfaces that are easy to use to accomplish what is needed, but over time and proven adeptness at using them more complicated tools and interfaces slowly evolve that match the mastery, roles, and skills needed (Lithium community platform (for outside the firewall) does this amazingly well, but doing this is something that takes incredibly deep skill and understanding).

It is also in this stage that information overload really can kick in. Connecting the information and knowledge to people and areas in the system that need it can become a challenge. What seemed to be a reality of a single culture in the organization is seen as more complicated with the multitude of sub-cultures with their own understandings, contexts, terms/vocabularies, and expectations. Not only do non-emergent taxonomies have problems here, but search does if it doesn't account for the social implications and influences underlying the content and needs.

By this point the realization that an open social platform didn't work there are now many smaller groups that are fully or partly closed off. The key is to embrace this understanding and work to build synonym repositories and bridges of understanding between the sub-cultures and divergent practice areas. The collective whole that is emerging becomes difficult to work with, but it can be done. The scale and needs that emerge out of this can begin to look like enterprise resource management services, but the components are not as stable and as predictable, they are human and social.

Focussing on the complicated components in all of this is a task. It can be done and taking the multitude of complicated steps, conditions, and interactions (software and social, as well as social software interactions) into account and breaking them down into smaller more manageable components through depth of understanding and experience can be done. Having not only a good understanding of broader social network interactions helps greatly, but understandings at the social interaction design level for the much smaller scale interaction needs is essential as well. The interfaces and needs of the service will be drastically different than what is needed earlier in the stages.

Even with some mastery of this stage the growth of people and actions over time will shift from being complicated to complex. Hopefully, the complicated needs are being identified and needs relating to the complicated needs are helping to address the issues at hand. Longitudinal understandings of use and patterns is needed to help iterate and meet needs.

Complex Social System

The complex social system is where things move toward emulating actual social systems in the world around us. Understandings that are central to urban planning and understanding healthy societies at scale, as well as using well worn research and theories for how the complex organisms known as societies interact. (Dave Gray has picked up on this and included it in the Connected Company post, which is worth your time to read.) There are few universal understandings of what people do that will consistently apply. The use and emergent uses of the services that happen in this stage will be quite different and the tools and patterns for managing things that worked in earlier stages will not work as well. External influences (influences outside of the cultures or are emergent and not planned) will impact use and value. Often it is these emergent uses that have the highest value, but they can also be problematic. It is also essential to understand how modifying the whole of the system and service to embrace these emergent patterns will impact.

There are no best practices and never will be. It takes identifying and understanding the individual influences (there are often many) and their place in what is occurring in small samples (rarely do large emergent patterns behave or happen consistently across the organization (although it can)) to get better clarity.

Knowing this stage is coming and being aware of the patterns indicate this emergent and divergent stage is really helpful as early as the initial planning stages. Indications where and how these patterns are emerging can be seen very early and they can be confused for mainstream use, which changes the whole of the system and skews it against easy considered use in the earlier stages. This isn't something to understand and worry about later, it needs to be something that is firmly in mind with people who not only grasp it, but can ascertain its existence and work through the myriad of considerations that will be needed to work through to best prepare and adapt for it.

Tools and services are not exactly here just yet. There are some that could be close, but it all is dependent on need, problems, and the underlying complications that lead to the complexity. There are also many examples for services identifying emergent patterns and behaviors and adapting for them or just letting them be. Things like hashtags in Twitter are an example of embracing the emergent patterns, but it was and is an edge user pattern. This past week Socialcast took the steps to further adapt their system to take hashtag and enable design patterns that helped it be far more usable and understandable to mainstream core users (I think I may know some people who worked on that and bravo all around).

Removing Trust

About two years ago I made a conscious effort not to use the term “trust” and encouraged those I was engaging for work and social interactions not to use the term. The problem is not the concept of trust, but the use of the term trust, or more accurately the overuse of the term trust. Trust gets used quite often as it is a word that has high value in our society. There are roughly seven definitions or contextual uses of the term trust, which is problematic when trying to design, develop, or evaluate ways forward from understandings gaps and potential problems.

Initially, I started a deep dive into reading everything I could on trust to get a better grasp of the term and underlying foundations. I thought this may provide better understanding and bring me back to using the term and with more clarity of understanding. While, this helped increase my understanding of the use of trust as a term it also confirmed the broad fuzzy use of the term, even within attempts to clarify it.

Why the Use of the Term Trust is Problematic

When I was working with people to help improve their social software deployments or use of social sites, as well as engagements in B2B and B2C arena the term trust was used a lot. I would ask people to define “trust” as they were using it, and they would describe what they meant by trust, but with in a sentence or two they had moved onto a different contextual definition. Sometimes I would point this out and ask them to redefine what they meant, pointing out the shift in usage. When I asked one group I was talking with to use other words as proxy for the term trust things started moving forward with much more clarity and understanding. Also gone were the disagreements (often heated) between people whose disagreement was based on different use of the term.

Once I started regularly asking people to not use trust, but proxies for the term I started keeping rough track of the other words and concepts that were underlying trust. The rough list includes: Respected, comfort, dependable, valued, honest, reliable, treasured, loved, believable, consistent, etc. Many found the terms they used to replace trust were more on target for what they actually meant than when using the word trust. There are some sets terms that nicely overlap (dependable, reliable, consistent and valued, treasured), but one term that came up a lot and generated a lot of agreement in group discussions is comfort.

Social Comfort Emerges

Within a few months of stopping use of the term trust, comfort was the one concept that was often used that seamed to be a good descriptor for social software environments. It was a social comfort with three underlying elements that helped clarify things. Social comfort for interacting in social software environments was required for: 1) People; 2) Tools; and 3) Content (subject matter). I will explain these briefly, but really need to come back to each one in more depth in later posts.

(A presentation to eXention last year turned what was publicly one slide on the subject into a full 60 minute plus presentation.)

Social Comfort

View more presentations from Thomas Vander Wal.

Social Comfort with People

Social comfort with people is one essential for people interacting with others. Some of the key questions people bring up with regard to social comfort with people are: Knowing who someone is, how they will interact with you, what they will do with information shared, reliability of information shared, are they safe, can I have reasonable interaction with them, and why would I interact with this person. One of the biggest issues is, “Who is this person and why would I connect or interact with them?” But, most social software tools, particularly for internal organization use provide that contextual information or depth needed to answer that question in their profiles (even in the organizations where most people have relatively “complete” profiles, the information in the profiles is rarely information that helps answer the “Who is this person and why should I listen or interact with them?” question.

Social Comfort with Tools

Social comfort with tools is often hindered by not only ease of use, but ease of understanding what social features and functionalities do, as well as with whom this information is shared. There is an incredible amount of ambiguity in the contextual meaning (direct or conveyed) of many interface elements (ratings, stars, flags, etc.) fall deeply into this area. This leads to the social reticence of a click, where people do not star, flag, rate, or annotate as the meanings of these actions are not clear in meaning (to the system or to other people) as well as who sees these actions and what the actions mean to them. Nearly every organization has a handful if not many examples of misunderstanding of these interactions in actual use. The problems are often compounded as sub-groups in organizations often establish their own contextual understandings of these elements for their use, but that may have the opposite meaning elsewhere (a star may mean items a person is storing to come back to later in one group and another it means a person likes the item starred and can be construed as a light approval). Even services where this is well defined and conveyed in the interface this conflict in understandings occurs. (This is not to ward people off use, but the to understand lack of consistency of understanding that occurs, although the 5 star (or other variations) are really universally problematic and needs a long explanation as to why.)

Social Comfort with Content

Social comfort with content or subject matter can hold people back from using social software. People may have constructive input, but their lack of their own perceived expertise may be (and often is) what inhibits them from sharing that information. The means for gathering this constructive feedback is needed along with the ability for others to ask questions and interact, which usually rules out anonymous contributions (additionally anonymous contributions rarely help mitigate this problem as that doesn’t really provide comfort, as well inside most organizations it is quite easy to resolve who is behind any anonymous contribution, so it is false anonymity). People often have contributions they believe are helpful, but may not be fully fleshed out, or are need to have the information vetted for internal political reasons or put in context (terminology and constructs that are most easily understood and usable) through vetting of others (whom there is social comfort with).

Improving Outcomes with Focal Shift

One of the outcomes of this shift from the term trust to others, including social comfort is areas that need to be addressed are more easily seen, discussed, considered, and potential solutions identified. The end results are often improved adoption through improved community management, improved interfaces and interactions in the services, better tools through iteration, and improved adoption.

Bing Likes Like, But Does it Mean We Do

Last week Microsoft Bing and Facebook announced Facebook is now part of Bing search. The part that has been touted the most is Bing's inclusion of Facebook Likes.

For me this is really surprising as Like has very little value, what little value is has is confounded by it lacks any explicit understanding of intent. Search is about finding what is being sought, which is much harder than it sounds, particularly with massive amounts of information, or when searching across contexts and influences. Like really doesn't add much of anything of value to this. Why somebody likes something is really important to understand, or more importantly even if a person actually likes what they placed a like on, or if they were using it as a proxy for a bookmark to hold on to something so to return later, or even if the Like is a social statement.

One of my trips to California I was with friends and we were trying to sort out where to grab something to eat. One friend suggested In-N-Out, she figured it was well liked and even the guy who is vegetarian would be in on it as he liked it on Facebook (she remembered). The vegetarian in the group strongly preferred not to go there and wanted an option with better vegetarian offerings. When he was asked why he put a Facebook Like on it he said, "I like hanging out with my friends there as it makes them happy, but I usually have eaten before, or will after. Now I am hungry and wish to eat, so I really prefer something other than In-N-Out." This triggered everybody talking about their doing similar things with Like in Facebook, which really didn't mean they liked what they clicked "Like" on.

Facebook Like, much like the often problematic star ratings, adds more ambiguity (or another value point that has no clear meaning that can be reliably used for search or predictors). My favorite recommendations from Facebook are those similar to "Those who like food also like sleep.", which gives me the option to like sleep. (We can cure cancer if we keep this intelligent thinking up.)

What is Next? The Past!

So, if this augmented ambiguity from using Facebook Like in search is problematic leads you to think, "What is better?" Well, a look back to 2005 or 2006 at Yahoo! is a very good place to start. Somewhere in this timeframe Yahoo Search did something smart, no freakishly smart (actually connecting two things together that made a giant difference for search). Yahoo! had its own social bookmarking service "My Web", which was somewhat similar to Delicious (which Yahoo acquired). The second version of MyWeb (MyWeb2) made it easy to see one's own bookmarks that you yourself tagged in your own context, your friends bookmarks they had tagged with their tag terms in their context, and everybody's. Yahoo! incorporated the tags and social connections from MyWeb2 into their search. This dramatically improved the search, if you were using MyWeb2 and particularly if you had stated people you were connected to.

At this point Yahoo! not only caught up to Google but passed it by a large margin for me. Why? Google was very good at finding good results, often good enough. Yahoo! with MyWeb2 built in and using my 60 to 70 people I was connected to started surfacing exactly what I was looking for. This was happening regularly. This was search Nirvana. Let's step back slightly to understand why.

Proper Social Understandings Improve Search Precision

One of the interesting things about people tagging content to store it in services like MyWeb2 or Delicious (or any other folksonomy tagging service) is people almost alway only tag things they have interest in. Based on the assumption (which holds up well) that people hold on to thing they like, but when they drift from that they usually will add tags that state that deference.

Search is difficult because of contextual influences and ambiguity. Having tagging done by people whom you know can help with that contextualization. People whom you know having tagged things around what you are seeking and use the terms in similar manner to the way you do has value. Well, no not really, it has insanely great value. The key is sorting out similar affinities (as close as possible) and similar term use helps to further remove ambiguity, which becomes clearer when you can parse things through the lens of a granular social network. With just 60 to 70 people my world of search was turned upside down in a very positive way. All search results that had been bookmarked and tagged by people I was connected to were annotated with their their name and often tags.

This giant step forward for Yahoo! did not last long as after a few months the experiment was over and Yahoo search returned to being not as helpful as Google search, which is just good enough.

The Yahoo experiment was not perfect, but it was much closer than most anything else to that point. Holding it back was the lack of people you were connected to. The more people you were connected to, to some degree, was helpful. Also, very few people knew about this experiment (it didn't seem like an experiment at the time, as it seemed it could only grow, but Yahoo really didn't seem to know how to get the word out or talk about this value, it was an information geek thing (yes, I could fall into that grouping). But, the piece missing that would have been most helpful, was the ability to garden and craft your relationships to those with whom you connected.

The gardening and contextualizing those with whom you are connected is really powerful. It doesn't need to be publicly exposed but the tools and service can make giant leaps forward if we have this. Most of this contextualization is assumed by tools and services, but having explicit crafting takes the guessing out. Being able to add fuzzy (roughly defined) semantic terms to attract what you value from that person closer while keeping the things of less of value at bey, can be helpful. This is core to the model of attraction (draft) idea that has been my frame for much around me for years. Being able to tag or annotate "Jim" with cycling, food, social search, design, and baseball will help search bring things roughly related to those topics or terms close to me, but may not give as high of relevance for his passion for early 1990s dot matrix printers nor Hobbits.

Next Step?

The next step for this as in terms of products and services also has happened. An enterprise social bookmarking service, Connectbeam (now gone) took the next step (Lotus Dogear, now Lotus Bookmarks in their Connections tools is somewhat similar) by bringing this same social tagging into the work environment and then surfacing that added value into search results. What set Connectbeam apart from others doing similar efforts was it helped people understand the social components better than most. They had some really good social interaction designs around the connecting people, that really started to get at some of the tough nuances that are really hard to crack outside the early adopter types using service (only 5 to 15% of most orgs will fall into that early adopter mindset, the rest are really lost with this). This crafting and understanding social interactions allowed Connectbeam to have the potential to drastically improve search, (search is a very expensive and painful proposition at every organization I have run across). The social interactions needed for comfort, familiarity, and producing value is central to getting any service right, but the hurdle is big but there is a large positive value if you get that right for social tagging. Sadly, Scuttle and thin not well thought through attempts at social tagging really do not add to much either.

Spending time to understand the keys to getting it right and selecting tools that do it well or working with vendors to get there will pay off.

On Fire with Social Progressions

When talking with organizations about social tools and logical social flows for information from ideas all the way to formal outcomes (white papers, process docs, product enhancement requirement documents, etc.) there have always been stated steps. Some of these steps have different incarnations and labels, depending on how things are done conventionally. But, there is a usual natural progression of how these flow that is rather common and universal across organization types (formal or not).

To these progression points there are classes/types of tools or services that map well to these, but very rarely is it one tool/service set crosses these, but whether it is all tools/services under one umbrella application or distinctly different instances, they really should be linked and integrated as seamlessly as possible.

The steps in the social progression are as follow:

Personal

The first step or home base, is more of a state for beginning, is the the personal space and repository. Sadly, this is the ugly step child that is very often missed in many tools/service offerings. The place were a person has a view of their resources, which is mapped in their context and needed representations to make sense with the least effort. This is the view with things they need to see surface (from their perspective and from others) and from where they jump to interacting with information, objects, tasks, and others.

Sparks (Ideas Shared)

The first step often comes from asking questions simply and easily and quick easy responses, or sharing quick notes and ideas that get feedback and interest. Many times this is done efficiently in micro sharing services like similar to Twitter but with a grasp of needs organizations have (Socialtext Signals or Socialcast are solid options to consider). But, other options, including blogs and discussion forums have the capability of doing this as well.

With sparks of ideas they need to have the ability to be found so to be responded to, aggregated, or even shared to ensure the right people see them and can interact. There is a wide breadth of types of things that flow through micro sharing services, but many will resonate, inform, or inspire others. But, quite often they get solid conversations flowing across a broad cross section of people and locations.

Campfire (Gathering of Others with Interest)

From the spark of inspiration many others with interest or affinity gather to discuss and the spark turns into a campfire. Stories are told and fuel is added to the fire. Honing of the ideas and gather inspiration, information, and content from broad sources and view is then curated and honed to some degree.

The tools needed for the campfire stage must allow from much broader conversation than the limited spark stage. Limiting the room around the campfire to those with strong interest and affinity helps keep the focus, but also these people will likely have the deepest reserves of fodder for the conversation and a wide variety of perspectives and resources they can tap ready at hand. Longer conversation and curating all that is gathers are the prime focus. Curation through tagging is often incredibly helpful (being able to tag so to aggregate and curate ideas from the sparks stage is highly important).

Bonfire (Broader Interest Gathering)

Once the ideas have been fleshed out and framed to some degree and curated to control scope the discussion turns into a bonfire. Bonfires, while much larger still need to be controlled and maintained or they get out of control and things get dangerous. At this stage broad viewing for healthy feedback and discussion, including highlighting things that have been missed, what works well, what doesn't work well, etc. are the key focus. This is the time to get understanding and direction that hones and shapes everything that is possible. It is also used to add to what has been gathered and curated in the campfire stage so to iterate on it.

Torch (Honing for Broad Use & Replication)

Lastly, is the torch stage. This is easy to handle, easy to replicate, and is safe. This requires Real Collaboration to work through the conflicting ideas and negotiate as well as intelligently work toward one final output. These final outputs can be white papers, new processes, new guidelines, new products, etc. But, the point is there is one (just like artists collaborating on a statue there is only one statue, not many and all through differences have been worked through to one salient solution).

5 Enterprise 2.0 Myth Mantras that Must Die

This week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston was quite good. It is one of the few conference I still won't miss. The conference is a good mix of vendors, implementers, and those who live with those results while working hard to improve upon this. This conference is a great place to talk with people who working through the gaps in Enterprise 2.0 tools and services, but still finding great improvements in their company from these tools and services.

Enterprise 2.0 tools and services comprise many different types of offerings that help groups of people share, communicate, interact, and even get to real collaboration. One big question in the halls outside the sessions was "Why is this all lacking standards? Why can't we choose best tools for our needs and get them in integrate?" This question is straight of of the content management system early days as well, but that ended up a rather huge mess with no picking and choosing of the best solutions for your needs from various vendors and easily assembling them together. The customers lost their bid to get best of breed for to solve their problems and have had to settle for mediocre components all from one vendor (nobody is happy with their CMS and never has been, we really must not repeat this bad pattern again). Right now Enterprise 2.0 has a variety of choices with some really good options depending on what a customer's need is (sadly too few educate the customer on what is really needed before they purchase).

On of the frustrating things at Enterprise 2.0 Conference this go around was there are still myth mantras that echo the podiums and halls. They really need to stop as they have never been proven to be right and are often proven to be incorrect (many times shown to be wildly incorrect). The last two years at Enterprise 2.0 Conferences (as well as other conferneces) I was presenting these myths and getting the whole room giving giant nods in agreement and standing up after in Q&A why people still make these statements. Part of the problem is the statements have been said so often they must be true (mantra), but as presenters we really must check these things not just repeat. Quite often this leads to disgruntled customers who make up, what Stewart Mader calls the "one year club", which are organizations that hit the 6 month to one year mark and have giant lessons learned from their tools and services, but wish somebody let them know this stuff up front.

So here are the mantra myths that bug me the most that have no foundation and when presented with any real world examples or research they are quickly (and always) disproven:

Millennials Needing and Leading the Way

Myth: It is believed that it is the Millennials (those recently out of university and roughly 22 to 27 years old) that are expecting or demanding these social tools.

Reality: Every year at Enterprise 2.0 Conference, since 2007, there are one or more sessions where this myth gets debunked. In the last 5 years or so I have never been in or talked to an organization what had actually ever had this request from Millennials (over 50 organizations at this point). In fact any Millennial that has been in any meeting I have been part of in an organization has stated very strongly, they can't find any reason for using the tools in the organization and they don't know anybody their age who thinks that either. They do think the existing tools (ECM, Portals, e-mail, etc. are absolutely horrid and nearly impossible to use). Often it is people in their late 30s to late 50s who see the solid value in these social tools inside the organization as solutions for the painful and unproductive tools they are forced to use.

In 2007 it was a lesson's learned panel that the panelist from Motorola claimed very few of their younger employees used the tools they put in place and challenged the other panelist to state differently and they could not do so. In 2008 it the same thing came up in a couple panels, one of which was Oracle's User Experience session which was heavy on the research they put into building their own tools and services. Oracle researchers were initially surprised that there were very few young workers who could understand why they would have these tools at work, but they found those older knew the need to more easily share, aggregate, curate, and collaborate with others. Most of these older workers found that their existing tools were keeping them from getting their work done efficiently, and some times keeping them from getting it done at all.

Another perspective that I found insanely helpful in thinking through this is talking with university professors who use social tools (blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, etc.) as part of their class participation. Most professors (not in computer sciences or information sciences) have a common experience in that their students fall get graded on in-class participation, homework, and digital tool participation and nearly all do well in one or two of the three, but almost none do well in all three. Different people have different comfort zones and strengths, so the teachers have been learning to grade accordingly to balance for this.

Web 2.0 as a Guide

Myth: Often people make the link from Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0 stating we must follow this path which is successful.

Reality: This myth is problematic as organization look at Web 2.0 services and want exactly what is on the web. The problem with this is they often see the Web 2.0 tools as successful because they have a few million people using them. To most people 20 million people looks like a lot, or 50 million, or even 500 million. But with well over 1 billion people on the web around the globe, these numbers get put in to rather small percentages. Even with Facebook's 500 million or so, we still don't have 100% adoption.

When I have been dealing with Enterprise 2.0 "one year club" customers (and potential customers) they are often very disappointed with their low adoption (they were some how dreaming of millions of users inside the firewall of their 30k employee organization). Nearly every time they had out performed the Web 2.0 tools with percentage adoption, but that is not comforting.

What Web 2.0 does is provide a glimpse of much easier to use services and tools to get the job done. Sadly most Web 2.0 sites have been honed and incrementally improved on early adopters, who are not representative of the remaining 90% to 95% of the population. The reality of Enterprise 2.0 is that organizations are comprised of everybody (the mainstream and the ear) and they are a fixed population (for the most part) and great strides have been made with many vendor's tools that enable their offerings to be used by much higher percentages of the population. We all still need to work with vendors to get this ease of use and mapping to the wide variety of needs and depths of use.

No Training is Needed

Myth: Often you hear no training is needed because the tools are so easy, or its related mantra "if you build it they will come".

Reality: Similar the ease of use mentions in the Web 2.0 myth above, the enterprise 2.0 tools are much easier to use than the really complex and human unfriendly tools many organizations have through out. While the older tools usually require days of training, 500 page binders, and a lot of bullet point ridden presentations. The Enterprise 2.0 tools still require training, but the training is much much lighter. The training is hours (usually if it is more than 2 or 3 hours you may have the wrong tools or the wrong training) not days.

Many organizations are now complaining that they have spent incredible amounts of information for a enterprise wide portal or enterprise content management (ECM) tool. But the tools are so complex that they have an insanely small number of people in their organization that are trained well enough to add or manage content. Many organizations are looking to Enterprise 2.0 tools to get information out of people's heads easily and shared with others (as one of many uses and valuable solutions the tools and services provide).

90-9-1

Myth: Many people believe that one percent create content, nine percent modify and interact with that content, and 90 percent just consume that information and are passive.

Reality: Sometimes this myth gets attributed to Bradley Horowitz presentations while he was at Yahoo! that used these percentages as estimates inside a pyramid. He often has said he wished he never put numbers in it as they numbers are not accurate and the percentages can be flipped and still be correct.

Any organization that deploys social tools, iterates them to improve to people's needs, and has community leadership almost always finds these adoption rates grow over time. Some organizations many organizations get 5% to 20% adoption and active use in the first year. Over two years this grows to be much more. E-mail saw nearly similar patterns and took 5 to 7 years to reach about 99% adoption. But, the best example is the BBC's greater than 110 percent adoption over 7 years, but as Euan Semple explains part of this is the employee base of BBC shrunk durning that time, but it still makes the 90-9-1 myth look horribly foolish (I know many companies grade their potential consultants on use of this myth and if stated they are immediately dropped a few ranking points).

In 1996 I was working for a legal professional organization and one of my roles was running their private professional Compuserve forums. They had been using Compuserve 2 years or so by the time I worked there, but they were already above 40 percent of the 3,000 members were on the service. Of those using Compuserve more than 50% were actively participating. We were finding those with 6 to 18 months of were actively contributing at a 60% or higher rate. Every intranet forum or groupware service I have run, built, managed, or iterated in jobs since has followed similar patterns, so that is 14 years of living with the reality that the 90-9-1 is a myth and all the lessons learned during that time as well.

People are Becoming Openly Social

Myth: People are moving to being more openly social as years go by. This is also tied to the youth myth (this combination myth really doesn't hold up at all either).

Reality: In every organization the adoption and broad use of social tools is almost always tied to closed groups, but we know those are problematic as information is shared but is can be nearly impossible to access and use. Right up there is the nearly global understanding that services that are openly shared to all in the organization by default (or only option) have very low adoption. There is no better way to hinder adoption than to opt for all interactions to be openly shared.

This follows the understanding had pounded into me over the last 14 years and lead to the rethinking of all of the social interaction models I used and knew of (particularly from Web 2.0) and started from scratch, with one of the results being Elements of the social software stack. I used stack because there is a distinct order to how people progress through sharing information and one of the most important parts is having action (blogging, annotating, tagging, notes, etc.) followed by the decision how broadly you want to share it. Most tools have this backwards by choosing the tool or action you have set how broadly it will be shared. Community managers who have pushed to have this switched or to have the capability to not share everything by default have seen the adoption rates jump drastically. These same community managers are usually rather angry that nobody put them onto this basic understanding earlier.

Many who use this myth mantra point to Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook as their proof. But, Facebook data doesn't seem to support Zuckerberg's assumptions, in fact it is quite the opposite. Many of the social computing researchers who work with this and similar data (danah boyd and Fred Stuzman among others) find there are no trends at all toward opening up social and in fact there are solid trends in the opposite direction in the past 3 to 5 years.

Fixing the Myth Mantras

We really need to stop using these myths and start surfacing all of the evidence that runs counter to all of these myths. I keep thinking these myths have died as there are so many people sharing their research, experiences, and evidence to these myths. But, some it seems many don't have experiences of their own and are still finding it viable to surface these myths as they sound good.

The reality of all of this is people use the Enterprise 2.0 tools when they are well understood, the social realities and complexities are understood to help form solutions that fill the gaps in the problems that organizations face, and we all more forward faster. We need to focus on the realities not the false myth mantras so we all get smarter and can all start addressing the real hurdles while embracing real advances that are out there.

Understanding the Cost of We Can't Find Anything

One problem I often hear when talking with any organization about new solutions is understanding the cost and inefficiency of their existing way solutions, processes, or general way of doing things. In the past year or two I have used various general measurements around search to help focus the need for improvement not only on search, but the needed information and metadata needed to improve search.

We Can't Find Anything

There is nothing more common that I hear from an organization about their intranet and internal information services than, "We can't find anything." (Some days I swear this is the mantra that must be intoned for an organization to become real.)

There are many reasons and potential solutions for improving the situation. Some of these involve improved search technologies, some improved search interfaces, or But, understanding the cost of this inefficiency is where I find it is valuable to start.

The first step after understanding you have this problem is to measure it, but most organizations don't want to pay for that they are just looking for solutions (we all know how this turns out). The best method I find is walking through the broad understandings of the cost of inefficiencies.

The Numbers...

At Interop 2009 I presented "Next Generation Search: Social Bookmarking and Tagging". This presentation started off with a look at the rough numbers behind the cost of search in the enterprise (see the first 16 slides). [I presented a similar presentation at the SharePoint Saturday DC event this past week, but evaluated SharePoint 2010's new social tagging as the analysis focus.]

Next Generation Search: Social Bookmarking and Tagging

View more presentations from Thomas Vander Wal.

Most of the numbers come from Google white papers on search, which gets some of their numbers from an IDC white paper. I also have a white paper that was never published and is not public that has slightly more optimistic numbers, based on the percentage of time knowledge workers search (16% rather than the Google stated ~25% of a knowledge workers time is spent searching). There are a few Google white papers, but the Return on Information: adding to your ROI with Google Enterprise Search from 2009 is good (I do not endorse the Google Search Appliance, but am just using the numbers used to state the problem).

I focus on being optimistic and have I yet to run into an organization that claims to live up to the optimistic numbers or total cost of inefficiency.

• Few organization claim they have 80 percent of or better success with employees finding what they need through search
• That is 80 percent success rate
• Or, 1 in 5 searches do not find what is they were seeking
• A sample organization with 500 searches per day has 100 failures
• An average knowledge worker spends 16% of their time searching
• 16% of a 40 hour work week is 1.25 hours spent searching
• 20% (spent with unsuccessful searches) of 1.25 hours a week is 15 minutes of inefficient productivity
• At an average salary of $60,000 per year that leads to $375 per person of inefficient productivity
• Now take that $375 per knowledge worker and multiply it by how many knowledge workers you have in an organization and the costs mount quickly
• An organization with 4,500 knowledge workers is looking at a inefficiency cost of $1,687,500 per year.
• Now keep in mind your knowledge workers are you most efficient at search
• Many organizations as a whole are running at 40% to 70% success rate for search

We Know We Have a Costly Problem

This usually is enough to illustrate there is a problem and gap with spending time resolving. The first step is to set a baseline inside your organization. Examine search patterns, look at existing taxonomies (you have them and use them to some degree, yes?) and work to identify gaps, look at solutions like tagging (folksonomy) to validate the taxonomy and identify gaps (which also gives you the terms that will likely close that gap). But get a good understanding of what you have before you take steps. Also understand the easy solutions are never easy without solid understanding.

Evaluating what, if any taxonomy you have is essential. Understand who is driving the taxonomy development and up keep. Look at how to get what people in the organization are seeking in the words (terms) they use intend to find things (this is often far broader than any taxonomy provides).

Facebook Makes it Hard to Like Them

This past week Facebook made a load of changes to how it works at their F8 conference. Very little of it is new or innovative, other than it is taking the ideas mainstream (and the ideas are poorly executed in usual Facebook style).

There are a lot of things that are problematic and troublesome. This is not directly about "the world is becoming openly social", which is a tiresome untrue meme if you talk to most people who are outside the tech industry. There is no quicker sanity check on this than watching use and more importantly non-use (more importantly why it is not used) of social tools inside the firewall of organizations. Being openly social is something that is very counter to most human cultures as we are not wired nor raised that way.

This is a listing of the personal problems Facebook has put me through. None of them were my decision or had my approval. (Also an overheard conversation included here toward the end that was pure gold.)

Reason I Use Facebook

First off, I have used Facebook to interact and keep up with friends and contacts I have met across life's travels. People are really amazing and Facebook is one place many of those who are not in design or technical industries hang out (exactly like AOL was in the 90s). Many of these people I have no idea of their views, beliefs or values, I am just connecting to them because I knew them at one point in life and I valued that relationship then for some large or small reason.

I joined Facebook just as it was opened to the non-academic crowd for the sole reason of connecting with and following the social software researchers who were (and still are much more) on top of what is good, missing, mis-understood, and wrong (still) in these social tools than most of the developers, designers, owners of the services, and pundits/gurus in this genre of tools and services. Ironically, these researchers really are not using Facebook as much and more ironically are finding, using Facebook data, that Facebook claims that people want op it to open up is far from the case (roughly 16,000 to 60,000 of Facebook's 400 million plus users requested things to be more open).

Opening Profile and Getting it Horribly Wrong

The first instance I ran into Facebook's mis-steps was with their Profile. Facebook turned all of the statements about one's self into links and made all of those open to the world. All of these statements had permissions closed to what I was comfortable with prior.

The big problem, as it always does with name and subject resolution is disambiguation (what is meant by a word, e.g. what is "apple", etc.). Any Profile likes or interests that I did not want to use the Facebook auto link would be removed from my profile (what challenged developer thought that one up?). The first look at my Facebook account it asked for me to give a blanket approval, to approve the creation of links one by one, or do it later. With 70 some links and I could see a few were not right and I was in Facebook check on a work contact so I was coming back later. I came back later that same day and still was focussing on work and Facebook asked the same and I replied the same.

The following day I looked at Facebook with a little time (10 minutes or so) and opened the select the links I want to make. The screen allowed me to approve all links with a check box and save. There was no, cancel option or come back later. I realized a couple of the links were horribly wrong (disambiguation problems) and I needed to sort out how to get them right. Since there was no cancel button I closed the page in the browser. I came when I had more time and found Facebook approved all of the links, even the wrong ones with out my permission.

The problems with this are it linked one of my favorite movies Blue of the French three colors trilogy to a porn movie (there are 3 it seems with this same name, according to various web searches). It created a fake page for my company, keep in mind Facebook doesn't care about pointing to actual pages or canonical (the source) source on the web (the web matters little to Facebook just like it did to AOL in the 90s). I don't nor will not have access to edit that fake Facebook page it created. The company I worked for prior also had a fake representation made up in Facebook and aggregated people from the four different companies with a similar name that none of these companies can fix either.

Cleaning Up Profile is Intentionally Hard

The only option to clean up the porn link and the remove other things while trying to sort out how to fix my own company link. In trying to remove the porn link first I found removing the link on the profile page by hiding it and then deleting it does nothing. The link was still there when I refreshed my profile page (as expected Facebook has either has no clue what it is doing or makes things intentionally difficult, and it is really hard to find designers and developers this incompetent). I went through my privacy pages and stumbled on something related and removed that, which did nothing to the profile link. An hour later I found a third place (I have no clue where) that had a remove option for that link, which finally worked for it and the other links I was removing.

At this time I also was locking down permissions by making all Facebook shared interactions with the service only available to 'Friends'. This lead to going through screen after screen and repeating the same changes for the same apps and services, because Facebook management is made intentionally hard and cumbersome. The global changes are not global, there are many more steps to getting things and keeping things locked down.

Why Tighten Permissions?

I had most of my Facebook permissions set to 'Friend of Friend' as I am rather cautious about what I share into the service. In February and early March I sat through 3 demonstrations from different marketers showing the great trove of personal data that Facebook offers up when you use Facebook Connect as a login to your site or service. But, not only is it the person's own personal information they are getting access to but anybody's information who has 'Friend of Friend' selected, as companies, advertisers, marketers, and any organization is your 'Friend' right? Many in the room realized how egregious this is, as most mainstream people (non-tech industry) using Facebook do not think about how widely this information is being shared and it is far from their intention to share the information with marketing or ad services (in many instances talking with mainstream people they are appalled and would not share that info or change what they say had they any idea). All three people demoing Facebook Connect clearly understood the ease to do evil with what was being surfaced and blatantly said "we will never do anything like that as we are an ethical marketing firm" (nice sentiment, but most in the room were not worried about these people presenting).

Where it became really clear to all in the room at one demo, was when the marketing analyst brought in live data they had collected (all three of the demonstrations did this, "to show the power" of their tools and ideas). The marketer selected one of the guys whose information was just added to their database and looked at all of the info that was shared. We all saw is name, his work, his home address, his phone numbers, he was married, his wife's name, and link to his profile, and many many other pieces of data, including people he friended. The marketer used the profile link to show this guy's page, which showed he had not linked to his wife's profile if she had one. But, it was clear most of his current interactions on Facebook were all with gay men and attending various "coming out parties". The marketer became very nervous and uttered, "I guess this guy's wife doesn't know he is gay". This statement may be completely incorrect, but having only partial context (perhaps not knowing his brother died of AIDS and he actively raises money for that community, while not being gay himself, or many other possibilities, even he is actually a gay man).

Transference of Reputation

The point is most of what is shared in Facebook is done with the understanding it is more of a closed private system than it is. But, also our friends and connections information is also part of who we are perceived to be. If we are connected to someone who turns out to be a member of the Klu Klux Klan, there is very quickly questions and assumptions of the similar is likely for us.

Facebook also opened their open social graph, which shows that people are connected and people are connected to things. There is no context in the social graph other than connections. These connections are built by friending someone or using Facebook's new Like feature. [Adina has a really good post on this The problem with Facebook Like]. The problem with an open social graph is it lacks context, it just shows who is connected to who or what. This is a problem with the unknown connections like Klan member, but also it opens up great trove of understanding for people to social engineer information and relationships to gain false trust for crimes or other deviant reasons.

I have stated over the years "The social graph is dangerous without context and much more dangerous w/ partial context", which is this social graph with no context is the just raw connections can be harvested and used in ways people never dreamed of when they made these connections. There is some trust that the organizations capturing this information will look out for us, but in this case Facebook is openly selling access to just that information. Facebook doesn't have your back, it has their own wallet. But, these partial context issues like the friend from years ago who is a Klan member and the usual human transference of reputation is more problematic and dangerous. The claims (assertions) people make about who and what they are connected to need context and it needs to be as robust as possible.

A Facebook "Like" has very little value to the person who clicked that link and has very little value to their connections. If you "Like" a restaurant, is it because of the food? Staff? Close to your work? The pies? Not knowing any of this makes that Like rather pointless. Services like Yelp allow for reviews and ratings. That level of context can start to have more value. But, solid value is when you get down to the level of Foodspotting, which gets to the real context of why somebody likes something, such as what at Shake Shack you liked. The ambiguity is removed and the understanding is clear. With this kind of information Facebook's Like is pointless and meaningless to people, but it does have big value to Facebook as it creates inbound links for Facebook.

External Opt-ins and Data Retention

Saturday I spent a few hours trying to clean-up Facebook while deciding to close my account there or if I could close access to account the few hundred people I am connected to there and make it harder to keep up with them there. After doing this I went to the Washington Post to check to see what activity was going on that had contacts on Twitter commenting about police activity in Washington, DC. The Washington Post greeted me with a large Facebook widget showing my Facebook connections and articles they like in the Post. This was something that the Washington Post opted me into with out my permission. Knowing that Facebook opened data retention from their partners from requiring them from having to dump data they get about its members after 24 hours to allowing them to keep it as long as they wish, also combined with Facebook opening access to parties open access to this new public information Facebook created with out asking permission (and making wrong open statements about the information in my profile).

Facebook is completely overstepping the bounds of anything right and decent by allowing opt-ins without permission from members. But, the Washington Post showed they have little understanding of the reality by opting me in with out my permission as well. All of the valued relationship I have with the Washington Post over the years, particularly after advising Post employees in my workshops more directly about social interactions, the fragility in keeping good relations, and getting social interactions right showed they have very little grasp.

Where to Now?

I still have not closed my Facebook account as it is the people I care about deeply who are there. But, it is those same people who are also realizing they are being thrown under the heap thanks to Facebook.

The other day Marshall Kirkpatrick asked me for comments on Facebook's steps and the need for a more distributed social network and that more distributed open network is where I think the next step will be. I think there will some really interesting discussions at the Internet Identity Workshop next month along these lines as many in the identity community are amazed at the lack of basic understanding of identity, privacy, and related social interactions Facebook has shown in these latest steps. Who widely people in the mainstream grasp what has been done to them (stereotypically people in the United States of America give very little concern to privacy, as they expect it is there and do not think it would be eroded or even the consequences of that). The distributed model where your identity and profile is housed in a place where people have deep trust and access to that can be accessed through permissions (think along the lines of Mine.org) is where we are headed next. When your provider is not as trustworthy as you wished or were lead to believe you can move to another and keep the relationships across all the services you already have as well as the permissions for who has access to what that you are comfortable with get moved as well.

Who Feels this Pain?

I don't know how widely this pain is felt, but one conversation I overheard gave me insight into one place where this pain is felt.

This weekend I was leaving an activity as the next group was arriving. One guy was particularly irritated and was complaining about Facebook and his profile links:

Irritated guy: I just went to check my Facebook account to see if my friend was coming this morning and I found my profile page was now all links. I didn't give them permission to do that.

Guy's friend: Mine did too, but I didn't have much there, just school and work.

Irritated guy: It is the work link they screwed up. The linked law firm Facebook now claims I worked at is not where I worked, but it is some ambulance chaser firm with a similar name. That is the last thing I need is that crappy of a reputation. I did not give Facebook permission to do that. They rather need to get to my permission by law, as it is they are making up lies about me.

Guy's friend: You moved on from your old firm? Where are you now?

Irritated guy: I am now a lawyer for the Federal Trade Commission. I left my old info as current as I haven't had time to change it.

Related Links

• What's there to like? Facebook Likes and social object relations by Adrian Chan
• Privacy, Consent and Collaboration by Oliver Marks on ZDNet
• The teachings of failure by Doc Searls
• How to Delete Facebook Applications (and Why You Should) by Sarah Perez at Read Write Web