Process of Change : socialsoftware

Steps to becoming a successful technology pundit

bobreb — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 06:57:00 GMT

First, study the hype-curve for all it's worth.

(http://static7.userland.com/oracle/gems/reynolds/hypecycle.png)

There, that should be about all it's worth -- useful, but no longer a new idea.

Now here's the formula:

When you find an idea gaining early mind share -- talk it up. You can afford to back a number of horses here, as long as you couch everything in phrases like "it's still early" and "potential to change you business" and "a new paradigm", or "2.0 or 3.0 anything".
Next, you wait until one or more of your darlings starts gaining majority attention -- usually shortly after Business Week spots it. Not too soon -- you need to bask in the "I-told-you-so" glow. But shortly thereafter, you start to back off. It's important to use phrases like "drunk on kool-aid" and "repeating history" and "another bubble" and my personal favorite "echo chamber". At this point you're going for sober, reflective, and cautious.
Here's the best part, once you've been cool as the edge guy, then cool as the mature-risk-adverse-guy-with-the-historical-perspective, you can be cool yet again with the "this is how it will actually play out gig". In fact, having some evidence that you've been through the first two can give you clout for the third phase. (Cautionary note hopeful technology pundits, this is also the place where all the "ignore it it's all crap" people turn into "we always believed it, we'll take it from here" types and crash your party. They can cramp your style.)

The theme is probably obvious, but I'll spell it out: technology pundits always challenge the late majority. When they don't believe, you believe; when they get excited, you sober up; when they become disillusioned, you cheer them up. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Want a great recent example? Check this out:

The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture
by Andrew Keen

Read more about this title...

I read it a while back and it left a bad vibe. It's not that the author doesn't make some fine points, he does. I suffered because it was so obviously a book from a marketing minded guy with an agenda unrelated to the point of the book. I don't believe for a minute he buys his own argument -- not a minute. I know he knows that what has value will survive and what does not will not. "Culture" is not at risk -- that is absurd, and frankly, not even possible. I am confident he was trying, and for a time succeeded, in capturing the anti-web20 chair at PMU (Popular Mindshare University -- which I hope does not actually exist). I admit, part of me wished I'd thought of it.

I've not heard much about him lately, so I suspect he couldn't sustain it. Why? Because he's being joined by so many other capable "mature-risk-adverse-guys-with-the-historical-perspectives". And, of course, they're just waiting for everyone to join in that chorus/dirge, and then they'll change their tune again.

Now, go forth aspiring technology pundit.

Epilogue: The unreasonable men make bets and move early; the fearful change direction in the downturn, or in the face of any apparent challenge; and the real explorers press on up the "slope of enlightenment". Fortunes come and go. Good technology pundits profit at every phase.

Facebook observation

bobreb — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 01:46:08 GMT

My experience with Facebook has been great. I'm somehow engaged with Facebook nearly every day -- sometimes multiple times a day.

Of course I'm there not only as a participant, but as an analyst. That changes the experience. Think of it this way -- if you read several books on the subject of writing books, then your book reading experience changes. You no longer simply enjoy the story, you find yourself studying the techniques the author has employed to impart life to the characters, develop the plot, maintain through-line, manage tension, build a believable world, and more.

So, as a social computing person, I find much to study in Facebook. Consider this: Facebook, through the use of shared applications, allows friend networks to define their own fluid identity. Put another way, affiliations are defined not only by friend status and group memberships, but by the applications people share. Facebook apps are introduced by any member, then compete in what I suspect could be drawn as a classic fitness landscape. Usage equals survival.

I believe "ownership" of the apps in play at any time, across an affiliated network of friends, is a key ingredient contributing to the stickiness of the experience. That leads to the following social computing design principle: users own the experience. Give them building blocks, not finished experiences.

Of course, many of these general purpose social services give users control over their UI -- over presentation. Interestingly, Facebook doesn't do as much of that (wall, superwall, html widget, and some other examples, aside). Clearly not like MySpace (or Piczo, which I think has a great UI for simple customization). With Facebook, identity is defined through a different balance of expression and affiliation.

Imagination exercise: consider the tier-three design model I proposed earlier (as an essential reframing -- broadening -- of the social computing phenomenon). Next, superimpose clouds of shared social apps on top of and relating the connected people icons -- indistinct edges and all. You might start by imagining one app at a time. Now maybe you're seeing what I'm seeing. Don't let that worry you, it's not permanent. You'll feel fine in the morning.

What I find curious is that the Facebook experience designers (if they even have roles of that sort) haven't attempted to reinforce the shared spaces visually. Wouldn't it be interesting to experiment with ways of adding, to the individual's UI (opt in, of course, and with tools to customize), attributes that depict the affiliations in play?

Integration first? Maybe -- but have you done your homework?

bobreb — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 19:16:02 GMT

Recently I found myself wondering about a comment from Sean discussing the order in which an organization should implement web 2.0 features.

Sean's answer was this:

"So, what’s the answer? Simple (simple to say, not do). The answer is none of the above. The most important feature to implement in your web 2.0 strategy is integration with existing systems and processes."

Sean is likely assuming you've done your homework. What I mean is that the what feature question is not the first one to ask.

Unless we're only discussing technical architecture, not user experience, the first thing you have to know is the readiness of your audience. The new "social" requires new behaviors. New behaviors are very costly to introduce. Has your audience already developed these habits of thought and action in any area directly related or not? Can you springboard from that? If not, do you understand what relative advantage participation provides and what personal cost your users will incur obtaining it? If the cost justifies the personal investment, it's time to demonstrate and educate.

If it's not entirely clear what features you should do first -- and the competitive situation could easily dictate a starting set of tactics -- I say think big, but start small. Experiment. If your customers must learn new behaviors, consider embedding the new into the old such that the old still works, but the new is clearly visible. Adding tags to existing support forums might be one example -- though not the least expensive.

If you can go where the audience already is, and you can do it credibly, that could be best. Experimenting with someone else's infrastructure has its good points. (As an aside, I believe there are ways of using existing third party investments without "going there" yourself, but that's beyond the scope of this post.)

In any event, wrap a simple program around the technology: incent the behavior; make the results observable; reward the participation; and, watch (measure) and learn.

Significant infrastructure investments are risky and therefore, appropriately, require evidence. Proof through analogy only goes so far. First hand experience with your customers is the best evidence.

Social software: people first, activity second? I wonder...

bobreb — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 18:08:26 GMT

(This was accidentally published in "note-to-self" form. Excuse me. It must have seemed more than a little incoherent.)

Anyway,

In a recent paper, The Significance of Social Software, Dana Boyd makes the following point:

"While early social technologies were about finding people with similar interests, the latest round
is far more about connecting to people and watching shared interests emerge
through that."

I do get this. I've been having a great experience with Facebook recently. They are focused on connecting to such an extent I can only image it must be written on the walls above the water coolers, in the header and footer of every document and email, and inserted subliminally in the background office hum, down in their Palo Alto offices. They certainly appear successful. It must be good advice.

How good? Dana also points out the following:

"...those who joined Friendster and assumed that everyone was like them did so
because of the way the site was designed – the structure is inherently egocentric.
This is also where things get tricky because egocentric communities cannot support
that many different contexts. And thus, what you see, is people using multiple sites
to keep contexts separate."

Clearly, defining activities shape the environment in which they are pursued. Though there are "social networking" sites that are successful and focus on the activity, or context, first -- librarything, linkedin, and a lot of dating sites, come immediately to mind. Somehow I don't think LinkedIn would work as well if it looked like a WOW fan site. I think that's the point she's making with context -- that, and the interaction styles individuals pursue within a given context. I, for instance, did not choose to make my LOTRO main character name prominent in my LinkedIn profile.

I wonder where the balance lies. Along those lines, Dana also makes this point:

"The problem is that monetization is hanging on the tip of everyone's tongues again.
To make money, sites have to grow. To grow, they have to expand beyond
comfortable context borders."

It's equally hard for me to imagine a large number of profitable "people-connect-first-and-we'll-see-what-context-turns-up" sites, as it is for me to imagine properties for every possible niche context. I believe that's the balance social experience builders have to address, and keep addressing. The creative in me wants to think you can have your cake and eat it too. I wonder if we could construct an experience that flexibly manages multiple contexts? The optimist thinks the answer might be yes.

I think Dana is asking the more general question here:

"Are there ways to rethink the scaling process to make social software more economically viable without killing the communities in the process?"

Claimspace -- The power of simple, reusable, ideas.

bobreb — Wed, 16 May 2007 06:38:00 GMT

Bear in mind, Claimspace has yet to ship in any form. It's sooo close to shipment (if only partial shipment), it's painful for those of us that have been waiting. Also, be aware that most of the capabilities I discuss below will not be apparent in the first release. This post is about potential, appropriate platform design, and the power of simple, flexible, reusable, components. I'm making a claim about the power of ideas.

Korby has done a good job of describing the value of Claimspace from the individual contributor's perspective, and from the community member perspective generally. And, indeed, it was originally conceived to meet those needs as the phrase "personal recognition elements", that he graciously recalls, suggests. You make a claim, and people can vote on the accuracy of the claim, comment upon it, view where else the claim has been applied (Microsoft properties and elsewhere), and best of all get an RSS feed for the claim.

In that regard this emphasis is key: because the user can create/define the claim, Claimspace constitutes a long tail recognition system. It provides recognition possibilities for the greatest breadth of customers, not only the important, but tiny, percentage that receive the traditional "five-star" type accolades. Those systems have obvious and ongoing value. But every IT professional and developer -- every single one -- has something to offer, is good at something, and has the right to seek recognition for it. This is fundamental.

Still, delivering recognition down the long tail (and thereby doing a lot to solve the "who can I trust issue") is only half the story -- perhaps less than half. Claimspace is also a generalized polling mechanism. The ramifications of that are not fully recognized and certainly not appreciated.

For instance, let's say I host a community and I'm interested in asking my community members how they feel about a proposed new feature. I create a claim about the feature, expose it, and watch the votes add up. I could even make ten claims regarding competing features, and see how the votes compare. I could do this on my blog, or in a forum. I could reuse the same claim in both instances and totals are calculated across both appropriately. I could ask 30 of my best friends to apply the same claim and because we support authenticated voting, we can avoid duplication and properly total across each instance.

Claims can be created and applied by anyone, including the people hosting the community. They could be built right into the forums application, for instance, to support assertions or claims such as "was this post helpful", or "this post answers the question asked". A library team could, for instance, create several standard claims (a claim/assertion taxonomy) that relate to the quality or usefulness of the posted library content.

We're only scratching the surface here. Because claims can be applied on non-Microsoft properties, the wealth of information regarding likes, dislikes, opinions, whatever, is almost incalculable.

A simple REST API gives everyone (and I mean everyone -- the mashup possibilities are just staggering -- caveat, keep the crawl, walk, run idea in mind) the ability use the data in a manner best suited to their needs: community (MVP or other influencer) reward programs, product design input, product feature voting, bug prioritization, and on and on and on, all without a ton of custom code. Any Digg-like application would love this kind of data. Can you imagine -- hottest claims, hottest people making claims, most used claims, newest claims, by product, by solution area, by geographical region, and the list goes on.

How many structured discussions can we imagine we'd like to have with each other?

Am I again stating the extreme case to make a point? Yes, guilty as charged. And worse yet, I have taken the liberty to discuss Claimspace capabilities that will not be available out of the gate. If this bothers you, well, I'm sorry. It's just as important to understand what can be done in the nearest term, as what will be available shortly thereafter. Our children are valuable not just because of their skill at kickball today, but also because of what they may become -- especially when growing up takes only few short focused development sprints of the Agile kind.

*Imagine my claim here: Claimspace has a lot of potential. Agree, Disagree, View Stats, Comment, RSS

Social Networking Core Tenets -- KPIs

bobreb — Mon, 14 May 2007 22:46:00 GMT

My new organization uses these terms. We didn't. We used some others, but the end game is the same. Just to be clear, tenets call out what we value (though not necessarily why), and the KPI's (key performance indicators) are intended to help us measure our effectiveness against those things we've said are valuable.

And because I don't see any meaningful distinction between social networking and community -- it's all a question of types of associations -- we might also say this is a contribution to the marketplace of ideas on the subject of a core community tenet and it's associated KPIs.

To be clear, I'm not covering community site statistics of the following sorts:

Number of unique visitors
New member registrations
Page views
Retention/Attrition
Member loyalty
Member satisfaction
Most active members
Message posts
and so on

Those are clearly important -- most clearly important for judging the health of any specific community site. At Microsoft we have many, many, community sites (thousands). Our partners have many community sites. The health of our community overall can't be found in the impossible task of rolling up the above sorts of stats across the sites we're able to identify. And to date, our polling mechanisms haven't been wired to answer those questions -- if indeed they could.

But we still have to do so. Here's what I propose.

Core tenet: associations

Call it relationship if you like. The point is, community is about connecting people to people. It may be that the purpose of the connection is to avail one member of the content produced by another, but if it doesn't involve people operating together it may be a wonderful thing otherwise, but it's not community.

KPIs:

Number of connections per member
Degree of connectedness between between member connections
Types of associations by groups and individual
Message propagation rate across the networks.

I might suggest one or two others, but that will do for now.

There are a couple of things worth pointing out. Most organizations won't have any ability to track this information at all (let me introduce you to yet another reason why we designed our services the way we did). Tagspace, the upcoming Claimspace, and finally the "subscription" services (ohhh, wait to you see this) planned for the first half of fy08, especially considering their integration into our discussion services, round out our story and make it possible to get one thru three. We're still puzzling over four -- but we know we want the information. I trust the business justification is immediate and obvious.

The other thing to consider is that while these aren't exactly site based, they do assume the use of one or more of our services -- and will therefore be limited in that regard. Still, the services it assumes members use touch many sites and indeed many people that may not be members. For those reasons the information these indicators provide offer another view on the health of our community. One that is different from, but complimentary to, and broader than, conventional community site-health indices.

Diffusion Rate Fly-by -- Customer adoption of social networking

bobreb — Mon, 07 May 2007 04:36:00 GMT

The factors influencing the rate at which any given innovation spreads throughout a population are well known. Applying those factors remains a bit of an art, but the exercise is always instructive. That's especially so when we start thinking about marketing investments.

The single best source of information on this subject, imho, remains Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations. Although I've been told recently that Rogers has been challenged in some circles. I'd love to know more about the proposed alternatives.

Diffusion of Innovations, 5th Edition
by Everett M. Rogers, Everett Rogers

Read more about this title...

Overall we consider these things:

The attributes of the innovation
The nature of the culture
The nature of the decision
Change agent impact

Let's look (very) briefly at each of these with regard to how they apply to Microsoft customer adoption of online social networking services.

The attributes of the innovation are relative advantage, observability, trialability, complexity, and compatibility.

Relative advantage: this should be a big plus for us. Adopters will have distinct advantages in terms of domain knowledge generally, and it's currency specifically. Over time this expresses itself as fewer surprises, less downtown, greater productivity.
Observability: This one is harder. You have to be in close proximity and observe an adopter over a period of time to observe greater productivity due to improved knowledge acquisition. And the activity that leads to the improvements isn't highly observable itself. Therefore, we're going to have to increase observability. Contests, for instance, wherein the most connected people are provided observable rewards, come immediately to mind.
Trialability: I don't know if this is an immediate plus or not. Everything we do is immediately trialable, but for compatibility reasons the success of the trial is questionable. Until we've had a chance to deliver the "social network placement" services -- aka subscription services -- ease of trial could be a problem with some people quitting when benefits aren't immediately (first week or two) apparent. Greater knowledge takes time to accumulate. Finding the right feeds takes time to do. As we simplify entry, this will be a big plus, but until then it may well cut the other way. Perhaps this suggests improved tutorial/getting started material?
Complexity: Another problem for us here. While not exactly complex, it is different. We've found that even understanding weak-tie networks as community is something the uninitiated have a very hard time understanding. Once in, however, it all seems so natural. It's the initial bump however that's tough.
Compatibility: Jeez, another problem. To most people using a feed reader is just adding more information to the already too long list of things to read. Microsoft's technology professional customers are mostly in the 35+ category -- me too, btw. That means long established work habits and corresponding habits of thought. Social systems are easily picked up by the under 30 crowd. The trick then, as we've always imagined, will be to integrate the new services into the traditional applications in a way that makes them easy to consume.

The nature of the culture here might just help. Information workers generally, and technology professionals specifically, remain effective as long as they have access to the right information at the right time. Therefore, they have an enormous amount to gain picking up the new tools. Because technology changes as often as it does, "new" is not as horrifying as it might be to some information workers. The pace of technology change may make it conceptually easier to jump into the new tools for the technology professional.

The nature of the decision is interesting in this case. No government is going to mandate participation. And not everyone has to play for the game to be productive. Further, we're already past the need for a bootstrap solution. There are already enough players to get things going for anyone that wants in. I say this is a net neutral -- maybe a positive.

Change agent impact is a wild card cause we're the change agent at the moment. We don't currently have budget, and we're still figuring out how the new organizational reality we face is going to effect us -- could go either way in the short term, though I don't think it can be anything but positive in the longer run. But do we need marketing budget? Part of me likes to spend money. And I do think spending money could accelerate adoption -- it could certainly raise awareness. On the other hand, no money forces us to be creative. We like that part of the job the most. Another part of me thinks there might be another change agent in the works...

That's just a very quick look. I can imagine expanding any of the above considerably. But it's a start.

Ever used this model? Got a better one?

Crossposted, as always, on theworkingnetwork.

Tags: innovation socialsoftware community

Amazon and social software

bobreb — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 02:08:03 GMT

Josh has an excellent post reviewing Amazon's investments in social software. (Thanks also to Brian for all the analysis). I agree they're good, and we've taken a number of clues from them including a hard-core focus on purpose-driven social software design. And clearly they're a reasonable general model, but I wouldn't take it much beyond that.

Amazon's social solutions are designed to help people sift through countless purchasable goods, and few of us have that problem. Some of the techniques they employ can be re-purposed to solve other problems, recommendations fall into this category, and that's fine as far as it goes. We're clearly into it. But the point is, don't just copy Amazon -- design your social systems for your users. For example, to what extent is "connection", or one-way, two-way, 1:many communication important, and in what fidelity. Ask yourself what goals your users have and what key activities will they pursue. In social systems like those we build for Microsoft, affiliations are key -- think MVP program. And there are lots of other examples -- access to the best information flows also comes to mind, as does reducing customer and Microsoft pain associated with support.

Also, Amazon's social solutions consist almost entirely of no-tie associations. That may be fine for them -- though I suspect they'd prefer it otherwise. (In fairness, some of the benefits of weak-tie associations are had in the form of the "other people bought this" feature.)

Finally, for many of us engaged full time in social software design, we assume our systems will form a daily experience, ideally many times daily, for most of our users. Personally, I check in with my professional social network many times a week -- I may skip days, but I'm more often in the many times a day camp. It's my morning paper, my during lunch reading material, and sometimes my bedtime reading. That's the way it is for most successful social solutions: WOW, Second Life, Myspace, del.icio.us, Facebook, or by far (IMHO) the most useful social network -- the one in your RSS reader.

Now I'm a real fan of Amazon, but if I'm there more than a few times a week it's a lot. I don't have any research one way or another, so I don't know if that's a lot or a little. My quick check (asked the folks in the adjoining offices) suggests my number of visits is on the high end. And the vast majority of my trips ignore the social features they have to offer because my social network sources the books that interest me. I visit Amazon after the fact and typically only to purchase.

So Amazon would get my vote for social software for the online low margin breadth retail marketplace. If you're interested in books, my vote for best social solution on the net is http://librarything.com. Be warned though, it's all about books. If they'd integrate their tagging solution with their forums, they'd be even better. BTW, I've heard Amazon has about five percent of the tags that Librarything boasts -- these guys know how to make tagging work. Hint: they know it ain't about the tags...

Information Design for the New Web

bobreb — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 02:12:55 GMT

Great post by Infotangle.

"Information design for the Web has changed.
People are changing the way that they consume online information, as well as their expectations about its delivery. The social nature of the Web brings with it an expectation of interaction with information and modern Web design is reflecting that. There are now alternate forms of navigation including the ability to browse by user, tag clouds, tabbed navigation etc."

One reason Microsoft cares about the new community services

bobreb — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 03:05:11 GMT

Here's an article I wrote explaining a few of the reasons customers should care about the new community services we've built.

Microsoft should care, and does, for a variety of reasons. Most of them having to do with customers being happier, better connected, and more productive. But there are other reasons as well and below we discuss one of them -- one that is not generally considered.

Outrageous claim: if Microsoft customers were connected in rich social networks our support costs would drop dramatically.

Here's why:

Social networks are also trusted communications channels -- cheap, effective, and fast communications networks
When customers are connected in an online social network (actually online or offline, but we're focusing here on the online experience) and one customer has a problem, they all know about it when it happens, and they all know about it when it gets fixed.
A customer only needs to call support, or visit a support forum, if their social network has failed.
Therefore, support calls drop dramatically through social network connection

Consider the following illustration:

This bell curve represents a typical product support incident call pattern. Here's the scenario. At point "B" a problem is discovered in a newly released product and the first customer support call is registered. As the product is adopted, the problem effects a growing number of customers and the call volumes increase. At point "C" a fix is found. Nevertheless, the call volume continues up for some time before leveling off and eventually trailing off. That is the case today.

The next illustration compares call volumes when social networks are fully realized (a theoretical best case):

In this case, shortly after point "B" the potentially effected social network is notified of the problem. Word spreads, but not necessarily fast enough to immediately curtail the increase in call volume. However, as word spreads (and communications across on-line weak-tie networks can be very fast) everyone -- ideally -- in the potentially effected community knows about the problem. Call volumes drop off because there is no point to calling. When the solution is found, the network will effectively spread word of the solution. The area within the curve and between the dashed lines represents the cost of social network failure in terms of call volume.

Overstated? Clearly. The extreme case was illustrated to make the point. How extreme is it? Hmm. No good way to know. Consider this, satisfaction rates among opensource users seems quite high, and social networks are a principle means by which information is shared across that community.

The tools of flow and the value of community

bobreb — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 02:48:14 GMT

This article describes the value of the next generation of Microsoft community investments to the customer. Actually it does so three times: short, medium, and large.

Short and sweet answer:

In the experience of most people, the internet makes available too much information. The new community services make it possible for you to filter out the noise and pay attention to only the information that matters most to you.

How is this miracle performed? It's the latest spin on the oldest trick in the book: we do it together. Simply put, you identify peers and experts you trust and allow them to filter the information vastness for you. You use an RSS reader to keep tabs on what internet resources they find most helpful. Identify the right peers and experts, and what they find most helpful will be very close to what you need. As your skill with the services improves, the greater the match to your information needs.

This link describes how to get started.

Not enough? Here's the medium version:

The medium and longer versions borrow just a bit from the field of system dynamics (stocks and flows). To be honest, I got this idea from a visiting consultant who told me about a post he recalled reading on the subject. I couldn't find the original reference, so below is my best effort to recreate what I imagine might have been the jist of it. And, of course, I've taken the liberty to relate it to my own projects.

The Microsoft communities team is evolving its information repositories from stocks, or collections of information for your reference when the need arises, to flows, or dynamic information systems delivering information as you need it. To be more accurate, our stocks will remain stocks, but they will become better and more accessible flows for an ever larger group of customers. This is important and leads to what may be a shocking statement.

If you ever have to search for the answer to a question about our products the chances are good that that we've already failed you. Ideally, you should never have to search for an answer.

Consider this: around a million people visit our forums every month, but fewer than 10 thousand new questions are posted -- some say much fewer, some say a bit more, in any event it's hard to measure (some questions are posted multiple times in different places by the same person, and the same question is asked by many people using different words). One of the major reasons why this should be so is that the questions most people are pursuing have already been answered. Now this is important -- really important -- ask yourself why it is that 990,000 people a month have to wait until they have the problem before they seek the answer if someone just like them, using the same exact product in a similar environment, has already faced and solved that problem? The answer is they're not connected; they are not communicating; their social networks have failed them. And by social networks I don't mean being chums and talking shop over beers. It's sooo much easier than that.

Technically, what I'm referring to are online weak-tie social social networks. But knowing that is not really necessary. The fact is that such networks are relatively easy to plug into, require little of you, solve information overload, and might even let you go home early on Fridays.

Let's not overstate the case. You will still encounter problems, but if you plug in to the new community solutions, over time your problems will be fewer -- and harder. Harder, because you'll know the answer to all the easy ones. You'll be operating at a higher level. You'll be longer and longer in flow, and spend less and less time in frustrating search. (And let's be honest, there is no happy way to be interrupted, only various ways of making it suck less. And of course, we are also doing what we can to make searching for answers suck less in those cases when your network does fail.)

We're trying to build networks by delivering social bookmarking and site tagging service, and later a claims service. Both represent a source of critical new flows in and of themselves. Perhaps more importantly, we integrate the new services deeply into the new forums and blogging platform. Then, through the magic of RSS the outcome is what we humbly believe will be the most fertile field of information flows on the planet. And of course the trick is in finding and plugging into the right flows. Find the right flows and the magic happens. Find the right flows, and information overload becomes information abundance.

If this is all you need, go here to discover how to get started.

If you want to know more, read on into the longer version...

Definitions:

Stock: In this case it's any collection of information. Examples include online forums, online libraries, knowledgebase articles, even wiki entries. Today most people access stocks when looking for the answers to questions. For the majority of internet users, the net is one big stock -- one big reference source you access when you need a quick answer. And, as far as it goes, that's clearly accurate.

And stocks are great when knowledge fails. But their limitations become clear if you consider the extreme case. What if you didn't "know" anything, except how to search? What if you had to search for the subject of every sentence. Every job would take a very long time. Put another way, knowing is like typing fluidly -- without thinking. Searching is like hunting and pecking on the keyboard. Which do you prefer?

Flow: I use this word in two different ways (sorry, both are very helpful). In the first case a flow generally refers to a dynamic process that effects the stock as in in-flows and out-flows. The question and answer process (or flow) contributes to the forum stock. The publication process (or flow) contributes to the document library stock. The local user group flow contributes to the individuals personal stock (the information he carries around in his head or has immediate access to), as does the technical publication to which he or she may subscribe. The latter two examples represent traditional information flows.

Another example of a traditional information flow is the information exchange between you and your coworkers (a strong-tie relationship that offers a different value proposition than the weak-tie relationships we're primarily concerned with here -- but that's probably more information than you're looking for on that subject). In many organizations email and the associated distribution lists are a widely adopted, even primary, information flow. Microsoft is one such organization.

Essentially, people plug into flows to maximize the information they have immediately available to them. You associate yourself with the information flows that deliver to you the most useful information and the least noise.

Here is the ideal condition:

You are happy. You are in the other kind of flow(a mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.)

But it doesn't always stay that way...

You encounter a question to which you do not know the answer. Now, if you are normal, you are very unhappy. So faced with an unknown, you either give up, or you visit an information stock looking for an answer. For most technology professionals, giving up isn't an option. So it's off to Google -- oops, I mean Live.com -- to search for an answer.

But if you've been paying attention so far, you already know that most of your questions have already been answered and that if you'd of been plugged into the right flow, you wouldn't have had to search in the first place -- you'd probably be on your way to your kid's little league game. Where are those flows? Enter the new Microsoft community services. In time they will deliver an almost unlimited number of flows for you to choose from.

(We can also offer some simple instructions to get you started. Later, in the upcoming year, we're going to automate this whole process.)

Here's how we've done it. We built some tagging services and a social bookmarking service on top of them (here's another link on social bookmarking). If the term social bookmarking is new to you it is worth you time to check it out. Obtaining feeds that refer to the tagging activities of the peers and experts you've found will be one of your principle information flows.

We've also built a claims service that will release in May of 2007. Claims will also be useful sources of information flows. What's most interesting about them is that the feeds they deliver link you to different information stocks.

Both of these new services have been thoroughly integrated into our new blogging and forum products, and rich support for RSS is available throughout. So here's the idea, let's say you have a blocking problem. You head to the forums and find an answer. Turns out it's a good answer. The person that provided it has some real expertise and is a skilled communicator. So instead of just taking your answer and going back to work, you obtain an RSS feed for that person. Next time they contribute something of value, you'll be notified. Tagging and claims make the experience better by allowing you to further filter based upon a stricter and stricter definition of the what you're looking for.

Simple: you went to the stock, found an answer, and left with a new and valuable flow. We've embedded the new ideas and capabilities into the more familiar services. Thinking of deploying Vista this summer? Wouldn't it be a reasonable idea to plug into the key flows of information around that subject? How would you do that? Once we've migrated to the new forums, simply obtain an RSS feed for the contributions of experts you can find, or simpler yet, obtain an RSS feed for the tags Vista+deployment.

Today, these services are brand new. We haven't migrated the old forums to the new forum infrastructure yet, so the stock available in new forums isn't as rich as it will be later this year. In the meantime, the best thing you can do, is explore. There are lots of excellent flows out there. Yes, the interent is a fast reference source, a vast stock of information. But it's also a social space, and by using the new community services you'll be learning to traverse the new social spaces and to manage information access in that fashion. Take the time, develop the skill, and you'll be happier, better connected, and better informed for it.

Social Networks are not all created equal.

bobreb — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 03:51:00 GMT

From Wikipedia: A social network is a social structure made of nodes which are generally individuals or organizations. It indicates the ways in which they are connected through various social familiarities ranging from casual acquaintance to close familial bonds.

Social networks, then, cover a range of associations between members in some relationship to one another. Communities, then, are social networks. And like communities, social networks come in many forms. The different forms have different value propositions for the members.

Taking this a little farther, MySpace is often considered a social network. Okay, fine. But MySpace equals social networking to the same extent that that a cruise ship equals transportation. Yes it's true that a cruise ship is transportation for people with some very specific transportation needs. In the same sense MySpace is a social network for people with some very specific needs.

And the needs of that very specific audience happen to revolve around private spaces and identity production.

Now, below is a screenshot of another social network. This social network has no single "site" at its social center, though there may indeed be several management tools to help create and maintain it . People in this type of association typically have different needs than those in play on MySpace. (They better, because this social network isn't likely to meet their needs otherwise.)

This social network (one of mine, actually, and currently managed in an online reader called Feedraider that has some great features) is optimized for professionals seeking to maintain their knowledge and discover new information as it becomes available globally and in near real time in the area of web2.0 community technologies, tools, and techniques. Yes, it's nothing but a collection of RSS feeds. But a collection of RSS feeds -- the right collection of RSS feeds -- can change your life.

It's probably obvious, but the subject of the Feedraider social network portrayed above is only one of a nearly limitless number of possible subject areas. Others might include things like movies or books, sports fitness, hiking, Windows Vista deployment, ASP.Net development, Microsoft Small Business Server, or -- you get the point.

If you're reading this, you probably already have one or more of these types of social networks. Good for you. In fact, very good for you. You've already tapped into the latest generation "community" solution that is either already, or soon will, make you far more productive (for so many reasons) than any single resource in the past -- at least any that I've known about. It's a fabric that can and will underlie every other online community type.

Why this should be so, will be the subject of a later post. In that post I'll detail why this type of social network makes every participant more efficient and it can, for instance, answer most of your questions before you even know to ask them. I know, if you haven't experienced this first hand it sounds crazy. It's not. It's common sense. It's an everyday experience. It's unavoidable if you just plug in. In fact in its essentials, it's nothing new. It's little more than an online version of old old game -- it's another one of those disruptive things that have emerged recently on the web.

And it's one type of community my team is set to support, to accelerate, to simplify, and to introduce to a broader audience, when we release a new set of beta services in April.

Weak-tie networks rock.

Just a little more on -- What is Community

bobreb — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 22:14:00 GMT

I can't help myself. I'm bent on doing my utmost to come to some agreement on the meaning of terms under discussion. It's become top-of-mind for me recently because my group has been part of a general reorganization and the slow process of understanding between the new housemates has only just begun.

I took a stab at defining community a couple of years ago. The diagram that resulted is below. (And yes I admit I snagged ideas from a lot of places to put it together).

I suppose many of the terms used in the diagram above deserve some clarification, but for now I'm going to risk misunderstanding for the sake of brevity. I liked it, and continue to find it useful because it speaks to a range of associations, makes clear the overlap that exists between them, and points out that many community "types" can exist based upon a single fabric (forums, blogs). There are also several weaknesses. For instance, it does not make clear that strong-tie associations of the user group kind often employ many tools. That is, they may visit the same forum or forums, read each others blogs, or participate on the same DLs. There's a possible apples and oranges problem with the examples -- though I think it's a minor one. And, it's not remotely complete in terms of the channels available to "community" -- email isn't listed at all (sell that to the burning-man communities).

Finally, my diagram doesn't call out the fact that both no-tie and strong-tie associations tend to be predominantly "site centric", while weak-tie associations are more likely to be "net-centric". It doesn't in part because I'm not sure I buy it just yet, though I'm aware of a lot of anecdotal evidence that supports that contention.

All pro's and cons aside, there are other ways of looking at the subject. It's just one way to get to some common ground.

Below is another. It's from Rawn Shah (a Community Program Manager at IBM's Developerworks).

What I like about this is that it starts from "General Population" and ends with "Organization". That's a perspective my version misses altogether and that I find interesting. Also, by avoiding the word "intimacy" and instead describing the more concrete forms increasing intimacy delivers or enables (levels of involvement, complexity, focus, shared identity) it is perhaps easier to understand.

The downside is that what he calls audience and "social network" is what lots of people in my world call community. Telling them they're not community managers, but are instead audience managers, or social network managers, is asking for trouble.

In both cases, however, the range of possibilities is clear. And that is the central message. People are almost always in more than one type of association based upon needs and disposition. I, for instance, have very few online (or offline) strong tie relationships. I am, however, very much into weak-tie associations for purely utilitarian reasons. Even where I do engage in strong-tie associations, in those same areas I fully employ every weak-tie association I can find.

One type of association is not better than another -- though there may be reasons to strive for one over another from a corporate perspective in that there appears to be a correlation between strong-tie associations and customer satisfaction. (Sadly, the research I have available does not make these critical distinctions and so have less value than they otherwise might.) And apart from simple discovery, it's not clear that one type necessarily leads to another. Though we shouldn't discount the discovery/awareness angle. Seen this report?

Once we agree on a rational definition of community -- one that in the very least draws distinctions between types -- we can talk.

Tags: community social network socialsoftware microsoft

Personal anecdotal evidence

bobreb — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 22:36:00 GMT

Of what? Of the notion that weak tie community of the online sort does constitute enough connection between people to activate the social aspects of your brain. If you're interested in more detail about the "social" aspects of the brain,Social Intelligence is a good introduction.

Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships
by Daniel Goleman

Read more about this title...

My anecdote is simple. I take some pride in the fact that I think I have a reasonably effective work/life balance. I'm sure approaches vary, but mine works for me. For the last several weeks, however, I've been out of balance. Work made more demands than a balanced schedule would allow. No big deal really. It happens.

But when it happens, something has to give. What gave, in this case, was the time I'd ordinarily spend in my RSS reader keeping up with the contributors there and the world that continuously unfolds therein. And I missed it.

I missed it very much. Tuesday night I plugged back in, for just an hour. I couldn't believe what I'd missed. Perhaps worse, the efforts I was expending at work would have been both higher quality and perhaps even streamlined, had I not unplugged -- lesson learned. (That and the difference between a presentation and briefing -- but that's another story.)

Stranger for me was this feeling that I missed the people. This is odd because I don't know these people in any ordinary sense, and I'm confident they don't know me in any sense at all -- with just a few exceptions.

Hmmm. I suppose we can't dismiss the possibility that I'm suffering some sort of breakdown.

In any event, I haven't checked in on anything recently contributed by Dana Boyd, but she might know if anyone has ever applied any scientific rigor to understanding the degree to which online "social" activity engages your brain physiology and how/if it compares to it's in-the-flesh counterpart. There must be something.

Corporate community strategy: communications as the safest choice.

bobreb — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 04:08:00 GMT

Why is investment in online community communications -- specifically, enabling social networking and social computing -- unlike most innovative efforts you'll ever undertake? Two reasons: the strategy is rock solid, and the community will do all the real innovating. How can the strategy be considered so solid, and what would ever entice the community to do all the innovating? The same thing answers both questions: genes.

(http://members.cox.net/darkened-past/evolution.html)

It is that simple. Birds flock, fish school, people associate with one another, and some of those associations we call community. We are a social species. We are a "we". Community, broadly, is among the adaptive responses our species -- our evolutionary lineage in fact -- has developed to cope with the requirements of survival in the complex adaptive landscapes we have inhabited, and that clearly characterize our lives today.

What's changed now is only the revolution in community that has emerged from the co-evolutionary development of several internet technologies relating to personal publishing, web20-style development, and syndication.

At least the communications world.

This makes the strategy unassailable. People are hardwired to associate and to use those associations to achieve their own goals. Give people the opportunity to interact and they will. Increase the communications capacity of your audience and they will -- in time -- make the best possible use of it. Even if you can't foresee what they'll use it for. (Alexander Graham Bell, for instance, felt the telephone would be most useful as a means of broadcasting symphonies and news. He did not anticipate it's popularity as a means of 1:1 interaction.)

Sadly, that doesn't mean that the tactics are foolproof. There's a lot of room for error in exactly how we deliver these new communications tools to our customers. Plainly, this calls for an agile methodology. We have to assume some missteps and focus on short turnaround iterative development. What's the right path?

To decide what to build we elected to stick with the basics:

Know your customers as individuals
On the basis of that knowledge help to connect them to experts and peers (emphasis on peers)
Given them venues in which to interact
Reward them for participation.

We have projects aligned with each of those four pillars.

Along with those basics, we've adopted the following user experience design principles:

Every customer visit should result in a community connection
Let customers feel the presence of others
Customers are in control of their self expression and their consumption
Customers should have access to the tracks they leave
Build for the long tail
Wed participation architecture with personal utility and a focus on a specific activity
Expose an API

We believe we can deliver on each of those design principles through tight integration between the components. (Will we get it right the first time? Probably not. But we're in it for the long haul.)

As far as I know, we didn't actually create any of those principles -- they're a product of the community of people interested in social software. It's our community; one which we appreciate; and one in which we make every effort to contribute to.