Digital(Analog)

Irene Greif - IBM Fellow and Director, Collaborative User Experience.

The Dogear product announced as part of Lotus Connections was originally a research project in her team. From the beginning they focused on providing REST api access to the service, mash-ups started - most notably was the inclusion of results of a search of bookmarks into the IBM intranet search results.

Persistent chat with “Social Lens” - A social lens provides a visualization of the users in a collaboration. This was originally shown in “Loops”/”Babble”. This is present in a future offering from the Sametime team called Rendezvous.

Visualization Collaboration - Some years ago Irene hired Martin Wattenberg to bring some rigor to the research on visualization. His more famous pieces are the Map of the Market and the Baby Name Wizard.

Many Eyes - Matt McKeon does a demo of Many Eyes. It is a web based tool for showing interactive visualizations with browsing function, along with a feature for points comments on certain views of the data. When you post the comment it captures the state of the visualization at the point of the comment and allows people to link to it.

The Many Eyes tool provides an end-to-end process for visualizing data. You can upload the dataset, choose a chart type to display and customize the visualization to display as desired. The goal is to allow for data to be shared in many forms. There is a function for generating an embedded thumbnail of the visualization like you can embed a YouTube video. There is also a structured feed for all of the data that is generated.

The chart types available include bar, pis, stack, treemap, geographical maps.

Matt shows a sample of a treemap that displays a stock set of data for NBA salary. “Starting today you can join us in building an eye-opening community“. Irene mentions implications beyond the business world to general community information sharing for things like shaping public policy.

In her observations about game-like environments Irene mentions that game like behavior has been observed in ‘non-game’ environments, like the baby name wizard. Some of the things that make games what they are is the experience of a compelling UI, the stickiness of a goal based activity, the sense of belonging to a community.

3D environments can help people map abstractions into something they understand and provide appropriate affordances. However 3D environments can be very difficult to navigate.

Socialogists have ideas on how to improve innovation:

• Strong Ties - people we are closest too
• Weak Ties - people in our social network we might not know personally, but can reach out to to connect us to other communities
• New information is more likely to come from weak ties.

Possibilities exist in technologies like virtual worlds to do team building that might only be done otherwise in person.

While the laptop battery lasts…

Jeff Schick - VP Social Computing - Lotus Connections is enterprise ready social software.

Here are select paraphrased quotes from Jeff’s talk:

Innovation can come from anywhere in the org chart, and flow in any direction - from the bottom, from the top, or even from outside…

Imagine how much Wisdom is resident in the people in your company who are about to retire.

Social software has emerged as a an important enabler of innovation.

There are five components in Lotus Connections:

• Actvities - tool for ad-hoc collaboration
• Blogs - individual and community blogs
• Communities - tool for inte
• Dogear - social bookmarking tool
• Profiles - rich, web based enterprise directory

Ajamu Wesley - Senior Technical Staff Member in Social Software.

“Profiles are the foundation of discovery as they tell people who we are, what we do, and what we’ve done.”
“Communities bring people with shared interests together.” Communities can have blogs and bookmarks, shared missions and content.

“Dogear [social bookmarking tool] unlocks buried information allowing people to discover resources through others’ experiences”

DEMO - Profiles, Dogear, Communties

Dogear - Enterpirse bookmarking with features much like del.icio.us. Bookmarklets and a Firefox plug-in for user’s convenience. Bookmarks can be associated with related communities and allow for a pivot search against these communities. They can also be pivot points for people’s records in the Profiles directory.

Ronnie Maffa - Director, Community-Centric Collaboration.

“Blogs provide a new direct connection between communities of people inside and outside of our business.”

“Activities help you organize your work, plan next steps, and collaborate easily with others to execute on your everyday deliverables”

DEMO - Blogs and Activities

Blogs: Customized version of Roller that is integrated into the rest of the services in Lotus Connections.

Activities: “Its about the work that you do”. Connected to the Profiles system to allow the user to share the content or ownership of the activity with other users. Activities is written with a REST based ATOM api that allows for integration into other platforms. An example is shown of the Activities integrated into Notes 8.

Opening entertainment… some band who’s name didn’t make it through to the broadcast on in the overflow room. They sang Pinball Wizard from The Who’s “Tommy”.

Mike Rhodin announces +30% revenue growth for 2006 coming, in part, from updates of Notes/Domino and the release of Sametime 7.5, the Sametime Gateway and Sametime mobile.

Mike announces Lotusphere in Second Life. The OGS will be available for replay in the 2L IBM auditorium starting tomorrow.

Guest speaker: Neil Armstrong. The famous astronaut tells the story of going up to the moon and setting up mirrors that would allow scientists to measure it’s distance from earth “so the astronauts could know how much mileage to put on their expense accounts.” The mirrors have been used since many times for various experiments.

Mike highlights Lotus’ commitment to improving the end user experience - “We’re going to allow people to work the way they want to work.”

Mike recounts a story of his daughter coming home from college and spending most of the time on Facebook. He talks about how the next generation will work this way and we must build the tools that they will use at work. He said that he heard of a recent interviewee saying “email? thats for my grandfather”.

Challenges that Lotus is taking on: Taming the inbox, sharing information, integration services, assembling applications, creating connections. “We’re ready to help you do things like you’ve never done them before”

Bruce Morse and Akiba Saeedi take the stage to talk about “unified communications and collaboration” - the new direction for Lotus’ real time collaboration strategy. To be released this year - updates to Sametime 7.5 point to point video chat, tabbed chat windows, Linux server and Mac client.

“Unified Communications and Collaboration” - the flexibility to connect IP telephony, video, voicemail, multipoint device presence.

DEMO - Sametime 7.5 New features:

• Video - point to point natively and multipoint with vendor support (Radvision in this case)
• Tabbed Chat
• Cisco integration - use softphone to make a call to a POTS phone; voicemail integration - display incoming voice mail and listen to them through the client.
• RIM integration - multiuser chat with option to ‘convert to call’. Back end system calls all of the chat participants.

Ken Bisconti on how Lotus is going to “help you tame your inbox.” Dropping the ‘Hannover’ code name and getting ready to ship Notes 8. Notes 8 is built on top of Eclipse for extensibility in a way that was not available before.

DEMO - Notes 8 Client

• Ghosted calendar views that allow you see what meetings have not yet been acted on.
• Calendar import - ics import example.
• Threaded mail views
• Integrated feed reading experience - sitting in the ’sidebar panel’
• “Composite Application” - a ‘mashup’ of existing Notes assets created using the Composite application editor. The CAE allows you to ‘wire’ components together graphically.
• Integrated ‘productivity editors’ (presentation, spreadsheet word processing) based on Open Document Format, able to open most current formats and save as PDF.
• Thumbnail viewer for all open tabs.

Ken segues to the topic of sharing information. Alistair Rennie comes on to introduce Lotus Quickr - “a shared replicable file system with rss and atom feeds.” Every Notes DWA licensee “on maintainence” will be entitled to the personal edition of Lotus Quickr for free. Quickr compontents (a partial list) - Team blogs, team wikis, team calendars, document storage… Quickr has connection points for vendors to add in function.

DEMO - Lotus Quickr

• Browser based display of content respository
• Windows desktop integration - shell extensions for Windows explorer to allow of check-in / check-out etc. There is also an office toolbar.
• Sametime 7.5 Mini-app for accessing content repository, with an integrated side window pane that displays documents that are being shared.
• Notes 8 integration, with options to point to the document repository instead of sending a file as an attachment to reduce on mail file size.

Larry Bowden - How customers “put it all in context”. In the last week there is a good chance we’ve interacted with WebSphere portal technology. Larry announced WebSphere portal express 6 - for small/medium business with a prebuilt intranet and extranet “out of the box”. Installation in “less time than it takes to watch your favorite sitcom”.

… Now I have to run to the ISV enablement Lab to get set up … check out LotusphereLive.com for more real time updates.

I love my cousin Ana, which is why I hate to say this, but her MySpace page is horrendous. Last I saw it there was a giant background image of pirate ship, the controls for sending her messages, adding as a friend etc. where unrecognizable, and there was more than one element on the page that deformed it and contributed to the more than 1 screen width’s worth of horizontal scroll… oy vey.

But it really doesn’t matter. At least not as far as the purpose of the site is concerned. Ana and her friends use the site just as the creators might have intended it - to share music tastes send messages and most importantly in this context - to express themselves. A view of Ana’s page on any single day shows a new song and a fresh page full of messages from her friends.

My page has a very standard layout and I’m lucky if I get a message every other month.

So clearly, for the intended audience, Ana’s two page wide, horizontal scrolling, pirate ship’d page soundly kicks the crap out of the online manifestation of my OCD.

So here is what I want to know… what is an enterprise web application admin console going to look like when Ana get her hands on it? (Not that she’ll go into software - she’s headed for something more than that I think… but you know what I mean). There is something coming out of MySpace, that although “eye-bleedingly bad” as Tom Coates mentioned, is very free and, in a way, unspoiled by the constraints of conventional design.

Don’t mistake me. If I see a giant pirate ship background in an admin console, or any other piece of software I come across, I’ll toss it instantly … but I am really interested to see where free form design like this will take us…

“These sliding alert windows must stop.”

That was the text of an instant message from an executive talking about some software I was writing, along with a few members of the WebAhead team at IBM. It was 2002 and we had released an internal project called IBM Community Tools (ICT) that combined instant messaging with Broadcast Messaging. The anonymous executive’s request was not without precedent from other users of the software - but they where not in the majority.

The Broadcast messaging tool used a Pub/Sub engine written by IBM Research that allowed for messages to be sent to a large number of users subscribed on a particular topic. These messages weren’t email, just bytes over the network. It was up to the receiving software to determine what to do with them. In the case of ICT we sent around XML messages that originated as requests from individual users for response from the community in the form of a poll, group chat or 1-on-1 chat. For online users subscribed to the topic (community) that the requester was using they were alerted with a sliding window that contained the content of the request. This window would slide into the user’s screen from the right, wait 10 seconds, and slide away.

This was based on a previously successful system, with a small cult following that alerted the users with an even more intrusive pop-up that did not go away until the user closed it. When we were building out the system for a lager audience we realized that that type of interface would not scale for the broader user population.

It’s important to mention here that by default all users were initially subscribed to the “everyone” community. This was the default community for questions that did not have a clear category. The software allowed for client side filtering so that instead of subscribing to messages for a large list of communities the users could list key terms that would indicate a message they were interested in. We fooled around with an adaptive filtering scheme at one point, but filtering in general was largely unused.

This meant that most people who were logged on to the system got the messages sent to the “everyone” community. It also meant that most people got messages that were really not relevant to them, but *most* users didn’t complain. It’s funny to think about it - in essence we built a spam tool and just put it out in the IBM internal wild and let it run loose. At first glance its surprising that anyone enabled it at all.

From the beginning there were people who “got it” and they were on board right away. For the people who considered it a livable minor annoyance, over time, we noticed a pattern, there was a very simple tipping point that changed people’s minds. If they used the system to find the answer to a question that they had no other clue about how to answer they were hooked. There seemed to be an instant transformation in their opinion not only of the tool, but their perceived inconvenience with receiving broadcast messages. These people then started to become evangelists, slowly changing the minds of others.

I believe that this principle applies in most social software and is more evidence for what Tom Coates mentioned in his talk. There must be percieved value to the user. In the case of ICT, that perceived value might not have come for some time and I am sure that, dispite its relative success internally, there might have been something that we could have done to show that perceived value from the beginning.

Mike Gotta posted a piece over at Collaborative Thinking on some thoughts that he had w.r.t to social software…

Often I find that the consumer market is also an interesting environment to examine given that many of these tools remain emergent within the large enterprise. To over-generalize what happens:

• Consumers begin to use socially-oriented sites for their own purposes
• They end up sharing content more easily with friends, family and so on
• Along the way they discover that they can find information and activities that are of interest more rapidly
• And in doing so, they continue to connect with other people, forming relationships, communities, etc.
• Which persuades them to create, customize, and extend their own social environment which in turn…
• Encourages reciprocation; adding value back across their associated networks, groups and communities

This lines up nicely with Tom Coates assertions from his Future of Web Apps talk. Its a philosphy we’ve been talking about at IBM recently that we’ve called the Discover -> Connect -> Execute cycle. Mike also relates this consumer pattern to the business environment:

Studying consumer patterns and correlating them to possible use case scenarios within a business environment is a pragmatic approach that can benefit enterprise strategists. There are similarities that people can learn from and apply internally.

• Workers use tagging and social bookmark tools to capture and organize information for their own purposes
• The public and accessible nature of tags and bookmarks enables workers to share information more easily with other co-workers
• Other workers that rely on such tags and bookmarks to find information in turn, post about such information in their corporate blogs
• Other workers that subscribe to the RSS feeds of that blog read the commentary on the information originally captured by the tags and bookmarks and create a wiki to begin co-authoring a report for a project where that information happens to be very relevant
• Other project members connect from the wiki to the blog to the bookmarks and discover that there are many other people in the organization that have similar interests or are involved in similar activities
• The person who originally tagged and bookmarked the information shares additional resources that has been collected with the project team and begins another wiki in parallel that acts as a community site for those involved in similar projects across the enterprise

In the work that we’ve been doing within the Lotus brand, especially with our internal social software projects, we’ve seen this happen time and time again. There have been instances where entire projects (admittedly of varying scale) where formed out of little more than
people meeting across our blog system and using the blog system, bookmarking system and wiki system to move from socializing to actively collaborating. The discovery portion of that cycle was what made the real difference.

On MySpace there is a user called MH1. As it turns out he is a guy that I know from high school. As of today he has 4013 “friends”. I’ve got 24. I’ve been using friendster longer and I have 41 there.

What cirteria do you use for adding someone as your “friend” in a social network tool?

MH1 and I clearly have different criteria, but we also have different reasons for being on MySpace. MH1 is promoting his music and I’m just trying to keep touch with friends. What implications does this have on the network as a whole? As far as I can tell the is only one type of edge on the MySpace network graph: “is friends with”. So if I’m looking for 2nd degree connections this isn’t really helpful if MH1’s graph is unintentionally trying to store “is friends with” and “is a fan of his band” connections.

Maybe on MySpace it doesn’t matter.

But what about on LinkedIn? I’ve gotten a few requests for people to connect on LinkedIn after having met briefly once and I’ve debated it. Then I read an article in Business 2.0

“LinkedIn is a very efficient tool when you’re trying to target passive candidates, people who aren’t actively searching for a job,” Gutmacher says. “For the niche that I am recruiting, usually the mid- to senior-level software and development engineers, they’re all there.”

People like Gutmacher are part of a controversial group within LinkedIn called “promiscuous linkers.” The person with the most connections is San Jose-based recruiter Ron Bates, who proudly trumpets more than 28,000 direct connections on his profile.

How does someone have 28,000 direct connections? I think that this is another edge labeling issue, and that for sights like LinkedIn its even more important to get this right. I’ve accepted those LinkedIn invites that I mentioned before, but if I was contacted by that person in the future I’d have no more reason to talk to them than if they just sent me a note.

If LinkedIn had a “met once at a conference” link as opposed to a “i really respect this person” link would you use it? Would it be useful?

What about MySpace or Friendster? What other kinds of links would you want there?

Carson Workshops held a summit on the future of web apps back in September of 2006. There where some interesting talks, but by far my favorite was given by Tom Coates of Yahoo. He had some insightful generalities that he believes about social software and what makes it valuable. It’s definitely worth a listen. One of the observations he makes is this:

How you can use social software to build aggregate value… in a nutshell:

• An individual should get value from their contribution
• These contributions should provide value to their peers as well
• The organization that hosts the service should derive aggregate value and be able to expose that back to the users.

Thats just one component of the talk - theres a good deal more packed in to the thirty-eight minutes and forty-two seconds. You can get it from the future of web apps site.