Web apps I use

Following our conversation, Vladimir Oane raises the question: Who actually uses all these shiny new web apps (rounded corners and all)? He only uses a handful, and these have been around for some time or tend to come from giants like Google.

His question reminded me of this earlier post where Dan Berte wrote about web apps that didn’t work for him. Indeed, of the half dozen new projects that show up on Museum of Modern Betas every day, how many do we really need? They might be built to be bought; but, if it is indeed “the same million people” using all of them, how many will this million of us use?

The mainstream media is shaking its head at the cash-happiness at the top of the Web 2.0 pyramid.
(See The Skype hyper in The Economist’s Oct 4th edition:

“By buying Skype, the internet phenomenon of 2005, eBay started a
bubble. Google, with its purchase of YouTube, the cyber-star of 2006,
inflated it further. And Microsoft and Google now appear tempted to add
more froth by investing a silly sum in Facebook, the latest big thing.
All three—the internet telephone firm, the video site and the social
network—make almost no money. EBay’s disappointment with Skype is a
timely reminder of where this fad might lead.”)

As a first pass at an answer, I’ll tally my web app usage as well. Our position as
early, enthusiastic adopters in Eastern Europe is somewhat more
equidistant than adopters in the Valley. Without personally knowing too many of the
developers, we evaluate web apps quickly
and decide in the first few seconds whether we’ll use something or not.

What are the ones that I use?

1. del.icio.us – closing up on 1000 bookmarks. The problem? When I try to retrieve, as often as not I had actually just starred the post in Google Reader. Or done nothing at all to save the page. Google Web History usually kicks in as an emergency solution.
2. Flickr – essential to my peace of mind since my HDD died and took all of my photos with it
3. Google Video – mostly for the excellent content from the Googleplex
4. Google Notebook and Google Docs – for research support and collaborative document authoring with my team
5. Twitter – micro-social-networking
6. Stikkit - now used as a GTD inbox for anything web-related. I had high hopes for this app. It could have become my inbox to the internet – intelligently feeding my travels to Dopplr, my goals to 43things, etc. It now looks abandoned in favour of IWantSandy. (Guess what? I DON’T want Sandy. I want a more integrated Stikkit.)
7. LinkedIn – would use actively if I could set up customized RSS feeds for Questions on subjects I can authoritatively discuss
8. Facebook – mostly to keep in touch with the people I met at the Office 2.0 Conference
9. coComment - tracking comments posted on other blogs (though very dissapointed with its performance, I’m not aware of a better solution)
10. More recently, specific social networks such as Social Media Today
11. Tumblr – for a personal blog / journal
12. Mindmeister – almost any project I start these days begins as a mindmap. If I need to collaborate with anyone else, I’ll use Mindmeister to share mindmaps without forcing people to install software or to edit the map together in real time.
13. Dopplr – while I’m not yet enough of a frequent traveler to make this immensely useful, I’m quite enchanted with its simplicity and the most seamless integration I’ve ever seen.
14. iUseThis – voting for the Mac apps that we use. This has become my no. 1 destination when I need Mac software. Would love to see a similar proposition for web apps
15. Picnik – for my very occasional image editing needs, a simple and sweet solution.

I had great hope for these, but now only use very seldom:

• Last.fm – there’s just not enough of a support for classical music – let alone the contemporary classical that I listen most of the time.
• Plaxo 3.0 – I cancelled my Premium subscription to this very promising re-iteration of the rather spammy Plaxo. It’s supposed to be a solution to the Syncing problem. At the moment, it just doesn’t sync what I need.
• 43things – occasionally used to collect random goals.
• iGoogle – promising, but I’m quickly losing patience with how long it takes to load / switch tabs

A couple to which I never gave much of a chance:

• None of the social news sites. I need highly selective filters to counter information overload. I need to fight the “too much input, no output” syndrome. No way am I going to add lots more input.
• Pownce, Jaiku, Ziki
• MySpace – useless AND ugly.
• Joost – I have no use for watching pocker games.
• These are the ones I remember. The rest? Hmm….

I’ll follow up with a post on what’s missing in Web 2.0 apps.

Office 2.0 – Online communities

Finnern told us the key to having a large number of community participants is to give out iPhones :D

The first question: where do we start? We are in a different place than we were; we’rea learning how social communities work. The rise of social web is driven by its utter simplicity – driving enormous growth. Most of the content is created by “us”, propelling the peer production model. The blogosphere is the biggest conversation in the world.

Self-formed communities – ex. KatrinaList. CafeMom is a sample of a real-people social network vs. SV network. Average people in an organization will not have time to adopt these tools. This is something that we have not yet found a solution for.

Problems: the 2% troublemakers; the 9x problems (new tools must be nearly 10 times better for people to have incentive to switch – Harvard research). Many are concerned that 2.0 will decrease productivity [and we're all so excited about how they increase productivity?].

Diane Davidson – found that when people say bad things, approaching them directly solved the problem. After some time, WebEx found people asking “can we do this in a community?”

Robert Duffy – Intel is opening up, looking at social media to make sure they keep being relevant. Participating not just internally but also going out to other places where discussions are going on as well.

Mark Finnern – finds that most of the growth on SAP’s communities for business processes consulting comes from word of mouth.

Josh Hilliker – when launching Intel vPro, wants to talk to the people within partner organizations who are bloggers passionate about silicon. Research is moving from talking to individuals in enterprises about what they want – to talking to the community as a whole.

Mike Walsh – talks about companies outside of the usual adopters (hi-tech industry) looking at online communities and obtaining great benefits?. [This is something that I am very interested in. Does anyone know of a company in the construction industry using enterprise 2.0?] Mike gives two interesting examples that I will have to look at: Dwell.com and Autodesk communities. I wonder

Comment from the audience: “Community can be a nice way of saying that we are shifting the burden of tech support unto our customers.” Diane sees it more as broadening of what gets done, a win-win situation. Offering joint ownership of our products [Apple, where are you?] Josh makes a good point that community is faster than support.

Audience asking for 5 tips on how a start-up can build a community. Answers:

• start with a great product
• one-on-one relationship
• listen and react so people feel heard
• hire your top contributors
• set your goals so people internally are on the same page
• find your greatest advocates
• market the community
• keep it open as much as possible (a minimum of private areas)
• reward people for providing good content and participating

What resources to allocate for launching a small community and growing it?

• do you want to build your own platform or buy? integrated or best-in-breed?
• WebEx had almost no resources internally
• need to find people internally who are willing to change the way they work
• Intel has a few positions of “Community Manager” (Josh’ position). Very very nice!
• Josh also makes the point that launching communities in Intel is very much like a start-up
• Intel has a goal of shifting the content to the community and ultimately spinning it off

Very nice panel, thanks to all the panelists!

Office 2.0 Unconference – continued

Ah, the tyranny of bloggers. I’ll post more about the panel discussion on emerging economies on BusinessIdeas.ro.

At yesterday’s Unconference, I participated in the following discussions:

1. Introducing disruptive technologies
2. How can Office 2.0 vendors make money
3. Does the virtual enterprise really exist?
4. Enterprise 2.0 in emerging economies
5. Productivity in office 2.0

Interesting takeaways and further questions:

• Once a Web2.0 product “succeeds”, it quickly loses coolness (see graph). J. C. MacDonald said that once Groove sold out to Microsoft, it “feel off the cliff of coolness”. If coolness (“Whuffie“) is the currency of choice in the Web2.0 world, and monetary success quickly brings a coolness penalty, what are the long-term options for 2.0 business?
• Disruptiveness is relative. I fully agree with Neil Raden’s point that (paraphrasing) “disruptive” is a coward’s synonym for innovation.
• Dave Mosby raised the very interesting question of how to raise pain awareness. Self-protective denial keeps people sane (“We manage just fine with email!”). I look forward to exploring this question throughout the conference, maybe in the Culture and Technolgy panel later in the day.
• Robin Carey shared some very thought-provoking ideas on the way social media could be used in NGOs and for social issues reporting. I will certainly follow up on this theme, as I find it tremendously promising. This recent Economist article is a good introduction (also covered in more detail by the excellent Humanitarian.info).

By the way… Twitter is still down. Very bad timing for me, as I was looking forward to twitterring through the conference.

More on Meetings on a Wiki

Bill Ives of the FASTForward blog adds some very insightful comments to my earlier post on holding meetings on a wiki.

Bill has an interesting point regarding notifications:

I would add to also allow this [notifications] to go somewhere besides the email inbox. I am not excited when a heated discussion on an email group suddenly drops twenty messages in my inbox. Take advantage of the common workspace here and do not drag in the sins of email spaghetti with its overlapping tangled mess.

I fully agree. I love RSS. I would, however, approach it in a differentiated manner depending on the lifestage of the wiki and people’’s level of familiarity with it. If participants are not used to RSS, I’d rather give them updates via email than wait until they learn to use RSS. After they get smothered in email, they will also be more likely to see the use for RSS :D

Stewart also comments:

One suggestion with the point about structure – it’s important to be careful to use as little structure as possible, and make sure people know that they can change the structure of a page if it makes sense to do so. In other words, the flexibility of the wiki is what makes it such a great event planning tool.

Yes, the simplest structure will usually work the best. Once a community has been using a wiki for some time, structure can be very sketchy and free-form. I find that with a community that has only just started with a wiki, an empty page will not trigger participation. Populating the page with some content – breaking the ice, as it were – gives the discussion the traction needed to get going.

Wishlist: RSS of LinkedIn “Questions from my Network”

I love LinkedIn’s Q&A feature. It consistently delivers genuinely useful answers from amazingly qualified people.

I also want to contribute with answers to questions from my network. But who has the time to manually check the “Questions from your Network” page?

Why doesn’t LinkedIn feed me questions via RSS?

Four wiki implementation take-aways

Nathan Wallace posts a great case study on creating a wiki intranet at Janssen-Cilag. The approach is refreshingly common-sense. My main take-aways:

• Pre-implementation conversations are a great way to create excitement and obtain personal commitment to maintain content. Also helpful: sharing articles that give a glimpse into the possibilities.
• Use the “social force control” argument when pitching a wiki: if social forces keep people from sending out weird email messages (which colleagues do not see), social forces will act more strongly to keep people on target in editing a wiki page. Also helpful: pointing out that changes captured in a wiki and monitored will be much easier to manage than the quiet behavioural departure from “norms” experienced by many companies.
• Use Wikipedia as an uber-known example. This provides a very positive point of reference for a new technology that is disconcertingly free-form.
• Offer ultralight training – Nathan was able to offer the necessary training in 5 minutes. After that, one-on-one coaching and a help section provide ongoing support. Also helpful: Begin with a basic help file, and as people have more questions, explain – then ask them to update the help section. People who are only just learning how to do something are much better equipped to explain to their peers than an “expert” is.

Nathan’s approach to content ownership and maintenance is remarkably simple and clear:

1. If someone isn’t willing to maintain a piece of content, it can’t be that important to the business.
2. We happily show people how to do things with the site, but we don’t do it for them.
3. Occasionally we highlight sections of the site on the home page, which is a great way to drive the defacto owners to clean it up a little.
4. We encourage people to have high expectations for content on the Intranet. If something is missing, please report it to the appropriate area of the business, or better still, add it for them.
5. The answer to verbal queries for many departments has become, “it’s on JCintra [the wiki/intranet]“. This reminds people to search first and ask later.
6. In the end, the quality of content in an area is a reflection on the defacto department owner, not the Intranet itself.

How to export LinkedIn connections to Facebook

Facebook looks tantalizing, very easy to populate with the content I am already producing elsewhere – but I was struggling to start using the “social” part of the latest social computing fad. This quick tutorial on importing LinkedIn connections to Facebook filled in this need:

We do know of an easy way to get your Linkedin Connections into Facebook in 2 minutes flat.

• Click on Contacts (after you have logged into your Linkedin account)
• Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on “export connections”
• Download the file as a CSV (Outlook) and save to your desktop
• Login to Facebook
• Click on Find Friends
• Click on “email Applications” and upload the saved CSV file

If you have any contacts on facebook from Linkedin, facebook will find them and display them and give you the option of inviting them to be your facebook friend; and send them an invite for you. Works like a champ! It will also invite all the other people that are not yet members of facebook from your Linkedin connections…

Source: Linkedin on Facebook?… At least there is a Linkedin Facebook Group
at FaceReviews.com: Facebook Application Reviews, Facebook Widgets, Facebook News
Address : FaceReviews

How to hold meetings on a wiki

In the days immediately following our first World Cafe, our team couldn’t find time to hold an evaluation meeting. We decided to try holding the meeting on our wiki, and found that the results were better than in a traditional meeting. Here’s what we learned:

1. Allow enough time for the discussion. While a traditional meeting can last as little as a dozen minutes, the time-distributed nature of a ‘wiki meeting’ makes it necessary to allocate at least one day, depending on how busy team members are with urgent projects. Don’t expect people to drop everything and participate on a wiki discussion. We created the wiki discussion as soon as the World Cafe ended, and within 24 hours had obtained input from all team members.

2. Offer structure. As you create the wiki page, populate it with questions and issues. Make the structure simple and specific. Add content, don’t just post the meeting agenda. Include all relevant information, spell out your opinions on each subject and ask for more information where necessary. People are much more likely to respond if all they have to do is agree / disagree with an opinion or answer a specific question.

3. Encourage participants to openly sign their contribution. Mediawiki software parses three or four tildes (~~~~) into the signature of a participant to a discussion. A simpler option is to simply preface each comment with “Ron says:…” While most wiki software allow readers to find out who performed each edit, openly signing content goes a long way to keep the tone conversational.

4. Provide participants with tools to follow the discussion. Whether your software produces RSS feeds or simply sends email, make sure everyone knows how to set up frequent notifications. (Wouldn’t it be great to have wiki software produce Twitter feeds?)

5. Manage the discussion. While a moderator is usually not necessary once you have created structure and obtained participation, a discussion will often require participants to gather additional information or perform external tasks. Someone might have to install and demo some software, make some phone calls, cross over into the office of a non-participating coworker to obtain his expertise on a particular issues, or simply dig up some information. While participants will often self-organize, it is your job as the initiator of the discussion to follow through. Above all, make sure you keep contributing with any information or ideas made necessary by the discussion.

6. Capture actionable items. Regardless of the project management system your team uses, it is very important to capture and act on any requests made during the discussion. At the very least add ideas to a “To consider” or “Someday” list that everyone can see. Discussions on a wiki are available for reference, and few things discourage people from participating as much as the evidence that their contribution was not followed through.

7. Declare the meeting closed. Give participants 3-4 hours’ notice to put in a last word. After, that, formally close the meeting. Post a notice at the beginning of the wiki page. Don’t leave the conversation open-ended. It’s discouraging.

7 enterprise uses for Twitter

Toddlers explore a dozen different ways to use a new toy. Twitter is an oddly seductive new toy. Twitterers – and non-Twitterers – are busy looking for productive ways to use it. Some find it can offer personal wellbeing, support networking, amuse professionals, or create “social proprioception”. Others find out that it’s better not to bang yourself on the head with it .

So how can enterprises / small businesses play with this toy? Dodging the danger of helplessly floating in a river of tweets, here are seven theoretically productive enterprise uses for Twitter:

1. Task status updates from team members.
Your team probably spends considerable time asking each other “What have you been doing”? Once members start twittering their activities, most verbal updates become obsolete. Added benefit: If I see that Laura is doing some research on The Monkey Corporation, I’m more likely to let her know that I just happened to tag a couple of blog posts about them on del.icio.us over the weekend.

2. Real-time presence status for IM.
Few people update their IM status regularly. Using Twitterific to automatically update status messages on Adium or mood messages on Skype will encourage colleagues to consider IM status before interrupting. If my status says you are “Crafting the Best Article of the Year”, the guy next door might be less likely to IM the latest joke.

3. Informal timelog.
As a personal motivational timelog, Twitter is without equal. By the time the entire world knows that I’m Crafting that Best Article, I feel a little more disposed to actually launch MS Word. If my co-workers know as well, I might actually write a couple of sentences by the end of the day. Added benefit: If someone forgot to log billable hours on a project, the information could be extracted from Twitter postings.

4. Assign tasks while away from the office.
In good GTD manner, items should be processed only once. If I’m on the subway and suddenly remember that Alex should install a new MediaWiki plugin, I can Twitter it from my mobile phone – rather than write it down and hope I’ll look through my notes by the end of the week.

5. Notify of important wiki updates.
Teams using wikis for project management can twitter mission-critical wiki updates. Bill: “Just off the phone with Jobs; see http://monkeycorp.server/mediawiki/apple_hostile_takeover“

6. Update everyone on last-minute schedule changes.
Whether I’m running 10 minutes late for that staff meeting or my next client meeting just got delayed, I often end up calling one co-worker and asking her to update critical others. Twitter will easily update everyone from my mobile phone.

7. Process IM in batches.
Twitterrific is automatically set up to receive updates every 30 minutes. This hits a sweet spot between the immediacy of IM and the impossible ideal of checking email once a day. If it’s burning, co-workers can use direct IM. Otherwise, message updates are processed in batches every 30 minutes. I remain available but retain some sanity.

Twitter is no corporate powertoy. It still lacks usergroups; you can’t get privacy, either (Update: as twittersweet indicated in the comments, you can make your updates private and improvise groups). Small businesses might cope by using anonymous accounts. In corporations, do you think we’ll see Twitter look-alikes in next-generation IM systems?

Get real with LinkedIn!

Looking through my LinkedIn connections a few days ago, I realized that I only knew about half of those people. The rest had extended invitations, and seemed interesting people, so I had accepted – but I did not know them! I sent off emails inviting them for a short conversation via Skype or IM.

It was amazing to see that all of the persons I invited responded within a few hours. I have already had great conversations with a number of them, and am likely to meet others within a couple days.