I’ve mentioned Spock a couple of times, if you’re not familiar it’s a new “people” based search which crawls web-sites and social networking site to build a comprehensive picture of people.  If you haven’t checked it out, it’s worth a look.

I recently wanted to get back in touch with an old friend who had moved and whose details I’d misplaced.  The white pages were no help — over 100 matches in N.S.W alone.  Spock on the other hand lead me straight to her linked in profile and there was sufficient information their to ascertain that she was exactly the person I was after.

It lead me to two conclusions:

1. Spock is getting it right — it was the location that helped me find the person I was after.
2. There are still a heck of a lot of people (100+ in one state for one name match alone) who still have no profile on the Internet.

Bernard Lunn commented on my last post  that when it comes to Enterprises and Start-Ups, we are thinking along similar lines.  His second post on his blog B2B media 2.0 and globalization is a well thought out discussion along similar lines, but with some minor differences in perspective to my comments.  If you enjoyed my post, then I can recommend Bernard’s as adding some great value to this conversation.

One thing he says that really got me thinking is:

The gatekeepers still have veto power but only if the software breaks the rules on privacy and security. It is not just start-ups buying this way, it is self-managed teams and departments. Try it free and use the credit card to buy a bit and expense it; the credit card vendors do a good job at expense tracking and those miles and other benefits are nice bonus.

As someone whose role is as a bit of a gatekeeper, I think he’s right.  It’s harder and harder these days to keep the gates shut against the storming hordes of Web 2.0, especially when the software is on the internet and essentially free. 

Hard earned stripes on implementing innovation tell me this isn’t a bad thing.  There’s nothing like passionate users in the business to drive the need for Enterprises to sit up and take notice — there are very few IT shops left I would think that don’t value their user as their customer (those that aren’t are probably only a swift signature away from being outsourced) and as we all know, customer is king.

That said, the problem space changes when it moves from individuals making independent choices, to trying to implement an enterprise wide solution.

I’ll use Word Press as a great example (and I’m biased as this is a Word Press blog as well).  As Bernard points out:

Add a few colleagues/partners as posters. Add some traditional semi-static pages. Add some social network, a bit of video and a podcast or two. Pretty soon I have a modern CMS, with minimal implementation costs and all on a pay as you go basis.

For individuals or small groups, word press is fantastic and can achieve exactly this, but it’s still lacking some features that would make it really appealing in an Enterprise.  For example, LDAP groups to manage the large numbers of starters and departers, centralised comment management so the marketing mafia can monitor what’s going on across multiple blogs and any number of small, incremental value adds.  Enterprises will want a real Enterprise Content Management system implemented underneath, users will cry out for single sign on so they don’t have yet another password, then marketing will want a reporting system to see whose hot and whose not.

Unfortunately (and to my own point maybe because they’ve already paid for it) Enterprises will wait for their major vendors who are on the roadmap and mostly only months away from releases that begin to incorporate many of these features (with “committed” roadmaps for the next 12 months that show when the missing ones will come).

It’s not all doom and gloom, I think Enterprises are slowly changing, and the gatekeepers are become more shepherds — letting the users mill around while trying to keep the flock from coming to too much harm!  Open standards are the glue that will let the start-ups and the Enterprise meet in the middle.

I love Bernard’s quote from Einstein that he concluded with, I’ll borrow it here:

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.”

It’s my increasingly strong belief that open standards will help us on this road (see some thoughts on this here: Poor-Rich applications).

…and why start-ups should want to play with them.  Chris commented on my “Are you hearing me? Who needs a new metric post?” regarding my position that an Attention gathering standard (and more specifically an Attention Engine) would be ideal for Enterprises.  He made the valid points that Enterprises are not friendly to start-ups and costly to build the service infrastructue around that they require.

 I thought I’d answer this here as a seperate post, because this is something I’ve been thinking about and I suspect going to be referring back to regularly in the future.  While I’ve never run a start-up, I’ve certainly been around large Enterprises a lot, worked with them, consulted with them and studied them.  Like individuals, it’s hard to categorise Enterprises with the same broad brush, but I’m going to give it a go here.  I should make the point that none of this is aimed at Chris or his company in anyway.

Here are some of the things start-ups should understand about Enterprises if they want to play (and a bit at the end about why they should want to play).

1. There is no doubt that most Enterprises are risk averse, and start-ups can be risky, however this does not mean Enterprises won’t take risks.  Enterprises will take risks if the rewards stack up.  Start-ups need iron clad business cases AND have to be prepared to let Enterprises validate this for themselves by trialling software and assessing the benefit.
2. Enterprises do not consider themselves an endless pot of gold, in fact most of them are cheapskates.  Don’t expect an Enterprise to pay for trialling your software — they expect and demand as much as 60% or more discount off list price from billion dollar software companies.  If you’re selling to an Enterprise, be prepared and willing to let them trial it for free.  On the positive front, poor payment terms aside (they’ll make you wait 60 days for your cash), Enterprises do pay their bills and will pay what something is worth (see point 1).
3. No-one wants to pay twice for something.  Anyone selling software needs to appreciate that Enterprises have long term contracts with major vendors, may be privvy to information that the general populace is not, and generally have an overall direction they are heading in.  Why should you pay for some new software that duplicates functionality you are likely to get in 12 months, will fully integrate with your environment and have probably already paid for to some degree.
4. It’s changing as the world of WEB 2.0 evolves, but generally speaking, Enterprises like to bring things inside their firewall.  I wouldn’t let this stop you BUT you will probably get faster adoption if you can deploy your technology inside the firewall.
5. Enterprises understand that most of the cost of ownership in software is in the support.  Enterprises don’t implement version 1.0 of something, and the general trend of Web 2.0 start-ups to release pre-version 1.0 software or continual released product that’s really just beta builds, while good consumer sense, is foreign to Enterprises.
6. Enterprises LOVE a good open standard.  As Chris points out, Enterprises will want to integrate your product into their environment.  True LDAP support should be a mandatory minimum.  Make your product as open as possible.

So lets be frank, if you’re a start-up, Enterprises are a pain in the butt, they’ll push you round, demand features which are un-appealling to consumers (who cares about LDAP if you’re an individual) and drag out the terms.  So why bother?

Well there are several reasons I think that Enterprises are worth the effort for the brave:

1. No-one got really rich (apart from Google) off the back of ad-sense.  If you think Enterprises are cheap, consumers are even cheaper still, they expect everything for free.
2. Lots of users and big complex systems lead to lots of big complex problems.  Enterprises are crying out for GOOD solutions that help them address real business issues, and the business issues are not that different from those faced in the consumer world. 

So why bother? Well, if you have:

• A unique solution to a real Enterprise issue that no-one else does;
• If you’re willing to let an Enterprise trial it for a reasonable period of time;
• A solution that is robust and rich in its problem space;
• Support and promote logical open standards which will allow integration;
• Can consider letting your software hop the fence to the inside of the firewall (or are willing to jump a few extra hoops if you won’t);

then Enterprises will pay and they will pay well.

In finishing, not every Web 2.0 solution drives a good Enterprise business case, but those that do should be very open to a key market that I think will ultimately assist them in what start-ups want — to be successful and make money. 

You can make money and be successful in the consumer space only, but if your offering makes sense to Enterprises, then don’t be afraid to play.

I came across Spock a few weeks ago and signed up for an invite.  At that stage it was just an empty web page with the promise of more to come, still the thought someone was tackling the problem of identifying people on the internet was refreshing.

Well Spock has moved to private beta now, and at first glance this is going to be the next killer app for finding and identifying people.  What makes it different from Google? Well a couple of things actually.

When I search for “Tim Bull” in Google, I get a hit for every web page that I (or someone with my name) happens to score a mention.  This is a long way from Spock, which acts in a person centric way — at a high level (and I’m interpreting here) a person is more akin to an object. Not a page, but rather a collection of references which relate to the person.

Where Spock is makles this process more intelligent is that you (and others) can interact with your person profile, voting on references, assigning references and generally collaborating to make a diverse, and complete version of “you”.

It’s another great example of how the new Internet is all about attention.  While some applications (Particls is one example) are looking at “WHAT” you should pay attention too, Spock looks at “WHO” you should pay attention to.

I’ve had my Nokia 6233 phone for about 6 months now.  Recently I’ve been wanting to buy an iPOD, but couldn’t really justify the extra gadget just for heading to work and back.  Anyway, in conversation with someone at work, they mentioned they’d been using their Nokia phone as a music player. 

I should point out that we all have the same model of phone here, they get upgraded with our laptops every two year, so there is some excuse (it’s not like I reviewed the feature set it just landed on me), but it struck me that after 6 months there was a whole set of features in the phone I’d never explored, even when the phone could address a need I had.

Sitting down with another person with the same phone today, I was telling them how excited I was about this (I bought a 2Gb micro SD card and now have some 20 cds worth of music or more loaded up).  Sure it’s not quite the iPOD experience, but it’s a big step up from where I was at.  They didn’t know how to do it, and pulled out their phone only to find they’d configured theirs using yet another set of options I didn’t know about.

It got me thinking about how yet again, tools and software are so feature rich that it’s just difficult for one person to know how to use all aspects of it.  I once heard a quote something along the lines that each person only uses 10% of the features available to them in Microsoft Word or Excel.  The problem is that everyone uses a different 10%.

What this leads to is tools which do many things — they are feature rich, but they don’t do all of them well — leading to them being both feature rich and poor at the same time.  I call them the Rich - Poor.

The Nokia is a perfect example of this — I really love having my music on the go with me, but for listening to music, an iPOD, with its navigation features built into the device is vastly superior.  With the Nokia, I get 150 tracks in sequential or random order.  I can build play lists, but I have to do them manually on my PC first and can’t just choose to listen to “jazz” or a specific album on the go.

Another story I was reminded about was the Firefly.  This is a great example of a Poor - Rich product.  What’s fascinating about this is that the product designed for 8 - 12 year olds became popular with senior citizens in the US, because of it’s limited (and therefore easy to understand and access) feature set.  Catching on to this trend the Jitterbug quickly followed.  A simple set of features, but a depth and richness in the market because it does them well and htis one need in a clear, specific way.

In the software world, we also see this becoming clearer with the move to services and WEB 2.0.   Instead of Rich - Poor applications, we are now getting Poor - Rich services, services that a feature poor in terms of the diversity within the one application, but rich because of the complexity and ability that the service provides.

Of course it’s no suprise this trend has already started, but the next two years is going to be a facsinating time as instead of Rich - Poor apps, we get a true diversity on the Internet with Poor - Rich apps to meet every niche popping up faster and faster as services become more prolific and the tools to plug them together move to new levels of maturity. 

I first became interested in the idea of prediction markets and ideas stock exchanges when I first came across the Hollywood Stock Exchange back sometime in around 1998 / 99.  It always appealled to me as something that would have some use internally in trading ideas, but brief investigations at that time didn’t reveal anything really suitable.

Fast forward to 2006 and I read Wisdom of Crowds, which convinced me that my inner belief there was some use for these kinds of tools could in fact translate to a real application.   I’ve been looking around again and recently came across Inkling Markets.   I had the opportunity to speak with them in my “day job” and I learnt a lot of things about how to apply a prediction market internally.

What I took away from this were three things:

1. No prediction market will function effectively without a metric on which you can measure the success of the prediction.
2.  Small prediction markets are pointless — it’s wisdom of crowds not wisdom of a few.  If you’re going to trial it, get as many people involved as you can.
3. The market has to be dynamic to keep peoples interest (ie. no point asking them to list 10 ideas and leave them open for 3 months — they’ll rank them in the first week and stop trading).  This means opening new markets all the time, and ensuring that there are changes to the stocks (either new IPOs or de-listings) in existing markets on a regular basis.

Some of the features of Inkling Markets which I like, is the tools that it supports to allow you to blog effectively about your market, including embedding graphs etc.  As soon as I can think of an effective public market I’ll have to start one up and try it out as well as the internal ideas markets that I’ll be experimenting with.

As we trial our internal market, I’ll be sharing some of the pros and cons of that experience here.  If you’d like to know more feel free to drop me a comment.

I came across two interesting sites by David Troy, http://flickrvision.com/ and http://twittervision.com.

 They are both elegantly constructed mashups that automatically match location from Flickr and Twitter to maps.  Apart from the pure simplicity, what struck me yet again was how this kind of location based information adds real depth to what is otherwise a photo board or shared SMS service.

Twitter takes on a whole new dimension when “Making my coffee” pings up on the map as day breaks in the US, and watching photo’s appear on the map from Flickr was surprisingly enjoyable.

Of course, the cynic in me is still not sure what practical use they serve, but they are both excellent sites and a worth spending 10 minutes to experience.

In the real world where people don’t live on-line 24 hours a day, with their internet connection at least as vital as Oxygen, I regularly come across people who display some unusual traits.

1. They don’t blog.
2. They don’t read blogs.
3. They often read “papers” and trust these as reliable information sources.
4. The terms Web2.0, Wiki’s, Blogs and Syndication may as well be Japaneese to them.

There’s actually more of them than you’d credit.  So is blogging really the “new media”, or is it a frenzy of mutual self pleasure amongst a select few?  I realise of course the irony of writing about this in a blog — most likely the exact people who will agree with this point are NOT online desperately awaiting my next post.  Still, I can’t help but agree with many aspects of this argument as raised by Matthew Buckland at Poynter Online and the conclusion he reaches here:

I believe we have to keep our eyes wide open. Citizen media will probably never “replace” traditional media. Organized, corporate structures with incentives (such as salaries) produce quality and get the best out of human beings. It’s worked for centuries. But also in the citizen media sphere: the pressure of social ties, and the idea of doing good and maintaining a reputation is also powerful in ensuring quality.

 A high quality information source doesn’t need the infrastructure of the blogosphere to support it — yes there are lots of occasions I find something interesting through browsing Technorati or Tag Clouds, but the best and generally most reputable news doesn’t need a ping mechanism to broadcast it’s latest view on the world.  People go there because it’s reputable.  Blogs will enhance and maintain this, but they won’t replace it.

I think that’s why we often refer to the best of the bloggers as “citizen journalists” — that’s what they’ve become.  High quality, reputable journalists, just unpaid.

In trying to explain Web 2.0 to work colleagues and explaining why it’s different from Web 1.0, I’ve created this easy to use “spotters” guide of features based on the reading and research I’ve been doing.  It’s a bit tounge in cheek (not your usual list of “Ajax”, ”Wiki” and “RSS”) but you might enjoy it.

1. Glitz and glamour, every Web 2.0 site thinks it’s the next big thing.  Exception to rule 1 are sites that already KNOW they are a big thing (see http://del.icio.us as good example of a pretty ugly site that does a lot of good web 2.0 things in a visually unappealing way).
2. Visually compelling, with desktop type features on the browser.  Ajax enabled will often appear in this context.  If you don’t get some kind of type ahead or dynamic lookup on the page, it’s not real Web 2.0.
3. It’s all about the tribe and the community, who all appear to be living in a slightly off-kilter universe where somehow telling the world that you’re watching American Idol is big news, or that they can’t imagine that generations of businesses somehow survived without the ability to have a message transcribed by someone in India.
4. It has a blog.  All good Web 2.0 sites must have a blog.  Only blogs are not blogs, they are part of the “blogosphere”, form a “conversation architecture” and make up the ”attention economy”.
5. 1st generation WEB 2.0 sites are mostly free, and it’s not always clear HOW they can be monetised. Late comers (read most sites launching in 2007) Web 2.0 let you try before you buy but over-charge for what they are really tring to provide.  I like to refer to these as Web 2.0a sites and Web 2.0b.
6. It’s a large scale, device agnostic message routing service stupid! Underneath the glitz and glamour of the latest tribal love-fest, is a cool piece of technology that many organisations could find a use for, but very few will buy.
7. REpresentational State Transfer (REST).  This is just the Architects way of describing loosely coupled services that don’t really know or care if you talk to them or not, but when you do, they give you information you can use in a format that you can understand and represent (the common example is getting a HTML page which you can represent as a graphically rich page in a browser or an RSS feed which can be re-constructed as news).  It’s a lot easier to say REST, which says a lot about Architects too.
8. Richard Scoble has written about it, commented on it, been quoted on it, or in some way used it.  It’s not genuine Web 2.0 unless Scoble got there first (or maybe a close second).
9. It’s a mash-up.  Remember the old days when you used to write programs on your desktop, and call lots of different API’s which provided services that people had written? We don’t code anymore, we create mash-ups by writing programs in our browser that call lots of different services which provide information that people have written for us.  It’s very different.
10. It’s all about services and the winners will be those that control the data.  Compelling services that offer net new implementations of features that people want and don’t have alternatives for will be some of the biggest winners and the outstanding examples of WEB 2.0.

I blogged about Twitter here and alluded to the power under the hood beyond the glitz of the live-conscious that is the twitter-stream.  Well I found another potential interesting use with Twitterment, a Twitter search term engine.

I remember reading somewhere, (no link sorry) someone making the comment that Twitter has potential uses in trying to track what people are talking about — well Twitterment is a tool investigating how to help delve that potential information mine better.

This article by Heather Havenstein in ComputerworldUK reporting on Forrester research gives an interesting perspective on what is going through minds of CIOs as they face the wild wild web and the Web 2.0 revolution.

However, he added that he was surprised by the number of CIOs who responded that their use of the tools was driven in part by the risk of losing market share unless they keep up with competitors’ use of the technology.

“There is a lot of fear and uncertainty driving this adoption. I don’t think we have seen something like that since the last tech bubble and all those companies who said they had to get a Web site up and running and get online,” Young [Oliver Young, Forrester analyst and author of the report] said.

The article reports a an interesting view that:

CIOs were most likely to view social networking and blogs as unnecessary, and said that RSS, wikis and tagging had relatively clear user benefits.

The general feel I get is that while Web 2.0 technologies ARE making their debut in fits and starts within enterprises, it’s no real surprise that they don’t get it.   To quote Tim O’Reilly again:

“It’s really about data and who owns and controls, or gives the best access to, a class of data.”

I see the issue here as business not seeing the forest for the trees — RSS more so than all the other technologies listed is more than any other a platform on which other implementations are built.  How do you implement RSS? Does an RSS enabled website mean you’ve achieved Web 2.0?

Or is it using RSS as a glue in a deep network of services and sites communicating and talking to each other in a rich tapestry that demands your attention? Providing data that’s compelling and best in class in a format that’s portable and lets YOU take control.

Following on from my last post, I saw this comment from Tim O’Reilly stating that Web 2.0 is all about controlling data.  I think he’s spot on.

Well, obviously this is a market with a lot of froth in it already. I have to say there are a lot of me-too products and companies. Yet another social network, of the 15th flavor — that’s common in every new technology revolution. There are imitators who have marginal improvements….

…That goes back to a major theme of web 2.0 that people haven’t yet tweaked to. It’s really about data and who owns and controls, or gives the best access to, a class of data.

From wired.com interview with Tim O’Reilly

I think we are tweaking to this, however there is still a way to go and the more good quality sites we see that have at their core not just a great visual experience, but operating as a service, then the sooner we can clear the froth and find the coffee!

I’ll be the first to admit that some times I just don’t “get” it.  As part of an ongoing quest to understand lifestream tools and what they are about, I was investigating Twitter and wondering why the need to “broadcast” the trivialities of my life was actually important, when I read the following on their blog.

Meanwhile, the current issue of the MIT Technology Review explains, “Twitter is a system that quickly matches new messages coming in from members with the followers who have signed up to receive them, then retransmits them using each follower’s preferred channel.”

Yes, we’re building a large-scale, device agnostic, message routing system that’s the technical core of Twitter and it has many applications. However, we’re making it fun and social too. It’s the fun part that technology columnists occasionally get cranky about.

http://twitter.com/blog/2007/04/new-york-times-on-911.html

This I get.  It’s a lesson I find myself revisiting often and is increasingly relevant in the burgeoning web2.0 world, if you can get past the “pimp-my-website” mentality of many sites which focus on the general user community, there is real power under the hood.

There’s something in that for both the evangalists and the cranky columnists — Web 2.0 has to also speak the language of Business 1.0 just as much as Business 1.0 needs to understand it’s not just about the wild natives broadcasting the trivilaities of their life, there could be something important that we are missing in the dazzle and glare.

I’ve touched on location based services in a few articles on AGPS and Plazes.  All which has me thinking more and more about logical extensions for this — how do we get location “off the map” and into a real application?  I was pointed to GeoRSS which adds geospatial support to RSS posts which allows you to know WHERE a post is relevant to, amongst other things.

This is leading to some interesting applications, if you haven’t seen it, check out World Explorer from Yahoo Research Berkely which analyses Flikr tags to produce a geotagged map of the world, weighted by the number of tags for a location – explore the world through the eyes of others in a way that makes sense.

So what should Enterprise Architects be thinking about?  In my overly lengthy post on AGPS (I’m going to try get better at more succinct ideas I promise!) I suggested you should be thinking about location type services, but I’ll go one further — you need a consistent global taxonomy for location in your organisation as it will become crucial.

Some 16 years ago, I worked for a fertilizer company, and we experimented with MapInfo to map sales data.  What we found was that based on the invoice address, most of our product was shipped into the centre of the city.  Now of course, this was explained as farmers either being owned by corporates, or having accountants who are located in the CBD.  Still, it wasn’t what we expected.  Even moving to delivery address didn’t help, as product was delivered to one of 6 major national distribution centres where farmers sent a truck to pick up product.

The point is simply this, location offers unique opportunities, many which I propose we don’t fully understand at this moment in time and others that will arrive.  To some extent we’ve been doing this in business for a while (hands up who has systems that know what office a staff member is located in), but we probably don’t understand this to the same degree of relevance about customers and in particular our own information.

I’m still remain sceptical that LBS will prove to be a ”killer app” for office based corporates, but I’ve no doubt that it will provide some incremental level of benefit.

I’ve mentioned Touchstone a few times here and here.  Well it’s just been renamed to Particls and the latest beta client released.  The new client looks to be a big step forward and a few niggly bugs from the earlier beta look to have been addressed.

The current beta is invite only from current participants, if you’ re interested and link me or leave a comment, I’d be happy to drop you an invite.