Notes in the Margin

I’ve recently signed on to a new assignment as head of Business Development for Scrybe, a startup in the social networking space. The application is called Convofy, which at first blush it appears to be very much like a wave of other popular private social networks such as Yammer, Socialcast and Chatter.

source: Geek and Poke

If Enterprise 2.0, like Web 2.0, is centered around people, and relationships, and communities, and being connected, then it’s no wonder these apps have gotten significant attention. Private Social Networks are like Facebook, except that the population of users is limited to everyone with the same email domain, which usually means people within the same organization. Of course, most of these PSNs (including Convofy) now enable people outside your email domain to have limited access if invited.

Purely from a social perspective, these apps are interesting and engaging, like Facebook can be. They become a switchboard of activity associated with the people and groups you work with. This activity can include things like shared links, updates, images and files. On a human level, PSNs can animate and narrate the social side of your organizational work; they can make you feel connected, and add a sense of meaning.

At heart, a PSN is a communication medium, like email or phones. It can also be an informal content-sharing platform. In either case, a PSN can help communicate and coordinate activities within and across groups.

As has been noted by many others, notably analyst Peter O’Kelly, the boundaries between what were once distinct categories of communication, collaboration, information management and web applications are becoming blurred. Because they are free, social, easy to use and immediately gratifying, it is tempting to adopt tools like Yammer to provide the primary channel for your organization’s communication and coordination requirements.

The challenge of course is that, while PSNs confer a sense of connectedness, and both narrate and notify users about work-related matters (and some non-work matters), they generally don’t constitute the environment where the work itself happens. Integrating your organization’s communications with true enterprise, productivity and collaboration applications is a natural evolution for these apps, and PSN vendors are working away at finding ways to be relevant to the arena of real work.

• Yammer has a published API, and plans to provide an embeddable widget to include social streams in other applications
• Socialcast has just announced a lightweight project management app, an environment more closely tied to real work
• Chatter is particularly effective when used in conjunction with its parent Salesforce.com platform.

Convofy is itself a PSN, with all the aforementioned connectedness and functionality you’d expect from the genre. While Yammer et al are about communication and coordination, they are not actually about collaboration – the process of working together to create, review, revise and publish. By adding true collaboration capability, Convofy makes a giant step toward the convergence suggested by O’Kelly in the diagram above, integrating the communication value of PSNs with real-time sharing, mark-up, annotation and commentary.

As noted in a previous post, by integrating collaboration with a dynamic communication environment, Convofy actually creates new value for people working together to create any kind of digital product, such as text, images, and web pages. What does this mean?

• It means that you can upload any of the most common desktop file types (Office files, PDF, RTF, etc.) and highlight, annotate and comment directly on their content – directly in the document (as faithfully rendered by Convofy). Highlight a sentence that needs attention, and add a comment directly.
• It means you can share with your group or organization an image or a photo from over a dozen file types, including PNG, JPG and Photoshop. With the image uploaded, you can draw a circle around elements that need to be tweaked, and add comments to explain your reasoning.
• It means you can share a link to any public web page, and Convofy will render the complete web page in its collaboration environment, where you can highlight text or images and comment on them. This is incredibly valuable for sharing ideas on the content of a site, whether its published page or a draft that you’re collaborating.

In Convofy, unlike any collaboration tool I’ve ever seem, comments are integrated directly into users’ activity stream – desktop or mobile – so you can more actively engage. And if you’re online at the same time as your colleagues, the collaborative work can proceed even faster through real-time messaging.

Having worked on great collaboration tools like Buzzword, I can say that this is revolutionary. It not only provides collaboration tools for a much broader range of file types, but it makes the annotations and comments immediately relevant and accessible. Your notice is alerted to changes and updates – you don’t have to think about going to look for them. In other words, collaboration enters the main stream.

Yammer et al still are useful and rewarding environments. But if you’re looking to extend your PSN to include real work, especially if you often comment or collaborate with your colleagues, Convofy goes to a level that those other tools can’t touch.

A new wave of social applications has emerged, calling themselves private social networks. These apps have the social DNA of Facebook, where a group of people can share content, images, video and updates in a more limited enclave than with Facebook or other larger networks.

As an application category, private social networks have not sufficiently matured to easily allow functional comparisons. They range from robust online community platforms like Ning, to group text chat platforms such as GroupMe. Many target specific usage and groups, like Chattertree, which targets family interactions.

Mainstream private social networks (PSNs) like Socialcast, Chatter or CubeTree offer many of the engaging social features desired for modern Intranets but are not viable and sufficient platforms for a corporate Intranet which generally require more control over layout, user interface, hierarchy and navigation. The addition of a few key features, however, could make PSNs an interesting alternative. Here are two primary missing capabilities in most PSNs:

1. LDAP or Active Directory Integration

PSNs are generally hosted by the provider. Login is generally enabled by the provider, or by using common social sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn to authorize access. So for most people using a PSN behind their company firewall, this means a second login is required. And for most employees, that’s a nuisance and a deterrent to use.

2. Persistent Pages, Page Elements and Deep-Linking

Most PSNs these days have a stream-based user interface, where events are added to the top of the page and all previous events are pushed down in the ever-changing stack. In this context, an event could be an actual event, like a calendar entry, but can also include a photo or other file uploaded, a status update added, profile items changed, etc. If the PSN supports groups within the network, these generally have the same stream-based UI. This means that there is often no persistent page that can be bookmarked, the content of which can be controlled by the page (or group, or department) owner.

Even when there is a unique URL to a group page, most of these PSNs don’t enable layout control so that, for example, an administrator could post news and announcements at the top of the page to ensure they won’t get lost in the ever-flowing stream.

Integration with an Existing Intranet

Still, PSNs seem to be gaining significant traction within companies and across organizations. The lack of single sign-on has not deterred many people who see in these PSNs a way to boost communication and productivity beyond email. The easy way to retrofit an Intranet when many in the organization are using a PSN is to offer a prominent link to the PSN from the Intranet. You may also be able to embed content from the PSN directly into your Intranet:

• A good old fashioned RSS feed, if supported by the PSN, would allow updates to your Intranet as well as a user’s feed reader. This approach would be easy to implement, and would have immediate appeal. One thing to test is what happens when someone doesn’t have an account on the PSN or is otherwise not logged in: will the RSS feed still render its content (if so, isn’t that a securoty concern?), or will it fail elegantly?
• Going a step further, you could look for PSNs that enable embedding in an iframe, web part or widget. This is apparently what Yammer is about to deliver (article here). This would have the same effect as the RSS feed, but provide a richer display of the stream. The iframe approach is probably of limited utility, again because of the lack of control over the PSN layout: the entire page, including all the navigation links, would render within the embedded area.

This application area is evolving quickly, so there’s little doubt that before long PSNs will begin to challenge more full-featured social Intranet platforms such as Jive or SharePoint.

The last post referenced a method for embedding tweets into a web page using one of Twitter’s widgets. It’s kind of interesting, and does liven up a site a bit. But the tweets in that example weren’t about or by your company, per se. In the example, the widget’s tweets are the result of a search for specific words.

But there are two ways (at least) you can make your Twitter integration more relevant to your organization and, in so doing, more social.

1. Use Hashtags That Are Unique To Your Organization

As described in Twitter help, “The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. It was created organically by Twitter users as a way to categorize messages.” The primary thing they do is to help find or filter for specific topics or keywords. Of course, hashtagology has evolved to become an artform, a way to also add commentary on tweets. This usage is articulated really nicely in an article by Susan Orlean in the New Yorker, which is referenced on the Twitter help page.

But to make your embedded Twitter widget more relevant to your organization, you could choose a unique hashtag for your organization, presumably one that nobody else will use.

Say, for example, you work for Acme Explosives, and you want to use Twitter as a way to share tweets with employees. You wouldn ‘t use the hashtag #acmeexplosives, because that would probably be used more generally outside the company.  Instead, you might want to use a hashtag that might be meaningful internally, memorable to employees but not obvious to others. Maybe something like #acmecommunity or, depending on how arcane you want to be, you could name the hashtag after your favorite customer, in this case perhaps #overconfidentiivulgaris.

Once you have the hashtag in place, you can then create a Twitter Search Widget that returns all tweets that use that hashtag. In essence, these are public messages directed at a private audience, so not suitable for confidential messaging, but a reasonable way to share industry / public news and notices with a specific audience.

Note that there are no technical barriers that prevent others from using your unique tag, so mischief from non-employees or partners is possible in this approach.

2. Create a Twitter List of Employees

Another approach would be to create a public Twitter list of all employees and partners whose tweets you want to make available. There’s a good introduction to lists in the Twitter Help pages. In the complete version of this approach, you’d have every employee get a Twitter account.

Once you have that list in place, you can create a Twitter List Widget that is based on that public list. In this case, every tweet added by employees on that ist will appear in the widget. Of course, you may have employees who tweet in areas that aren’t relevant to your organization’s focus. In this case, those employees may want to create separate Twitter accounts, or you may want to use the hashtag approach.