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.

The idea of “observable work,” as applied to the challenges of working digitally, may have first been created by Jon Udell in a 2009 post. A related meme, Narrate Your Work, was described by Dave Winer later that same year.

There are a few obvious ways I’ve typically quantified, or made visible, my work in the past – say, when creating a consulting invoice:

1. Search for documents created in a client folder for the designated time period
2. Trawl through the Sent Items folder in email
3. Scan through one’s calendar to identify meetings held and attended

There may be cases when archiving these artifacts into a zip or PDF file would be appropriate for making one’s work visible.

These days, the context in which work happens is evolving beyond documents stored on a hard drive or email. Online productivity apps like Google Docs, and scores of cloud-based tools now automatically log your activity, whether you’re planning, authoring, commenting or otherwise collaborating. Of course, few of these tools in my experience offer convenient ways to filter and view – make visible – the work you’ve executed. So, as before, you may be forced to create your own journal entries, perhaps with hyperlinks to your work artifacts.

It will be interesting to see the way in which working in online social environments might make work more visible. Of course, the signal-to-noise ratio will inevitably go down in such environments as items unrelated to work will be included, but increasingly important morsels will be shared in short fragments, as little as 140 characters or less. Sharing links, or answering technical questions, or reviewing text are all lightweight ways of adding value to a project, and often go unnoticed or unmeasured.

But if you conducted your projects within a group on a social platform like Jive, Yammer or Convofy, there would be stored in that location a record of all interactions, digital work and value added. This seems like a positive development in the process of making digital work visible – and valued. As teams look to the accrued value in these social platform, it might also push participants to be more conscious of their digital work as craft – that is, worthy of being observed and valued, and therefore worthy of taking greater care to deliver quality.

Like older sharing platforms, I don’t know that any of the newer social platforms offer a convenient way to capture, quantify and make the digital work of the team and its individuals visible. Furthermore, the hard part – identifying value in the stream of updates – remains as an exercise to the interested user. But all the data is there, and it seems like only a matter of time before digital work becomes more visible, its value better quantified and its quality more conducive to the elevated form of craft.

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.

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.

In the previous post, an external blog got hacked into a website through the use of iframes. “Hack” really is the operative word, and the approach is more evidence that a wholecoth solution is preferable when possible. However, there are many ways to season an old Intranet to enliven it a bit, and in this post we’ll look at the variations of Twitter widgets you can easily embed to make your site – internal or external – a little more social and dynamic.

Twitter itself does all the hard work in creating a Twitter widget. On the Twitter site, there’s a page that enables you to easily create four different kinds of dynamic feeds:

• Profile Widget: Display your most recent Twitter updates on any webpage. The image at left is an example.

• Search Widget: Displays search results in real time! Ideal for live events, broadcastings, conferences, TV Shows, or even just keeping up with the news.

• Faves Widget: Show off your favorite tweets! Also in real time, this widget will pull in the tweets you’ve starred as favorites. It’s great for moderation.
• List Widget: Put your favorite tweeps into a list! Then show ‘em off in a widget. Also great for moderation.

Below is a “Search Widget” which provides a real time feed of tweets containing the words “social” and “intranet”. There’s also a “List Widget” on this site, which shows a feed of Softjoe members’ tweets, accessible at the Twitter Feed link in the menu or here.

To create your Twitter widget, go to twitter.com/about/resources/widgets, and choose the My Website link on the left. There you’ll see the four kinds of feed reiterated above; choose the feed type of your choice, and Twitter offers you a set of simple controls to set up things like color, size, title, etc. Each page can show you a real-time preview of the widget as it will appear on your site.

When you’re done, click the button that says “Finish & Grab Code”, and you’ll get an edit control that has about 33 lines of code that you can copy and paste into your web site.

You can see an example of a Twitter widget in action here.

While Yahoo Groups or Google Groups lead the pack as obvious starting points, along with a plethora of wiki platforms or file-sharing sites, a surprising consideration might be one of the emergent social platforms. Socialcast, recently announced the ability to host external communities, for example, though this capability is not part of their free service.

Yammer however does enable external communities in its free version, and the capability is pretty compelling. Like most of the new social platforms – including CubeTree, Socialcast, Convofy and a slew of others – Yammer provides a free social network for everyone who shares the same domain name in their email address. And, like most of these others, this enables the ability to share files and links, create groups, share images and videos, and more. In fact, Yammer goes beyond most of these others by offering polls, events, org charts and more. Yammer even has an apps directory, with third party apps beginning to appear.

But for the purposes of this post, what is most intriguing about Yammer is its ability to host groups of heterogeneous members – that is, not all from the same email domain. At no cost. The image below provides a graphic look at how it works:

As indicated, external communities behave very much like groups within the native or primary network. They cannot themselves contain groups (though this is available in the premium version), but enable most of the types of content available in the top-level Yammer network. One interesting difference between an external network and a group, which is cosmetic but somehow seems useful nonetheless, is that external networks have their own unique URLs, without reference to the parent network. So for example, while groups have long URLs such as www.yammer.com/softjoe.com/groups/groupname, an external network can have a name such as www.yammer.com/opensoftjoe (as long as that URL hasn’t been taken by someone else).

Upgrading to the premium version of Yammer reveals other functionality for external networks, including all the apps in the app directory plus things like Groups, Org Charts, RSS Feeds, Inline Document Viewer and Inline Video Player.

We’re just getting started on using Yammer in this way for our Softjoe projects, and so far it looks good. More updates in this space as we gain more experience.

There’s been a lot of interest in Google Plus’s “Circles” feature over the past month. It seems to present a more sophisticated and nuanced ability to manage communications and relationships.

In Google Plus, you don’t just “friend” someone like you do in Facebook (a relationship that, like a LinkedIn connection, must be reciprocal), nor do you exactly “follow” them like you do in Twitter (which is not necessarily reciprocal).

Instead, in Google Plus you find someone and put them in a Circle. This has the same effect as following them on Twitter: that person’s posts will appear in your general stream, as well as the stream of posts for that circle.

And, like Twitter, the connection need not be reciprocal: if the other person does not add you to one of his/her circles, then your posts will not be included in their general stream. There is a place they can go, however, that will include posts from people who have encircled them: “Incoming”.

It seemed that this “Circles” approach uniquely enabled better segmentation of one’s connections and relationships, so that for example if you have something technically-oriented to post, you don’t need to intrude upon the notice of, say, your family. You just post it to a circle you may have create called, “Geeks”, and members of the circle called “Family” will not see the post (unless you have family members who are also geeks).

It turns out that the Circles capability in Google Plus isn’t new, it’s just promoted and designed better than the corresponding capability in Facebook. In fact, you could argue that Facebook allows better segmentation than Google Plus – if you can find it.

In Facebook there are two ways to segment your posts, and similarly filter the posts you receive:

• You can create groups in Facebook and invite friends to join. You can also just add friends to a group without their consent (though they can leave the group). In this case, posts to the group appear on the wall of group members only. You can even make private or secret groups to prevent non group members from finding those posts.
• Lists are actually pretty powerful in Facebook, and I suspect underused. You can create your own list of friends (lists aren’t shared, nor are they visible to your friends).

To filter your wall feed to show only updates from a particular list, click on the “Most Recent” dropdown at the top of the News Feed, and you’ll see the ability to choose from one of your lists.

You can also filter your posts so they’re visible only to specific lists. To do this, click on the status update box (“What’s on your mind”), and you’ll see the image of a lock, which is a drop down where you can select who sees the post. To select a particular friend, or a list of friends, click the “Customize” option.

So using lists ends up working very much like Google Circles, it just requires a little more effort. In fact, Facebook goes one step further: when you customize who will see your posts, you can also explicitly exclude friends or lists of friends.  A perfect approach for college students whose parents have friended them.

This report was sufficiently interesting to me that I thought it would be worth simply summarizing its findings. The report itself has much other interesting and evocative information, but for the sake of efficiency, I’ll simply include the top-level points of the report.

The skills are based on six drivers, which it defines as disruptive shifts that will reshape the workforce landscape:

1. Extreme longevity: Increasing global lifespans change the nature of careers and learning
2. Rise of smart machines and systems: Workplace automation nudges human workers out of rote, repetitive tasks
3. Computational world: Massive increases in sensors and processing power make the world a programmable system
4. New media ecology: New communication tools require new media literacies beyond text
5. Superstructured organizations: Social technologies drive new forms of production and value creation
6. Globally connected world: Increased global interconnectivity puts diversity and adaptability at the center of organizational operations.

In the report, these six drivers create the following ten critical skills. What I find interesting about these skills is that they are both the product, as well as the drivers, of new social engagement especially within organizations.

1. Sense-making
Definition: ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed

2. Social intelligence
Definition: ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions

3. Novel & adaptive thinking
Definition: proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based

4. Cross -cultural competency
Definition: ability to operate in different cultural settings

5. Computational thinking
Definition: ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning

6. New-media literacy
Definition: ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication

7. Transdisciplinarity
Definition: literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines

8. Design mindset
Definition: ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes

9. Cognitive load management
Definition: ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques

10. Virtual collaboration
Definition: ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team.

But collaboration has never fully lived up to it’s promise, except for academics and pundits who can wax at length about it’s (theoretical) virtues. The problem is that collaboration, as conceived in this context, is a purposeful and deliberate act. As if you would consciously allocate a certain percentage of your day to collaborative activities.

We saw this in observing the use of Buzzword, which was one of the finer collaboration tools of recent experience. The problem was that you had to think to go to Buzzword to encounter changes or comments from your collaborators; there was no effective notification. Even if there were, Buzzword (and all of Acrobat.com) remained a place apart, separate from your ongoing work and attention.

As a result, collaboration environments, as separate, discrete places disconnected from the flow of work, have remained somewhat stilted and their promise not fully realized. This is ironic when you think about it, and the opposite of the fluid and creative process evoked when you think of collaboration as experienced in jazz, improv or even flash mobs. Alas, online collaboration just hasn’t had flow.

Until now…

The sneaky thing about Convofy is that it looks familiar and innocent enough, something like Socialcast, Yammer or Chatter. It has a clean and orderly layout, a nice design, unique only that it is delivered in its own client application, not a browser, using Adobe AIR.

The UI paradigm is now very recognizable, a social feed with an input control at the top. When you click in the input control, as with Facebook, a variety of options are available besides simple updates, including the ability to add files, links, notes, task lists, and milestones.

So as you begin working in Convofy, you recognize it as a social networking environment, where you can add updates of various sorts, follow and be followed by friends and colleagues. You can also create groups, where you can segment your friends and colleagues. Oh, and you can also direct updates to colleagues and/or groups. So the social functionality is good, actually quite good, but the genre is well-understood by this time. Does the world need yet another one of these tools?

Well, maybe, because Convofy goes beyond being merely social. The cross-over nature of this application becomes apparent when you share a file or even a simple note with a group or with specific colleagues. For many common file types, including Office docs, PDFs and most image formats, the document is uploaded and converted into a preview form for viewing in context. Followers with access can also download the file, but if you leave it in Convofy you will be able to witness the integration of social networking and collaboration.

Convofy comes with an array of visual markup and annotation tools, the kind you will find in high-end tools like Acrobat and even Jive. These tools enable you to comment, highlight, underline, draw a circle around elements – all good collaboration capabilities when you want to work with others to create and refine content.

Remarkably, you can even comment or markup web pages added as links. Yes, the link you add leads to a replica of the actual web page. The advantage of delivering the application in Adobe AIR is that Convofy can render the web page and make it available for collaboration. Marking up and collaborating on web pages seems like a potentially very useful capability – especially for web designers and developers – and a capability I haven’t seen since Equill was acquired by Microsoft.

Finally, what makes this collaboration social is the fact that all comments and markups are surfaced in the relevant feed. In other words, the act of collaborative has become part of the social stream. Here’s an item snagged from a feed – a comment I made on a sentence taken from a Word document. The comment is above, and the snippet is a clickable link that takes you to the marked up version of the document.

When you click on the new comment or markup, you get taken right to the referenced location in the document or image. The comments appear on the right (like Buzzword).

Convofy goes where Acrobat.com did not go, but should have, applying Buzzword’s commenting ability to a broader range of documents, including PDFs.

So, is Convofy revolutionary? Possibly, though time will tell whether social networking and collaboration blend well this way. I have some reservations about the feed being the primary means by which users engage with collaborative content, though it’s a UI metaphor that seems to work for Facebook and Twitter. Convofy does offer some useful filtering options that allow you to look for files, or even specific file types. You can also filter on the other supported
content types.

So maybe this app will scale after all. It certainly is a fascinating attempt at uniting two related but heretofore only partially integrated application realms. With Convofy, the social element makes collaboration more immediate and relevant, while the collaboration capability makes social more substantive and valuable. This is an app worth watching.

For generations – maybe forever – people have been accustomed to sequestering information, and meting it out judiciously, often for some kind of personal gain. Even the simple act of sharing news or gossip can be done to position oneself as a valued source of information. In the extreme, and often in political organizations, jealously safeguarding information can feel like a survival strategy.

This instinct may vary from company to company, but I suspect that information hoarding is a natural human instinct.

The Social Web frames the information hoarding model in a more dubious position. The remarkable uprisings in the Middle East, enabled in large part by open access to information, are a stark reminder of this. When populist information is scarce, or the channels are mediated or occluded, it’s easier for regimes to wield power. The same is true for large organizations.

But once those communication channels are open and unencumbered, and information is no longer a scarce resource, what becomes of our information hoarding instinct? There are surely times where it’s still valuable, as when doing strategic planning or employee assessments, but for many other situations there is a need to develop or enhance the opposite instinct for sharing, generously.

This new instinct is more than a need, it’s an imperative. It leads to deeper engagement and ultimately greater job satisfaction. From the business perspective, information sharing leads to higher productivity, better alignment, as well as greater market awareness and responsiveness.

In a recent post called Change Is Good, But It’s Also Really Hard, Om Malik wrote:

Large companies are somewhat like me — once they get used to a certain behavior, they develop a certain culture and a set of procedures, processes and a work environment that defines them and their future. These define their corporate DNA. It is hard to change. You can’t buy new DNA, and companies can’t acquire their way into new corporate cultures. Furthermore, companies that lack that self-awareness of their DNA and behaviors, in the end, find themselves extinct.

Later in that article, Malik makes it clear that the required change is not about changing the DNA – the essence of a company, which is virtually impossible to change – it’s about changing behaviors that aren’t useful or constructive. Information hoarding can be one of those unhelpful behaviors.

As mentioned above, a vital element of the new information sharing instinct is engagement. With an online sharing environment, this can be seen as participation in the constructive, creative and enabling conversations that move the business forward. In a post called, Is Innovation Possible in Communications?, Valeria Maltoni frames engagement this way:

The difference between a motivated and energized group and one that sleep-walks through the day is engagement. And isnt that the very thing so many organizations are seeking from teams? What is engagement if not awareness, seeing whats going on around you, and responding appropriately and accordingly?

Information hoarding is the stuff of previous centuries and outdated regimes. But how do you change organizational instincts, which collectively is about changing corporate culture? Perhaps an infusion of new blood, though Om Malik was understandably not sanguine about those prospects. A populist uprising, though compelling on the world political stage, seems unlikely in a corporate environment, especially during a down economy when job security is paramount to most. Execs, comfortable in their relative isolation and unconvinced about the value, are unlikely to lead the charge.

Our approach is to tap high-value and catalytic people in the middle and upper levels of the organization, individuals we’ve dubbed Social Network Champions. These are people who are moving fast and generally making things happen in the organization. Not rooted in tradition, they can see the value of a new platform that will help drive, even accelerate, their agenda. We’ve also seen that if the platform is cumbersome, or the UI is ineffective, these people won’t waste time and will find other ways to get their work done.

These highly engaged individuals, we’re just beginning to see, don’t see information as something to wield selectively, but they instead distribute it freely – spewed out as a kind of collateral value, a by-product of their main activity.

So the hope is that the social platform will highlight the high-value sharing behavior of these Social Network Champions, and provide a clear example to others in the organization. This is the hope for changing behavior and, ultimately, instincts.