Pretty much every time I read Seth Godin, I get a good reminder to step outside of my narrow thinking and look broader. It happened this time as well, but there’s one point I need to take issue with in his post on Senior Management.
It’s the Steve Jobs assessment that doesn’t sit well with me. You just don’t grab dominant market share in areas where you didn’t even have a footprint without having a deep understanding of how the market currently works. It’s also misleading to claim the Apple has no significant online or social media presence. iTunes doesn’t obey the rules of the open web, but it is certainly both an online and social destination. By any metric you’d like to use, it’s one of the top destinations of the Internet.
Got some good help in SEO and advanced Google Analytics Techniques from Google Analytics Ninja. Not sure if he says so on his blog, but he is available for consultation. Knowledgeable and to the point.
Flickr changed their photo page. I haven’t even interacted with the new page yet, and I already like it. Why? The way they introduced it to me. From the initial ‘want to see the future’ to the 5 step quick tour, to the surprise guest.
Go check it out. I’ll wait.
I don’t know about you, but after seeing this, I immediately thought of Facebook. Every time Facebook changes anything, all streams are a-flutter with people forswearing the new, pining for the old.
What did Flickr do right?
They didn’t force change on me, they let me choose it. They even tempted me in and stimulated a desire for the new.
Once I jumped over, they helped me understand how to operate in the new environment.
They worked hard to put a smile on my face when it was all done.
When I first heard of Conway’s law, I though it was a geek joke. After years of seeing it play out again and again, I’m realizing that it actually communicates a deep truth about how the world works.
Conway’s law (in my words): Any organization that creates something is doomed/destined to create something that is a mirror image of its own organizational structure.
I’m doing some consulting work for a small organization that is spread out over two continents. Two continents, about 10 computers, and probably no official full time employees. The fellow who runs it does so out of love, and he hires people to handle issues as they come up. There have to be at least 4 or 5 technical folks with their hands on these machines. Maybe more. Truth is - I don’t know how many there are, because I’ve never met them. I don’t even know most of their names. One fellow I can catch on skype, but I don’t have his phone number.
And the systems of this organization look exactly the same way - a scattering of programs and computers that are cobbled together by a mess of scripts that either don’t interface with each other, or do so in a totally unique and unpredictable way. When something breaks, it’s an archeology exercise to figure out how it was built and what went wrong.
The organization wants to fix the problem by finding ‘a better computer person’ to add to the group. Meanwhile, the rest of the bunch still have their fingers in their part of the mix. If they really wanted to get things shaped up, they’d either hire a serious full time person to take on the whole picture, or at least insist that all the people involved have a regular conference call. Without that, Conway’s law is going to keep us all poking away at a scattered bunch of misaligned things that don’t come together into anything cohesive.
Over the past few years, I’ve been getting more and more regular in my meditation practices. One of the main benefits of meditation, for me, is an increased calm awareness of what is going on in my head during the time when I’m not meditating. I can sit back and watch, learn to identify patterns, uncover deeper motivations, avoid traps, and the like.
From this viewpoint, I’ve noticed an interesting effect. The latest movies I’ve seen and the latest video clips play through my head on a kind of re-run, sometimes for days, usually with no added insight or enjoyment. My mind rescreens them, for whatever reason. It seems like they are more sticky if the emotion of the first watching was stronger. As if the emotion has waves that play out over the course of days.
My spider sense tells me that we’re looking at Web 3.0 on this one - the next big step up - and what could very well be a serious crimp in Facebook’s style. It’s a communication and collaboration platform. It’s open. It’s got an API. It’s open to community development. It’s got Google momentum and mass exposure to make it happen.
It’s email, it’s live chat, it’s a wiki, it drags and drops files from the desktop, it embeds itself everywhere. Garden walls comes down. And it’s open - it’s just the beginning. Think whiteboard, think document collaboration, think task tracking, think project management, think collective web browsing. Zing!
On the knowledge management front, it looks like Wolfram is about to take a major step forward. I don’t make these predictions often - based on Wolfram’s track record and what it sounds like they’re set to deliver - this could be the next step in knowledge search, research, and computation. Meaning - it looks like it’s going to make the Google/Wikipedia method look a tad bit dusty. Wolfram Alpha is set to go live sometime in May. There’s a blog which gives us a bit of a tease.
Dr. Stephen Wolfram demonstrated Wolfram Alpha yesterday at Harvard. The video (embed below) gives us tons of mouth watering scenarios, video of Dr. Wolfram typing, but almost no views of the product performing. It sounds like it’s working. It sounds like he’s demonstrating something quite amazing.
I appreciate, as a observant Jew, that no matter how deep technology gets into our lives, there will always be one day a week where we will turn off the phones and the computers, get out of the cars, turn off the Kindle, power down the bionic retinal enhancers, and appreciate the simple world. Barring major unrest, I’ll always have books on my shelves.
My brain balks at fully understanding Twitter. I feel as if I can understand other media - newsprint, TV, Wiki, whatever. Twitter feels to me as if it’s half born - as if we haven’t yet seen what this baby is going to do.
Global Social Message Bus
In essence, it’s the pure social network - no frills, hobbies, books I’ve read, pokes, movie reviews. It’s just nodes, directed connections, and the ability to pass messages along those connections.
Massive MessagingAnything Market
The power is multiplied when combined with URLs. Nodes, directed connections, and the ability to pass ANYTHING along those connections.
Neurons and Synapses - Rewire at Will
We’ve spoken for decades about electronic communication becoming the nervous system of the planet. This baby is laying it bare and bringing it out to the edges.
August 6th 2010 Google plans to drop Wave - CNN.com EI: “I'm betting that it gets reworked, rebranded, and relaunched. There's way too much cool technology in here to just mothball.”
August 5th 2010 Facebook (1) | Eliezer Israel EI: “This is entirely an exercise in testing the power of links from Google Buzz, my blog, and various other RSS consumers. No need to pay attention. Move along.”
My spider sense tells me that we’re looking at Web 3.0 on this one - the next big step up - and what could very well be a serious crimp in Facebook’s style. It’s a communication and collaboration platform. It’s open. It’s got an API. It’s open to community development. It’s got Google momentum and mass exposure to make it happen.
