In the past week Tim O’Reilly and Guy Kawasaki have written thoughtful posts about why they love twitter.  Here is a summary of their thinking:

Tim O’Reilly likes the way Twitter works to establish ambient intimacy:

If I’m interested in someone, I don’t have to ask their permission to follow them. I don’t have to ask if they will be my friend: that is something that evolves naturally over time. If you’re a public figure like I am, the metaphor of mutual “friending” is truly broken. I get tens of thousands of friend requests from people I don’t know. Accepting would make it impossible for me to use a social tool to keep in touch with my real friends….Twitter’s brilliant social architecture means that anyone can follow me, and I can follow anyone else (unless they want to keep their updates private.) Gradually, through repeated contact, we become friends……I know not just what people are thinking about or reading, but enough about what they are doing that our relationship deepens, just like real-world friendships. People who follow me on Twitter learn that I’m making jam or pies, or gardening or riding my bike or feeding the horses, things that I’d never (or rarely, since I’m doing it here) share on my blog.

For O’Reilly, Twitter transcends the web:

Like all of the key internet services today, Twitter is equally at home on the mobile phone. Even on the PC, I find myself using a separate client (Twhirl is an Adobe Air program) that provides a rich, alternate interface.

And finally, Twitter is emblematic of one of O’Reilly’s key principles of Web 2.0:  Data is the Intel Inside. 

Twitter isn’t just a protocol. It’s also a database.  That means that they can let go of controlling the interface. The more other people build on Twitter, the better their position becomes.

Guy Kawasaki is less philosophical and more practical in his advice about twitter.  In an earlier post, He gives good advice about how to build a network of followers (follow the social media whores; follow everyone who follows you; always be linking — I used to give this advice to people who were trying to build blog networks back in the old days).  Once you have built a following you want to monitor what people are saying about you and to ask for help.  And use tools like twitterfeed that enable you to provide an rss feed to twitter from you blog or any source. 

I do follow Tim O’Reilly on twitter (via an rss feed of his tweet in Google Reader) and I find his tweets to be full of useful information.  Rather than document his activity, Tim uses his twitter feed to pass along things he finds interesting.  He is “upstream” of me on a number of topics I care about so he is a good source. 

I find Guy’s tweets to be less valuable.  They are too voluminous — spammy really — to be of value.  More about his actions than interests. 

All that said, I do find twitter to be an interesting tool for communicating around events.  All the event needs is a public hashtag and twitter users who are attending the event can coordinate their interests, pass along notes, and share stuff. 

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Ross outlined how his wiki software has evolved in terms of how it is being viewed and used:

2002: project communication and lighweight documentation
2004: general collaboration

2008: specific business processes

Ross hates business processes but he believes in the idea of management by exception. For enterprise 2.0 to take hold, It has to be about problems that are being solved. And wikis can solve the problem of managing mass collaboration so that the exceptions to standardized business processes can be managed efficiently.

Opportunities abound in the area of collaborative Intelligence: too often feedback from field is broken. Search and browse by tag and solve exceptions to business processes.

Ross believes the goal of enterprise 2.0 software is not automation to drive down business costs. Rather the goal is augmenting people to get better productivity. In this I wholeheartedly agree with him.

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Rishi makes the argument that this type of distributed work is best supported with cloud computing. The cloud is the only place where you can achieve the economics and scalability needed to have global solutions built on open standards.

Of course the big bugaboo is the issue of security. Rishi counters with the notion of false security under today’s “behind the firewall paradigm.” Huge numbers of lap tops are stolen. Data sticks are lost. At the same time the cloud computing providers need to prove that you are secure. Rishi asks: are your five to ten security experts more adept than the hundreds of security experts at google?

The era of the cloud has arrived: All innovation that is relevant to the enterprise will happen in the cloud. Because this software is built on open standards, there will be lots of competitors. The move to the cloud will be driven by the needs and desires of the under 30 generation who are dependent on team productivity not individual productivity.

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Dion Hinchcliffe clearly knows his stuff but I find his presentation to be overly complicated and his graphics, while rich, are complicated to the point of fussy.

The presentation began by mapping the terms enterprise 2.0, social media, and km 2.0 on Google trends. This is a good way to show how 2.0 tools are now entering the collective mindset if not the enterprise. Dion related a story of how 2.0 tools pushing the other tools out of the realm. AOL was using Documentum and mediawiki just blasted documentum out of the water.

He also cited a statistic from Forrester Research that 50 % of Global 2000 are planning to adopt e20 — a $4.6 billion market in by 2013.

I felt one of the key moments of the presentation was Dion’s presentation of the newest compact definition of web 2.0 from Tim O’Reilly:

“Networked applications that explicitly leverage network effects.”

Thus it follows that social networking will be the largest e20 app in terms of dollars spent (although this was not covered in the part of the tutorial I saw).

One of the audience members raised the notion that “individuals become hubs of their own personal networks.” In my opinion this is controversial and at the core of why e20 finds so much resistance behind the firewall. But it is also at the of the key value that can be created by e20 services — that is a network of talented individuals who share knowledge and collectively raise the intelligence of an organization. Unfortunately most e20 platforms don’t recognize this as the core value and are built around generic services rather than people.

I did not get to see the case study portion of the meeting. (The set up was awful. We were packed into tight rows in a small room.) This is the kind of session that needs to be set up classroom style so that people can spread out and interact with one another.

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I’m looking forward to hearing about the state of the industry, as I’ve spent a number of years developing web 2.0 solutions for enterprises.

I plan to cover the keynotes and a number of the sessions. I also plan to interview people as much as possible.

Given my experience, my interest (and bias) are towards looking at enterprise 2.0 not as a general “platform” but rather as a solution to problems that cannot be solved by other means. So I’ll be exploring and writing from this angle.

If you have questions and/or topics you’d like to see explored, please email me at kathleen@ottergroup.com and I’ll do my best to cover them.

Stay tuned….

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Now I’m looking for a select group of companies interested in co-developing the next version of our SWIFT platform. Yesterday I put out a request to my connections on LinkedIn:

Can anyone introduce me to conference producers who would be interested in working on our next version of SWIFT? We are looking for independent owners who are innovative and entrepreneurial.

I received about 10 responses from my network (thank you guys!) and found some very interesting new connections.

I have only used this feature once before and it is something that I would use sparingly. I don’t want to bombard my network with what could become irritating requests for help. But in the right context, this is a very useful feature.

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Our boot camp was built around developing plays for your 2.0 community. Plays are tactical maneuvers that achieve a foundation built on strategic goals.

II. The Plays

The Promise – your social media strategy must offer a higher value than other services out there - this values is what will drive interest and adoption. This value may be given to the group or perhaps to the individual first and then to the group.

Tools – there are a myriad of social media tools out there - social networks, blogs, RSS aggregators, microblogs, bookmarking sites and so on. You must select the tool(s) designed to fit the job, one appropriate for large or small groups and appropriate for the mode of interaction you want to foster. Tip: new tools are not always better.

Bargain – What will you and your audience get in return for participating? How will the investment be repaid? Users must agree to the bargain (the deal). Tip: the more complex the interaction you are fostering, the more complex the bargain will be.

We covered some sample plays and then had the group of 60 break out into four groups and work on developing their own plays. The break outs were tremendous with some really terrific plays emerging.

Sylvia and I will be running the boot camp in a day-long format for clients at their businesses. If you are interested in driving utilization for your 2.0 efforts, this is a great way to get going. Email me: kathleenceo-at-gmail.com for further details.

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So please plan to join us for the boot camp and bring your stories. Collectively we’ll forge them into a narrative of a successful community.

Technorati Tags: community2.0-bootcamp, community2.0

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The new model creates a more trusted environment for reaching high-value, frequent purchasers, whether of airline tickets, electronics, clothes or other items. Where does that leave the less-frequent purchasers? Probably looking to their friends rather than to advertising for advice. I’m an expert on travel; my friends may look to me for hotel choices. When I’m in the mood to buy a book or a new computer, I’ll check out what my friends on Facebook are doing.

This does not mean that traditional online advertising will go away, just that it will become less effective. Value is being created in users’ own walled gardens, which they will cultivate for themselves in real estate owned by the social networks. The new value creators are companies — like Facebook and Dopplr — that know how to build and support online communities.

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Alloy Media + Marketing commissioned a study by Harris Interactive toward the end of the 2007 school year. Social networking ranked highly, and was listed as a daily activity by 54% of respondents, second only to e-mail.

More than one-quarter of respondents also said they viewed online video daily, which explains why many students listed YouTube as their favorite Web site.

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