Sharing at Work

Vendor news from #e2conf: Socialtext free for 50 users, Lotus debuts “LotusLive Connections” SaaS collaboration platform

Daniel J. Pritchett — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:26:18 +0000

These are two discussions regarding the 2009 Enterprise 2.0 Conference from Boston. Conversations courtesy of Friendfeed… this is becoming a habit!

And they’re off… Postcard from Enterprise 2.0 Boston (itsinsider.com)
Open Enterprise Project: the state of Web 2.0 tools, architecture & techniques in the enterprise… (web2expo.com)
Corporate Bloggers: Look Outside the Walls, not Inside for Content Ideas (conversationagent.com)

Why Paul Buchheit of GMail and “Don’t Be Evil” fame is dead wrong about blog subscriber measurements

Daniel J. Pritchett — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:34:18 +0000

“You’re the Diet Coke of evil. Just one calorie, not evil enough.”

Image via Wikipedia

Social network and wonderfulness discovery engine Friendfeed set off a tizzy amongst its user base with yesterday’s announcement that they’ll start reporting Friendfeed profile subcsriptions as blog readers. To understand what that means, check out the image at the right hand side of this blog that trumpets “926 readers - by Feedburner“. Two days ago this blog was happy to boast 150ish subscribers, but Friendfeed’s update has visibly redefined the notion of blog reader measurement in a way that makes many bloggers - including me - uncomfortable.

I wasn’t sure what to make of the change at first, but now that cofounder Paul Buchheit has clarified his position it’s clear that Mr. Buchheit is wilfully conflating subscriptions to blogs with subscriptions to people:

I’m surprised that people think everyone subscribed to their RSS feed actually reads their blog. In Google Reader, I’m subscribed to hundreds of feeds (including a number of bundles), but really only read a couple of them. The same for iGoogle, etc. - Paul Buchheit

Why not count Friendfeed readers?

The 150 subscribers this blog claimed on Monday represented 150 different people opting in to a subscription to this blog. (If you haven’t tried it, you can do the same by clicking on either link next to the big orange button at the top right. It’ll even set you up with an email subscription if that’s what you’d prefer.) The 700+ new subscribers from Friendfeed have opted in to a subscription to Daniel Pritchett - not just this blog. This is a crucial distinction due to the variety of content user are sharing on networks like Friendfeed. Clicking through to Paul’s own feed shows that he’s streaming his contributions from almost 20 different services into a single feed. His personal blog is only one of those feeds, but its reader metrics will now include the 9000+ people following Paul’s FF profile.

Friendfeed founder kicks off a subscriber count blogmeme

While I dearly appreciate Paul’s contributions to my online life - I’m on GMail and Friendfeed at home, at work, and on the go - I’ve got to disagree with the spirit of his post. Paul’s right in suggesting that I’d be kidding myself if I thought more than a few people were actually reading every post I put up on this site whether the sidebar widget claims 900 or 150.

How do blog publishers know if anyone’s actually reading?

Blog syndication clearinghouse Feedburner provides lots of useful metrics behind the scenes to registered bloggers. Check out this Feedburner graph for a clear example of the difference between subscribers and active readers:

"Reach" measures actual readers rather than inactive subscribers

The green line counts everyone who’s signed up for a subscription to Sharing at Work while the blue line tracks the number of people actually reading the site’s news feed from day to day. On most days the green line is far above the blue one because most of you aren’t sitting around mashing F5 hoping for my next post to drop like Seth Godin’s legions of fans seem to do.

Why would Friendfeed HQ pretend that subscribing to a person and a publication are the same thing?

I think Paul, Bret, and the rest of the Friendfeed crew are savvy enough to see the difference between following a blog and following a blogger. My take on this change is that they, like many other of you - find subscriber counting to be an overblown pastime ripe for redesign. I figure Paul knows exactly what he’s doing by diluting Feedburner subscriber counts and he thinks that we’ll all be better off in a brave new future where people don’t write 800 word screeds like this one about blog subscriber counts and their effects on commerce, culture, and politics.

For even better analysis on this topic, check out buddy bloggers Rob Diana and Louis Gray’s posts from yesterday:

Nothing against the FriendFeed team, as they have always been awesome, but I think the subscriber count reporting may be a bad idea. I would prefer that they remove the feature (not that I have a choice) and continue adding awesomeness to FriendFeed itself.

from Subscriber Counts Now Mean Nothing

Rob’s Regular Geek blog

It’s tempting to go back the age-old line of there being lies, damn lies, and statistics. On the Web, where practically everything is measured and big numbers are almost always better, counting up one’s followers, friends, subscribers or authority is practically a pasttime. But with each metric comes a question of validity - how did they approach that data, and is that process consistent with the world view of what is factual?

from FriendFeed Sneaks Into My RSS Stats And Hits The Big Red Button

Louis at Louisgray.com Live

Memphis social media calendar: Start a business, learn about the semantic web, meet interesting people!

Daniel J. Pritchett — Thu, 21 May 2009 21:50:05 +0000

: Memphis skyline via Wikipedia

Starting in fifteen minutes…

The May edition of Social Media Expedition’s Memphis “TwilightCamp“. From the site:

[T]he after hours version of our Expedition breakfasts. It’s a little more casual, but still packed with information and networking opportunities. There will be plenty of time to catch up with your Memphis social community…

Next weekend…

Startup Weekend Memphis 2 is a 48-hour event where (up to) 100 people get together for a weekend and try to rapidly flesh out and implement some startup business ideas. Last year’s business was Spynnr, a tool to facilitate gatherings amongst alternative sports enthusiasts. So far there seems to be a Facebook application and a Ning community involved.

Two weeks from yesterday…

The June edition of Social Media Expedition, with a panel planned on semantic web technologies. I’ve enjoyed this breakfast series many times - this will be my 5th or 6th chance to attend. You should come too!

Related articles by Zemanta

Social Semantic Web: Where Web 2.0 Meets Web 3.0 (captsolo.net)
LinkLog: Social Networks for Creative People, Medici effect, Twitter… (dorai.wordpress.com)

Innovation Webinar Live Chat (Spigit/Forrester hosting)

Daniel J. Pritchett — Wed, 13 May 2009 17:18:04 +0000

Hutch’s blog has an overview of the session with a registration link if you’d like to join in. Realtime chat from Friendfeed below:

Collaboration throughout the centuries - a letter from a reader

Daniel J. Pritchett — Mon, 11 May 2009 21:24:46 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

Today’s post comes from a colleague of my father’s. They are working together in Baghdad as civilian advisors to the Iraqi legal system on IT process and infrastructure matters.

Dear Daniel,

I am working with your Dad in Iraq and he was telling several of us about what you do and how you are trying to get people interested in sharing information in order to move business along more quickly. Your approach sounds exactly like that of Ben Franklin (founding father Ben). He wrote a letter to a friend at one point and said something like “I forward these thoughts to you somewhat unformed but want to get them in front of others because some ingenious soul may be able to refine them more quickly than I”.

His philosophy always was to share information as quickly as possible because someone else might have a different take on it and advance the ides more quickly that he could. He was very open with his work. Another great philosopher of the Enlightenment Period was Joseph Priestley. I commend to you a book called “The Invention of Air” as it explains, in a manner so much better than I, how important the sharing of information was to rapid progress in science, philosophy and religion. It is an easy read.

I wish you success in your endeavor and just want you to realize that you are in the company of some truly great minds.

I hold myself as more of an interested observer than a thought leader in the wide world of workplace collaboration, but I greatly appreciated Rod’s letter all the same. I’d love to see correspondence and collaboration flourish above and beyond current workplace norms. Let’s all continue to share emails and blog posts and comments together, whether they be with coworkers, friends, or with strangers who might share our interests.

Enlightenment Man 2.0: Talking Joseph Priestley with Steven Johnson (omnivoracious.com)
Bill Clinton On The Invention Of Air (stevenberlinjohnson.com)

Enhance your events with these hashtag “backchannel” tips

Daniel J. Pritchett — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:09:20 +0000

Twitterprise: Rolls off the tongue. Use it in a sentence.

Today’s lunch hour was a fun trip to two enterprise collaboration webinars: The first was #Twitterprise part 3 put on by @ross and SocialText. The second was Jive Software with #ihgwebcast “InterContinental Hotels Group Presents: Boosting Customer Loyalty with Social Business Software“. Let’s just go ahead and spoil the surprise by saying that #Twitterprise was more fun.

What was great about the sessions?

#Twitterprise turns out to be an *excellent* name for a webinar series. It succinctly captures the topic of “enterprise microblogging” in fewer syllables and far fewer letters. It’s fun. It invokes the growing popularity of the Twitter brand. You can use it in a sentence, when talking about the topic rather than the event itself.

The magic of this can’t be overstated: Instead of paring what I wanted to say and then slapping #twitterprise at the end of each tweet, we can just skip right over saying “twitter” or “enterprise microblogging” or whatever and insert #twitterprise inline in its place. The evocative brevity of this trick is perfect. Kudos to whichever person came up with the name!

The #twitterprise backchannel was pretty lively. There were about ten different people participating over the course of a one hour (free) webinar. Kudos and followups trickled in throughout the remainder of the day.

Jive ended their session with a link to a Jive-hosted forum for continued discussion of the IHG webinar. It’s nice seeing everything aggregated into one place, but I imagine there will be lower attendee conversion over to this new destination than there might have been if discussion kept to Twitter.

What could be even greater next time?

My only real lament is a lack of subtle cues from other tweeters on the #twitterprise hashtag stream. I dumped a lot of informative links into the stream as a way of supplementing the ongoing discussion. I’ve continually refined this sort of behavior over on FriendFeed where I am a heavy contributor, but it might not play so well on Twitter.

Unfortunately, there’s really no way to know if other #twitterprise readers enjoyed my links. They could quite likely have been irritating fellow viewers (or more likely first party presenters!) by clogging up the stream with third party content when people were really looking for more info from SocialText and the presenters from Pistachio. A simpler form of feedback such as a FriendFeed [Like] could go a long way towards helping users self-evaluate their behavior in a public setting like this one.

Thank Meryn Stol for suggesting this particular idea. I’d love to see it added to the Twitter hashtag following toolkit, but who knows if or when Twitter will see fit to add that sort of feedback mechanism. They’ve already got the star/favorites feature - perhaps they can make it more immediately obvious when others react to our content.

Presenting While People are Twittering (blogs.msdn.com)
Jive finishes up my enterprise disruption week (scobleizer.com)
Socialtext Brings Status Updates to the Enterprise (mashable.com)
Microblogging Will Marginalize Corporate Email (bhc3.wordpress.com)

Running your own vanity OpenID provider is a horrible idea

Daniel J. Pritchett — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 21:45:26 +0000

My own personal OpenID failure

I haven’t been able to access my own OpenID since November. I made the mistake of binding many of my social network accounts to the “www.sharingatwork.com” OpenID back when I was hosted by Blogger. I lost them when I moved away from Blogger. This isn’t anyone’s fault but mine, and yet I still feel obligated to share this cautionary tale:

I started this blog as danielpritchett.blogspot.com using free hosting from Blogger (i.e Blogspot) last July. After a month or two I was pretty sure I liked the whole blogging thing and I knew I’d like to move on to a more customizable platform. Hosted Wordpress was my obvious choice so I moved over to Tubu in November.

I strongly support collaboration software and as I’ve mentioned repeatedly on this blog I enjoy things that reduce barriers to participation. User registrations and logins are the first and biggest barriers most sites present to collaboration, so I’ve been using OpenID where I can’t get an even easier method of single sign on. That worked out fine well for me until I made the decision to sever my connection with Blogger.

Where my OpenID went wrong

: My OpenID is locked out.

It wasn’t a bad idea on the surface to use www.sharingatwork.com as my OpenID address. My blog was run by Blogger (i.e. Google) and so it enjoyed strong uptime and decent free support. When I switched to a hosted blog service, uninterrupted OpenID support was rather low on my list of priorities, but I assumed I could take care of it. I tried a WordPress plugin that claimed OpenID support but it’s not working for me. The plugin authors have been working their way through variations on this problem for a few months now, and I’ve no doubt they’ll eventually get it fixed.

Once my personal OpenID inevitably comes back up I’ll use it to log in to all of my five-months-dormant accounts and move them to a more dependable OpenID provider. I appreciate the product and service Tubu’s given me, but I should never have tried to cram OpenID into my $10/year blog hosting package.

What I should have done (and what you should do!)

If you want an OpenID of your own, I recommend you pick one up from a bigger and more dependable OpenID provider such as the ones recommended at OpenID.net. It’s your choice whether you want to use a standalone OpenID service like ClaimID or the OpenID feature of a larger web property like AOL, but either choice is less likely to cause headaches than foolishly running your own OpenID server like I did.

What does this say about OpenID?

First and foremost this shows that OpenID is still a developing technology and that best practices haven’t been perfectly ironed out. I’m sure a personal OpenID provider can work for some people, but in my case it’s turned out to be more than it’s worth. I’ve got the training and experience to be able to fix this WordPress plugin that’s giving me grief, but it’s not the sort of thing I’m interested in devoting my time to this year. Most bloggers won’t even have the programming and computer security background to pretend - like I am - that they could fix it if they so chose.

Portable logins are still a big part of the future of consumer web interactions, but I have to grudingly admit that the legions of OpenID detractors (hi Mona!) have a point. If someone with my technical background can’t easily make the right choices to navigate the user authentication minefield, what hope do non-technical surfers have of choosing the right solution? There’s still work to be done.

I’d like to say that Facebook Connect is the stopgap I need right now, but my Fortune 100 employer’s firewall blocks *.facebook.com so I can’t use that service in the way I’d like to. Maybe Google’s FBConnect competitor will morph into something useful soon. Nobody outside of China blocks Google at the firewall, right?

Funny(?) aside: The first post on this blog was about OpenIDs and how great they’d be at minimizing registration and sign-in headaches.

Blogger connects to Google Friend Connect (googleblog.blogspot.com)
Friend Connect: Grow Your Blog’s Community (buzz.blogger.com)
How Facebook Connect Points the Way Towards Velvet Rope Networks (chrisbrogan.com)

Enjoy two new offsite posts at One Half Amazing and Louis Gray

Daniel J. Pritchett — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 22:10:35 +0000

: Bob Hazlett photo by launchmemphis via Flickr

Memphis-based online marketing professional, video blogging expert, and BarCamp contributor Bob Hazlett recently asked me to participate in his fledgling “Buddy Blogger” interview series and gratefully accepted. Head over to One Half Amazing for the interview and learn more about where the blog has taken me in the months since I started writing. I had fun sharing my ideas on the future of workplace collaboration, the process of writing this blog, and other blogs I enjoy.

Louis Gray photo by Thomas Hawk via Flickr

Silicon Valley blogger, marketer, and all-around social media expert Louis Gray continues to flatter me with the opportunity to contribute to his blog, and my latest effort just went up: Weblogs Inc’s iPhone Ads Show Focused Content Delivery. This observational marketing research style is a departure from the usual fare here at Sharing at Work and it has been fun writing about topics beyond my day to day work environment.

Don’t forget to subscribe to Bob’s and Louis’s RSS feeds while you’re perusing their blogs! Thanks again to both of you for sharing your spaces with me, it was a pleasure.

Six months later, FriendFeed grabs the team microblogging grail

Daniel J. Pritchett — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 22:00:42 +0000

It’s been just under six months since FriendFeed launched their first real time updating features. At the time I was characteristically excited about the possibilities, noting that

twitter-style @replies to individual users and direct messages to individual users … are all it would take to push FriendFeed over the hump in the enterprise market. - Sharing at Work, 10/2008

Yesterday FriendFeed unveiled an impressively hyped beta to further advance their realtime capabilities, and my requests were granted! The new FriendFeed beta does have “direct messages”, but they’ve made the excellent decision to allow the DM feature to also be used as a public notification service.

Sure, you can DM a private message to one of your contacts just like you could always do with Twitter or email, but now you can do a lot more. Post something directly to your personal FriendFeed stream, and you can choose to copy specific users in the To: field of the message. Check out the following screenshot for a taste:

FriendFeed direct messages can have multiple recipients and they can optionally be publicly dislpayed, linked, and responded to

What should your team do with this powerful new tool?

First and foremost, get a few of your closest colleagues on FriendFeed with you. Create a room (FF rooms are now called Feeds) and start collaborating. Share relevant links with one another. Address your shares to users who you think will get the most value out of them. If and when one of your threads gets really valuable, link it to the rest of your team via email.

Which competitors should be afraid?

Yammer is - I believe - the biggest name in enterprise microblogging right now in terms of press mentions. This is presumably due to their winning the best of show award at TC50 2008. Yammer in particular is going to have trouble distinguishing itself in the face of FriendFeed’s superior conversation and link sharing options. The only things I can see saving them are a dedicated focus on finding and retaining enterprise customers. As a public service, the FF team is unlikely to start specifically courting Enterprise users just yet. Maybe we’ll soon see someone leave FriendFeed to start an enterprise-focused spinoff, just like we saw from FaceBook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz.

Twitter is the public face of microblogging, as surely as Xerox is the face of photocopying. The vastly larger userbase of Twitter keeps them safe from being overrun by FriendFeed today, but FriendFeed - with its post-GMail engineering pedigree and impeccable uptime record - is clearly positioned to make a run against Twitter. If FriendFeed can maintain their flawless technical record while continuing to roll out powerful new tools, they will be ready to catch a stumbling Twitter that seems to dedicate more time to fighting fires and controlling external API access than to enhancing the user experience.

How can FriendFeed further improve their best-of-breed messaging platform?

Add the option to take a private conversation thread public. A fifty-line “DMversation” with @lalunablanca last night convinced me that we might need to after the fact if all involved parties opt in. This can be worked around currently by cutting and pasting relevant text to new places, but it would be nice expand on the existing conversation thread if we decide to share it later.
Add a new recipient - or room - to the recipients list of an existing thread that’s suddenly blown up. FriendFeed threads start out with zero comments and a comparatively small amount of inherent value. Once the thread attracts a rollicking conversation and explores multiple facets of the original topic, it’s suddenly got lots of value and is often worthy of resharing. While FriendFeed’s improved semantic URLs can be re-linked wherever you might want them, it would be great to be able to bring in additional actors when a thread gets hot.
Further promote the power and flexibility of FriendFeed direct messages by renaming the feature and giving it increased visibility in the beta layout. FriendFeeder Tina suggests that the feature be called “Notices” instead in order to differentiate it from current-generation direct messaging options such as Twitter’s.

Where else can I learn more about FriendFeed and its growing number of business uses?

A number of blog posts on the new FF beta went up yesterday. I’ve enjoyed efforts from Thomas Hawk, Hutch Carpenter, Louis Gray, Robert Scoble, and plenty of others. Here’s a collection of recent blog posts about FF that I’ve found interesting if you want even more links.

Now that you’ve made it through this energy-filled gush of a post, I’ll bet you’ve got a few ideas of your own on how FriendFeed can (or can’t!) be used to further your goals at work. What do you like? What do you want to see improved? Sound off with a comment below, and don’t forget that you can sign in using a Facebook account if you don’t already use Disqus.

Enjoy my new mobile security article at LouisGray.com

Daniel J. Pritchett — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:25:37 +0000

Louis Gray has kindly published another of my articles at his early adopter / tech geek site LouisGray.com this week. This one’s about potential new security applications for mobile phones.

I’m particularly interested in the implications of the just-released Battle.net Authenticator by Blizzard Entertainment - it’s like a consumer-grade RSA authentication token for a notoriously difficult to secure class of user accounts. We use these RSA tokens at my job for security on days when we need to work remotely. Since these can cost $100 to replace, it’s neat to see a free program that provides a similar solution.