Bruce MacVarish Notes

Flow-based Triggers

Paul Golding does a nice job describing the opportunity and impact of flow-based mobile applications on our daily lives.  I like the way Paul talks about weaving the flow of our activity streams into how we experience "events" in our personal "timelines" and the "timelines" of others.  

For me, the most interesting of Paul's points is found in his last sentence - "The tools invented to seize the moment have begun to define the moment".  

We will increasingly be triggered to take action in our personal and work lives by the transactions, conversations and relationships found within our activity streams and the activity streams of others. 

The real opportunity for flow-based applications is to evolve from helping us capture and share the moment, to creating triggers for new ones... new transactions, new conversations and new relationships at work and at home that would not have been created otherwise. 

Below are a few sections from his article published in the recent issue of Vodafone's Receiver: 

"We are rapidly headed towards a new era of human interaction that is marked by perpetual conversations and perpetual info drip-feed, as enabled by the umbilical of the mobile.  With its always-on and always-carried potential, the mobile allows our streams of consciousness and related intentions to be converted instantly into actions with both local and remote effects.  Not only does the mobile enable us to seize the moment, but increasingly it is the cause of the moment, adding more and more events to our daily timeline.

Time is nothing other than the intervals on a clock face counted out by the advancing second hand. But this is not how we experience time. We experience time as a series of moments measured out by events. Our personal timeline is a series of events that happen moment by moment and are dominated by the events that happen in our brains – thoughts, contemplations, urges and emotions bubbling up from our sub-concious stream, some of them converted by the conscious into intentions and sometimes into actions. It is communication and self-expression at the speed of thought. 

Not long ago, phone calls ('ring ring'), texts ('beep beep') and the alarm clock ('brrr brrr') were the only ways that our mobiles might 'interrupt' us. With Twitter, other Flow based Apps (my edit) and widgets, this is changing. But don't mistake these moments as interruptions. These are the moments that make the stepping stones of our daily timeline across the ocean of people and info chatter. We weave them into our timeline and they weave us into theirs. The tools invented to seize the moment have began to define the moment."

The Conversation-to-Conversion Process

"In the edge economy, an organization's capacity to capture, track, manage and analyze the conversation-to-conversion process improves its ability to innovate and grow."

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Webware 100 Finalists for 2009 - Communications Category

CNET's 2009 Webware 100 finalists for the Communications category are listed below.  Voting for your favorite closes on April 30th.

Which of the following finalists have you used... and which is your favorite?

As I look at the list, I find my self wondering how many serve as proof points aligned to my vision of the future state of enterprise comm applications.

AdiumJaxtrTanglerAIMJottThunderbirdCallWaveOtherInBoxVonageDigsbyPidginWebExDimdimPingerWindows Live HotmailFonPostboxWindows Live MessengerGmailPresentlyYahoo MailGoogle TalkRingCentralYahoo MessengeriChatSkydeckYammerJaJah DirectSkypeZimbra

When Passive Objects join the Conversation

In an earlier post, I point to Russell Davies' thoughts on what happens when (passive) objects have multiple communication channels embedded, become (active objects) and are able to converse with us, with relevant customer and vendor communities and/or with other relevant objects.

Russell was looking at this change and its impact from the Agency side, and I slightly broadened it to include new sources of growth for enterprise communication application providers :

"When products have their own communication channel built in, conversations across user communities, customer service interactions and social branding will provide sources of new growth."

Today, David Armano (@darmano) pointed out that Nokia interviewed Leonard Shustek, board chairman of the Computer History Museum, as part of their Ideas Project.   In the interview Shustek outlines his belief that our relationship with the objects we create is about to radically change. 

Today, the things we manufacture are for the most part passive. But as sensing, computing and communication capabilities proliferate, they will penetrate virtually every device we produce (and many we don't), profoundly modifying the way we live.

It is worth spending some time on the Nokia Ideas Project site... and you can start by viewing their interview of Leonard Shustek below..

Social-Enabling Voice Conversations

Daniel Berninger has a guest post on Jeff Pulver's Blog titled "The HD Connect Manifesto". 

In the post, Daniel highlights how text-based communications dominate voice-based communications and points out that the voice-based user experience in 2009 is essentially the same as it was in 1959:

"The growing adoption of text in the form of email, texting, and microblogging as the dominate mode of communication represents a remarkable development. It avenges the long ago defeat of the telegraph by the telephone. The underlying cause of declining interest voice communication represents a familar story. There exists no difference between the end user experience of a telephone call in 1959 and 2009. The wireless industry made telephone calls mobile. The VoIP industry made telephone calls cheap. Yet, every penny of voice revenue requires the sale of a 1950 quality telephone call."

I like Berninger's push to drive change in the user experience of voice based communications.  Importantly, Daniel is advocating that the combination High Definition (HD) audio quality, click-to-connect and unmetered global termination or collectively - HD Connect - as a foundation for a resurgent voice industry.

While improving voice quality and connectivity serves as a strong foundation, I also believe significant new value and growth can be found in over-hauling the user experience and unlocking new value found within voice-based conversations (not just connecting). 

Enabling users to store, thread and share conversations with relevance and context creates new value for users and new growth for the industry.  

Users want the ability to store voice-based conversations and manage them through tagging and indexing just as we do today with text-based communications.  Visual voicemail is an early proofpoint of this.  Once stored, users want the ability to see these conversations in the context of the real-time flow of personal and work activities and thread them (link them) appropriately.   In addition, users want to share important and relevant conversations with friends, co-workers and colleagues.   

While it is easy to subscribe to a person's blog, follow someone on Friendfeed or send a tweet to your followers on Twitter, the associated social graph is extended with many links that are weak and many nodes that may be irrelevant (to you or the conversation). 

The people we call and engage in voice-based conversations, in our personal and work lives, represent our active - and in many cases our most relevant - social graph.

To build a resurgent voice industry, consumers and business users need a new user experience that helps them unlock the value of their active, relevant social graph by social-enabling their voice conversations.  

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Communications becomes Entertainment

Netpop Research LLC has recently published a new report titled “Netpop | Connect: Social Networkers US” highlighting that at the same time as online communications has increased to 27% of online time spent, the time for traditional forms of online entertainment has declined dramatically down to 19% of time spent online.

Netpop concludes this is changing the face of how entertainment is defined, and giving rise to a new form of social / conversational entertainment built around talking, sharing, and providing opinions and perspectives.

Check out the presentation here:

Netpop | Connect: Media Shifts to Social 2009 Preview

View more presentations from Netpop.

While one could describe this as a shift toward social entertainment, describing this as "communications becomes entertainment" as highlighted by MarketingCharts.com opens up new ways to think about the evolution of communication applications.

If Communications becomes Entertainment, then the source of new communication opportunities may be found at the intersection of:

• game theory and communications
• social capital theory and communications 
• mobile social games and communications 
• gifting and communications 
• rating/ranking and communications   

We see it today in consumer communication applications and I think that is what Netpop Research highlights in their report.   

For me, it will be interesting to see if and/or how social, gaming and entertainment theory emerge in enterprise communication apps moving forward.

FriendFeed v2 - Increasing & Filtering the Flow

From Steve Gillmor @ TechCrunch on FriendFeed redesign... and is only the beginning:

"... what FriendFeed 2.0 suggests is the capture of the sense of the moment. Like a Kennedy press conference or the incredible rhythm trills of Lennon on the roof in Get Back, we're seeing something electric and tangible appearing out of nothing. I dive in and swim in the current, swooping from swirl to eddy, then into direct communication and back to the world I've left behind for a moment. It still takes several moves to accomplish a single task, but the handwriting is on the wall and the time is near when we can pick up where we left off months ago."

Dive in and swim in the flow from swirl to eddy... jump to direct communications...and later... pick up where we left off months ago.   This hints toward an interesting way to intelligently filter and manage near-real-time flows in terms of relevance, context... AND ... time.

Remember Clay Shirky's hypothesis that it may be that we're not suffering from information overload but rather filter failure.  

Friendfeed seems poised to help us filter and manage the flow... at least for the consumer.

Sensor Analytics of Real-time Activity

As flow-based applications continue to emerge and deliver on the promise of real-time conversation across networks, markets and communities, analytics apps that help us understand and sense the flow will becoming increasingly important.

If the first wave of monitoring and analytics apps focused on historical activity, then we're starting to see the second wave of analytics apps that focus on the real-time flow of conversations, sentiments and transactions.  

Chartbeat is a good example:

Chartbeat offers a real-time dashboard that shows how many people are on your site at any given moment, where they are, where they're coming from, and what they're doing.  Chartbeat constantly receives information about your users and we show you if they're reading, writing or idle. We also monitor twitter and blogs for comments about your brand