Bruce MacVarish Notes

Not all Graphs are the same

Chris Dixon, CEO of Hunch, recently presented at a GoogleTechTalk at the Google New York office.

Chris talked about the value of Graphs ... as in social, communications, intention, taste graphs ... the evolution toward Graph Wars ... and strategic choices important to developing graphs.

 

I was particularly interested in his question:

"How are Communication Graphs related to Social or Taste Graphs?"  

While there may be some overlap in "nodes" that appear across all 3 graphs, there are many "nodes" that are distinct.  As a result, we should expect to see the use of each graph as the source for distinctly different services for users.

Because not all Graphs are the same, the value of network analysis and new graph based services will continue to grow.

Games @ Work

I wanted to refresh my thinking on the Guiding Principles of Game Design @ Work from my earlier post. 

 

The Guiding Principles for Games @ Work were focused on making it easy for collaboration leaders and business users to:

1. Define clear boundaries, shared problem(s) and a community of collaborative business users

 

2. Assign satisfying tasks or roles that enable business users to excel and be part of something "Bigger"

 

3. Build nonmonetary incentives into a game economy to strongly motivate individuals to accomplish group aims.

 

4. Deliver hyper- transparency of information about users' skills and teams’ real-time performance 

 

5. Create a virtual economic marketplace for information and collaboration

 

6. Open multiple real-time sources of information and communication upon which to make decisions

 

7. Structure as a project-oriented organization that can easily be disbanded and reformed based on tasks and skills

 

8. Recognize individual, group and company achievements in a clear, specific way

 

9. Open visibility into all skills / project / social networks of communication across an organization

 

10. Adapt multiple, purpose-specific communications mediums to improve speed and efficiency of collaboration. 

 

With a little vision, strategy and design, it is not hard to see how game design principles will be shaping the future of communication and collaboration applications.

 

Trust Deficits in Social Networks

"Social networks have something of a trust deficit, which will either limit or make “more expensive” its ability to offer new services.  The product teams at social networks have proven their ability to offer compelling services in exchange for personal information, but our research shows that people place a relatively low value on their social information. 

For social networks to offer products in exchange for higher value information such as health records, physical location, or email/IM history, they will need to offer even more compelling products, services and outcomes to consumers."

Timothy Morey,

Frog Design,

Who do we trust with our personal data

Evolution of the Enterprise Applications Industry

John Mancini, the President of AIIM International, provides his perspective on the evolution of enterprise IT in one slide:

Personally, I like the way John describes the shift from managing "a web page" to managing "a conversation" as we see systems of engagement emerge in the enterprise... but...

While the balance of the slide is specific to Enterprise IT and the companies that define the era include traditional enterprise players like IBM, Digital and Microsoft, it isn't clear to me that Google and Facebook have had the same level of ENTERPRISE impact (yet?).

If you dig a little at this line of thinking, you clearly see that each era was/is defined by a number of different sources of value and competitive advantage.  

With a hat-tip to insights gained from the work of Geoffrey Moore, Umair Haque, John Hagel, Valdis Krebs and others, I like to describe the transition we're seeing in the enterprise applications industry this way:

 

Combining the two models, we have a hint at the opportunity for enterprise application vendors moving forward.   Helping users manage conversations, relationships and transactions with and across the enterprise is a significant source of new value and growth.

A couple of questions to consider as the enterprise application industry evolves to a "network of information nodes":

1. Will Google or Facebook be "the best known" enterprise vendor as outlined by John in the Social and Cloud era?

2. What comes after the Social and Cloud era?

The "Future State" of Work - Changes & Skills for next 10 years

GigaOm has an upcoming conference Net:Work that will explore the challenges and opportunities presented by a new culture of work and key tools and technologies for collaboration.

They put forward a report from Gartner that outlines 10 changes over the next 10 years that will impact how we work and collaborate in the future.

It is interesting to consider how Gartner's report compares to a similar report from The IFTF on key workplace skills for the future.

Gartner's view of how work changes includes:

1. “De-routinization” of work.

“Non-routine” activities that cannot be automated, such as innovation, leadership and sales, will dominate employment: By 2015, 40 percent or more of an organization’s work will be “non-routine,” up from 25 percent in 2010.

 

2. Work swarms.

Rather than traditional teams of people familiar with each other, ad-hoc groups or “work swarms,” with no previous experience of working with each other, will become a commonplace team structure. Gartner’s “work swarms” concept sounds similar to the Noded philosophy, which describes how groups of individuals, often but not necessarily geographically distant, come together to form temporary or recurring project teams.

 

3. Weak links.

Weak links are the cues people can pick up from people who know the people they have to work with. Exploiting our own networks will help us to develop the ties that are required for participating in wider “work swarm” opportunities.

 

4. Working with the collective.

Being able to influence the complex ecosystem of suppliers, partners, clients and customers will increasingly become a core competence.

 

5. Work sketch-ups.

Informality will define most “non-routine” work activities; the process models for these activities will be simple “sketch-ups,” created on the fly.

 

6. Spontaneous work.

Seeking new opportunities and creating projects around them is likely to be an opportunistic, rather than strategic, activity.

 

7. Simulation and experimentation.

The culture of Google’s “perpetual beta” is likely to spread to other industries, with rapid prototyping taking place in very public environments.

 

8. Pattern sensitivity.

Extrapolating from history and experience will become less reliable; the ability to detect and parse patterns and trends in society will provide better insights.

 

9. Hyperconnected.

With formal and informal work diffused across organizational boundaries,  the support mechanisms for workers (healthcare, HR, IT) will need to evolve to support fuzzier, ad-hoc relationships between people and departments.

 

10. My place.

The boundaries between home and work life are already blurred. Balancing almost 24/7 availability against burning out will become a critical skill.

Relevance-Aware Activity Streams

 

Liz Gannes of GigaOm does a nice job summarizing a recent interview of Twitter CEO Ev Williams. Williams provided a few significant insight into how he thinks Twitter (and by extension real-time activity stream apps)  is different from email and search.

 

"Blogging (Williams was previously the founder of Blogger) and Tweeting can be different (and better) than email, he said, because people who have something to say can find their audience. That’s a much better situation for both the publisher of the information and the consumer of it. So recipient-based media can scale better “in a world of infinite information,” he said.

That’s also a contrast to Google, said Williams, which serves more purpose-driven needs versus Twitter’s focus on “an interest-based world.”

“Google is very good at ‘I need to solve a problem, I need to buy something, I need an answer,” he said. “Twitter is more ‘I’m interested in many things, I don’t know what I need to know.’” Where Google is more likely to be gamed by a company like Demand Media, Twitter is a different beast.

However, there’s still the problem of filtering information on Twitter. “What we need to get much better at is scaling that system so you don’t have to pay attention to everything, but you don’t miss the stuff you care about,” Williams said. He said more such products were on the way.

Williams cited Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who said recently that more information is now produced in two days than was in all of time before 2003. Williams said automated streams of information from services like Fitbit and Blippy —  in addition to the proliferation of media — will only add to that problem.

Williams also said to expect forthcoming products that would help filter relevant tweets around events, similar to what it’s doing with location. This would go beyond the user-developed convention of hashtags, he said, though he didn’t elaborate.

Developing relevance-aware activity streams will require a flexible filtering experience that enables users to filter across a number of different topics or variables.  It seems that Ev hints at developing certain types of filters - for example filtering based on events.  

Does that mean we'll see a slow roll out of category based filtering tools versus a broader, user-driven filtering tool capable of coarse and/or fine filtering?  Will it be an open-friendly approach or closed?

Developing relevance-aware activity streams is an important step in the evolution of the real-time web.  

If, as Ev points out, recipient-based media can scale better in a world of infinite information, then the relevance aware filtering model must be able to scale as well.

(image from johnhaydon.com)

 

Conversation Analytics within Companies

 

Sandy Pentland talks about how his research and his book "Honest Signals" can help improve business productivity by analyzing communication flows within companies.

Some key points include:

- All social species are alike and improve productivity through Discovery and Integration

- Higher access to information discovery improves productivity by 4%

- Face-to-Face networks improve productivity by 10%

- Conversation mining and User Dashboards are critical to identifying and understanding communication flow and opportunities for productivity improvements

Mobile Social Cloud Communications

Microsoft created Project Muse to interview and engage 2,000+ users about their likes and dislikes of their mobile experiences.   These volunteers helped crowd-source the design of Kin 1, Kin 2 and Kin Studio - the "productized" results of the user research.

There were 3 big user pain points found in the Project Muse work.  They were users' needs for a mobile experience focused on:

• social connections

• self-expression

• multi-screen digital life

While Kin 1 and Kin 2 may have suffered from poor execution at the "whole product" level, Kin Studio received significant recognition for breaking new ground by improving the social experience, integrating mobile + cloud and redefining the mobile user interface.

I believe there's value in distilling Project Muse and Kin Studio down to a few design lessons and guiding principles for consumer and enterprise mobile + cloud social software.

Guiding Principles of Real-Time Mobile Social Cloud Design:

• Enable users to easily create, publish and share the "story-line" of their real life activities

• A user's story-line (pictures, video, texts, call logs) created on any device should be available from the cloud on any web browser

• Story-lines are activity-streams mapped and prioritized in time, by tags, by strength of ties and/or media

• Personalize and prioritize the real-time push of feeds

• Simplify the ability to share and aggregate news and social feeds

• Strong Ties before Weak Ties or Temporary Ties

• Archive Mobile Sensor Data to the Cloud

• Extend through 3rd Party Applications & Developers

• Enable & manage user identity (e.g. Contacts, CallerID) as a cloud service

• Engage end users early and often through user research and design iteration

What would you add?

Twitter Graph Relevance

John Batelle provides further proof of the value found at the intersection of network graphs and conversation analytics.   

We now have a number of graphs defined by aggregating links and conversations around social objects: web graphs ( e.g. Google), social graphs (e.g. Facebook), interest graphs (e.g. twitter), location graphs (e.g. foursquare).  

"In short, Twitter knows who you are connected to, and what you (and they) are interested in.

Fashion that into a graph - the same kind of graph that powered Google's graph of web links, or Facebook's social graph - and all of a sudden you have a pretty powerful organizing principle for relevance in the Twitterverse."

John Batelle, Twitter's "Public Interest Graph"

We will see more network graphs being formed around a number of new and different social objects.  In addition, new innovative ways to derive relevance from the social conversations across various network graphs will continue to emerge.  

As MG Siegler points out in his recent take on the Facebook vs. Twitter battle...

"Social networks ... lose because they fail to innovate. Because they fail to stay ahead of the curve."

Expect to see continued innovation focused on ways to aggregate and analyze real-time conversations across network graphs... and... a consolidation across the layers of network graphs.

The Future of Advantage is Allocative and Creative

I really like Umair Haque's HBR post on The New Paradigm of Advantage because it provides a framework for thinking about the new sources of strategic advantage for a product, a business unit or a company.    From his post:

"Over the last few months, I've discussed in depth the tectonic shifts rocking the macro and micro economy. Let's put it all together. Here's what the 21st century demands from firms of all stripes: a paradigm shift in the nature of advantage.

The past of advantage was extractive and protective. The future of advantage, on the other hand, is allocative and creative. I made a little Prezi to illustrate it, below. Let's go through each category in turn.

The future of advantage:

Allocative. Google's advantage was built on allocating attention to content and ads better than its rivals. Google's real secret? Relevance, media's measure of how efficiently attention is allocated. Match.com is building an allocative advantage in, well, matching people with partners. Allocative advantage asks: are we able to match people with what makes them durably, tangibly better off — and can we do it 10x or 100x better than our rivals?

Creative.

Apple's advantage is, of course, radically creative: built on creating insanely great stuff that turns entire industries upside down. Next month, the iPad promises to do what the iPhone and iPod did before it. The power's in the creativity, not just the technology: Apple's thinking different yet again. Creative advantage asks: is our strategic imagination 10x or 100x richer, faster, and deeper than our rivals?

And the past:

Extractive. Over two decades, Microsoft has honed its extractive edge, coming up with cleverer and cleverer ways to extract profits from customers and suppliers. But Microsoft's just a flea on Wall St's elephant — who mastered extractive advantage by finding ways to, ultimately, extract trillions from you, me, and our grandkids. Extractive advantage asks: how can we transfer value from stakeholders to us, 10x or 100x better than our rivals?

Protective.

Think Microsoft's the master of 20th century advantage? Think again. Monsanto's Round-up Ready strategy protects genetically modified crops with proprietary herbicide that crops need to flourish. The result? A protective advantage: Monsanto's made sure that farmers are locked in to Monsanto as tightly as possible. Protective advantage asks: are buyers and suppliers locked in to dealing with us, 10x or 100x more tightly than to rivals?

These dimensions are mutually exclusive. When a company pursues an extractive or protective advantage, it cannot hone an allocative or creative advantage. The opportunity cost of protecting yesterday is creating tomorrow. The opportunity cost of extracting resources is allocating them in better ways.To extract or protect is to forgo finding better ways of allocating or creating.

and his presentation on Prezi:

The New Paradigm of Advantage on Prezi