Bruce MacVarish Notes

Old World vs. New World

 

Back in 2006, as I started to realize how consumer oriented innovation was leading enterprise innovation and could serve as a proxy for future enterprise applications, I started a habit of replacing the word "computing" with the word "communications" when reading new announcements and visions of the future for computing.

You know... "cloud-computing" became "cloud-communications"..."virtual computing" became "virtual communications"... "social computing" became "social communications"... you get the picture.

Where am I going with this?

I found myself repeating this habit when reading Steve Frank describe an interesting way to think about the difference between "Old World Computing" and "New World Computing" when reacting to the recent Apple iPad launch: 

"The bet is roughly that the future of computing:

1. has a UI model based on direct manipulation of data objects
2. completely hides the filesystem from the user
3. favors ease of use and reduction of complexity over absolute flexibility
4. favors benefit to the end-user rather than the developer or other vendors
5. lives atop built-to-specific-purpose native applications and universally available web apps"

So, take out the word "computing" and replace it with "communications" and we have a rough draft vision statement for the future of communication applications... driven by the emerging computing model.

"The bet is roughly that the future of communications:

1. has a UI model based on direct manipulation of data objects
2. completely hides the filesystem from the user
3. favors ease of use and reduction of complexity over absolute flexibility
4. favors benefit to the end-user rather than the developer or other vendors
5. lives atop built-to-specific-purpose native applications and universally available web apps

For me, this New World vision for (consumer + enterprise) communications implies a number of important user experience, user interaction, device and web application design choices for new products that need to be considered and tested with users.

Do you agree with this view for new world communication applications?

Evolving toward a People-Centric, Real-Time Web

There are plenty of reasons to consider the collaborative opinions of Chris Messina and Jyri Engstrom. Chris is a champion of the open web and leads/contributes to the DiSo Project, OpenID, OAuth, microformats, activitystrea.ms and Portable Contacts initiatives.   Jyri is the founder of Jaiku, one of the first real-time microblogging social / mobile apps acquired by Google.   Both Chris and Jyri have co-authored a post outlining their vision for the next phase of the web and describe it as a "people-centric, real-time web":

"It’s 2009, going on 2010. For the past three years, the web has been morphing into a real-time and people-centric place. We’ve seen this trend among individual users — through their actions and demands for better social experiences — but also increasingly among companies and developers. We want a web that’s more “like us” than the old model was. We want a web where people are as important to the architecture of the system as documents."

Both Chris and Jyri recently presented at Mindtrek where they outlined their perspectives on the value of taking control over our personal identity, our activity streams and social objects as the people-centric, real-time web emerges. 

Chris presented Identity is the Platform with a focus on data capital and social objects centered on our personal identity across the open web:

1. Data Capital - All the data we're creating as personal activity streams has value ... and we should control access / use

2. Social Objects - Activity streams related to our "social objects" are meaningful and valuable too

Jyri presented Snack Size Sociality outlining how the battle for the people-centric, real-time web will focus on 4 important areas:  

1. People's identity
2. Activity Stream Routing
3. The Social Inbox
4. Real-time Search

I think it is valuable to consider both of Chris's and Jyri's Mindtrek presentations together as an indication of how they see the People Centric, Real-Time Web emerging.   They've pointed to key enablers that include:

- Portable profiles means that instead of creating an account on each service you join, you can now host your identity in one place and bring your profile and friends with you to other sites as you surf the social web. Webfinger, OpenID, Portable Contacts, and OAuth all make this possible (and for bootstrapping profiles from the legacy document-web, we have Google’s Social Graph API).

- Distributed Push Publishing means there is no longer a need to rely on proprietary platforms. The emerging standards here are PubSubHubbub (PuSH) and rssCloud (see comparisons on TheNextWeb and TechCrunch).

- Synchronized Conversation Threads means that users can participate on the same conversation thread across multiple interfaces and services (we are still waiting for a standard, for which various geeks are actively devising a plan). Check out the Salmon effort as an example. 

So you might say that the people centric, real-time web will be based on a stack of building block technologies a la the DiSo Project:

- OpenID
- OAuth
- Portable Contacts / Profiles
- PubSubHub / rssCloud
- activitystrea.ms
- Conversation Threading (example Salmon Protocol)

While it is early days in this next phase of web innovation, we'll see progress and proof points continue to emerge in the consumer space.   So let's say we see the emergence of a people centric real-time web as envisioned by Chris and Jyri.   

What might that mean for the enterprise?  

How and when will this set of building block technologies impact the enterprise space and create new value for business users?

Is it reasonable to think that the enterprise will embrace a people-centric, real-time web, when they've had a hard time embracing the social web?

PS: I'm a big fan of the opportunity and user value to be generated by "conversation threading" and have been pushing an enterprise Sensing, Threading, Sharing strategy for a while now...

Visualizing Meaning and Seeing Sentiment

information aesthetics (where form follows data) continues to provide insight and leadership on information visualization.   I like the current post highlighting Pecha Kucha's presentation at Ignite Salt Lake (see below) with Mattias Shapiro discussing how different data visualization techniques can be used to determine what particular datasets are telling us.

In the Conversation / Attention / Engagement Economy, conversation analytics will become increasingly important.  Being able to quickly visualize meaning and see the sentiment of the conversations we engage will be extremely valuable to users and to brands.

  

 

The Future of Games @ Work

"Applying Principles of Game Design to Engage Business Users"

A recent survey of over 70 Fortune 500 CIO's identified enabling "collaboration across remote locations" as one of their significant challenges over the next 3 years.   Yet, we have seen a number of different applications and technologies developed to address the problem of collaboration across a distributed workforce. Audio Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Video Conferencing, Instant Messaging, Social Software, Mobility solutions and more have all emerged as communication and collaboration apps focused on helping users collaborate across remote locations. 

In most cases, these collaborative technologies have been deployed for some time and are available for today's business users.  But many of these tools are under utilized by enterprise users.   While some business users will never be ready or willing to adopt next generation comm & collaboration applications, I believe that most are ready... they just need to be fully engaged.

Most communication and collaboration applications are on the path to improving the overall user experience, but to engage business users it will take more than just clean interaction design or appealing visual design.   Yes, understanding the job, the needs or behaviors of a business user and integrating that into the interaction flow of a collaboration application is necessary, but it is not sufficient. 

 

To engage business users in a compelling and continuously productive collaboration experience, enterprise apps need to tap the user's individual motivation, unleash the user's curiosity and align the user's incentives, unique skills and social networks.  Are there proxies for this type of engagement?  Yes; in multiplayer gaming applications.  A powerful example of users who are engaged in self-motivated, aligned, collaborative efforts can be found in massive, multi-player on-line games.  

 

Today’s massive multiplayer online (MMO) games provide powerful and engaging collaboration software that appeals to the user's motivation, curiosity and social awareness.  To me, they hint at important design elements for future enterprise collaboration applications. Nick Yee at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and Stanford's VHIL has focused his research on social interaction and self-representation in virtual environments.   According to Yee, "..the purpose of of all video games is to train players to work harder while still enjoying it. The success of on-line games demonstrates how seductive and concealed the work treadmill can be."  Imagine if you could get your work colleagues to collaborate at the same level of engagement and collaboration found in MMOs.  It is coming.

Many business users in the enterprise today are playing MMO games and the numbers will increase.   As a result, we should expect to see their impact on the communication & collaboration market.  Just as we're seeing the social / Web 2.0 generation demand social collaboration software at work, the emerging MMO generation of business users will demand that their work experience mirror in some way the engagement and enjoyment of their gaming experience. 

Games at Work are becoming serious business.  A number of academic and industry researchers have been investigating how MMOs deliver both user engagement and collaborative productivity across remote or distributed locations. 

By applying the insights of researchers like Jane McGonigal, Elan Lee, Sean Stewart, Nick Yee, Byron Reeves and IBM, we can draft a set of guiding principles worth considering as we envision future communication and collaboration applications in the enterprise.  Let's take a quick look at the research of Jane, Byron and IBM to highlight the opportunity of engaging users through game design:

Jane McGonigal is a game designer, a games researcher, a future forecaster, and a very playful human being.  Jane's research scope extends from analyzing and forecasting the "Engagement Economy" at the Institute for the Future, to helping create the genre of "Alternate Reality Games" (ARGs) that connect game worlds with the real world.   Her work highlights that collaborative MMOs succeed because they offer clear boundaries, a shared problem and build a community of collaboration.   Jane's vision of the "Engagement Economy" builds on her research of human engagement and behaviors of players in successful, extreme scale collaboration MMOs. Based on her research, MMO games succeed because they fully engage the user by providing: 

(1) Satisfying Work to Do
(2) Experience at Being Good at Something
(3) Time spent with people they like
(4) The chance of being part of something Bigger

Byron Reeves is a Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, and Co-Founder and Faculty Co-Director of the H-STAR Institute (Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research) and its industrial affiliate program, Media X.   He is also on the Board of Directors for Seriosity - a company he co-founded with J. Leighton Reed.   From the Seriosity web site:

Seriosity's mission is to change the way people work together in functions requiring a high level of collaboration, communication, and feedback in today's information-intensive business environments.

Our software products and services improve collaboration, innovation, and leadership by using game principles that create focus and motivation to align personal and corporate goals. Up to now, these design elements have been missing from traditional enterprise software applications.

We combine the best of these principles to create a synthetic economy, tailor-made for today’s information-intensive enterprise. Combined with our applications to support knowledge workers, the Seriosity solution facilitates a dynamic marketplace of ideas, attention, analysis, persuasion, and resource allocation.

IBM and Seriosity have done in depth research to understand how multiplayer online game environments in the virtual world apply to the business world to enhance productivity, innovation and leadership in a distributed world. Researchers studied people who headed up teams in online games and they also sought the insights of gamers who have led real-world business teams at IBM. Their most important finding is that getting the leadership environment right can be as important as choosing the right leader. They point out important aspects of game environments that companies might consider adopting as part of their communication and collaboration strategy.

So, what are the guiding principles of game design that we might apply to improve engagement and productivity of communication / collaboration apps for business users across the enterprise?  The details can be found in the research linked here... and numerous other resources found in the fields of game theory, game design and game psychology... but here's the start of a draft list:

Guiding Principles of Game Design @ Work - DRAFT 

Make 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. 

I'll continue to refine and add to this draft list of guiding principles.  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.

The Live Web of Interaction Signals for Business Users

Over the next 3 years, the ability to interact, analyze and filter our stream of interaction activities based on a live or real-time model will redefine our personal, work and mobile experiences with the web.  

Let's look at these two categories (i) the Live Web of real-time streams and (ii) Interaction Signals separately:

The Live Web of Real-time Streams for Business Users

The real-time theme continues to grow and it will increasingly define a new class of web.   While it has taken some time to get established, it is not a new idea.   With a hat tip to Stuart Henshall, I've found it very helpful to read the early insights and writings of David Gelernter  .    

 

Professor Gelernter is a Computer Science Professor at Yale and his research centers on information management, parallel programming, and artificial intelligence.  As early as the 80's, Professor Gelernter envisioned managing information based on a time paradigm and through a decentralized data storage system.  He is credited with setting the foundation for today's time based activity stream and cloud computing models so prevalent in Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Salesforce.com, Google apps and a number of start ups.

In this 2001 interview, I like how Professor Gelernter describes the impact of moving from a space ( or file) based computing model to a time ( or activity stream) based model:

When I look at where software is heading and what it is really doing, ... what's happening and what will happen with the emergence of a new generation of information-management systems, and as we discard Windows and NT ... these systems that are 1960s, 1970s systems on which we rely today, we'll see a transition similar to what happened during the 19th century, when people's sense of space suddenly changed.

 

If you compare the world of 1800 to the world of 1900, people's sense of space was tremendously limited and local and restricted in 1800. If you look at a New England village of the time, you can see this dramatically, everything is on site, a small cluster of houses, in which everything that needs to be done is done, and fields beyond, and beyond the fields a forest.

People traveled to some extent, but they didn't travel often, most people rarely traveled at all. The picture of space outside people's own local space was exceptionally fuzzy. Today, our picture of time is equally fuzzy; we have an idea of our local time and what happened today and yesterday, and what's going to happen next week, what happened the last few weeks, but outside of this, our view of time is as restricted and local as people's view of space was around 1800. If you look at what happened in the 19th century as transportation became available, cheap and ubiquitous, all of a sudden people developed a sense of space beyond their own local spaces, and the world changed dramatically.

What's going to happen, what software will do over the next few years has already started to happen and will accelerate... our software will be time-based, rather than space-based.

 

We'll deal with streams of information rather than chaotic file systems that are based on 1940s idea of desks and file cabinets. The transition to a software world where we have a stream with a past, present and future is a transition to a world in which people have a much more acute sense of time outside their own local week, or month in which they now have a clear idea of what was different, why February of 1997 was different from February of 1994, which most people today don't have a clear picture of.

With the introduction of activity streams, a business user, a department, an enterprise will have a more acute sense of time and how things have changed over time.  They will have a clearer idea of what is happening now... live... in real-time... with the people, topics and activities most important to them... and what is different between this week vs. last,  this month vs. last, this year vs. last ... across people, projects, customers, product lines, businesses and markets.   This is an incredibly powerful shift.  

 

Interaction Signals for Business Users

The shift to the live web is underway in our personal (consumer) lives and will ... as with other consumer web innovations ... be adopted and integrated within our work (enterprise) lives.    If we describe the enterprise live web as a flow or activity stream of information tied to our live transactions, conversations and relationships ... then a number of new, live, time-based signals or metrics will be needed to help us optimize how we allocate time and attention in our daily interactions.

I think there are 4 classes of signals or metrics that are emerging to help business users understand how their interactions - and by interactions, I mean their transactions, conversations and relationships inside and outside the enterprise - are changing over time and will improve their productivity by embracing the Live Web. They include:

Interaction Activity Signals track the number, rate of change and scale of interaction activities for a business user over time.  Examples include:

• number of posts, emails, meetings, conversations, orders, tweets, cold calls over time
• count of views, votes, comment, responses, feedback, re-tweets over time
• active, inactive subscribers / followers over time
• total inbound/outbound connections, interactions, links over time
• number of unique interactions over time

Interaction Role Signals track the involvement, collaboration, leadership and consistency of roles that business users play through interactions over time.  Examples include:

• pattern and pace of interactions over time
• degree of replication and emulation during interactions over time
• variability in emphasis, rhythm and timing of interactions over time
• degree of openness to new ideas and influence over time
• inbound-to-outbound interaction ratio over time
• positive-to-negative interaction ratio over time

Interaction Influence Signals track the diversity, reach and influence of interaction activities for a business user over time.  Examples include:

• diversity of business user social graph in the enterprise over time
• conversation to broadcast ratio over time
• conversation reach across the enterprise over time
• degree of reference / Link over time
• diversity of reference / Link over time
• influence of your followers over time
• influence of your referencers over time
• new conversation generation over time

Interaction Results Signals track individual business user, team or enterprise deliverables resulting from interaction activity over time.  Examples include:

• new transactions (orders, contracts, demos, investment, etc. ) over time
• conversation-to-conversion ratio over time
• relationship-to-conversion ratio over time
• correlation ratios between interaction activity, role, influence and results metrics over time

As the Live Web of activity streams and interaction signals emerge in the enterprise, one could say we're about to step out of the quaint New England village of the 1800's as described by Professor Gelernter.   

The enterprise is shifting from a space/file software model to a time/stream based software model where the real-time interactions of business users have a past, a present and a future.   

New value for business users - and revenue for enterprises - will come from aggregating, analyzing and filtering these interaction signals enabled by the Live Web.

Enterprise Flow

My guiding principles for the future state of enterprise applications are:

- hybrid cloud + premise

- end user driven

- social

- device agnostic

- flow based

- sense aware

An interesting example of some of these principles applied to the enterprise is Zenbe's "Shareflow" which allows enterprise users to build flows of communication streams around relevant people and topics.  Here's a summary from Matt Marshall at VentureBeat.

"For too long now, email has remained oddly stupid: We can expand an email, forward it, or reply. But for groups of people working together on projects, it’s awful — not to mention overwhelming. Google has implemented something called email “threads” into its Gmail service, which lets us see the back and forths of conversations. But that’s about it.

However, a rash of recent innovation is starting to challenge email as the predominant form of work-flow communication.

Zenbe, a New York City-based startup, is the latest example. The company today has released something called Shareflow. Shareflow is essentially a web-based dashboard that lets you see the flow of communication around a given topic (see image below). In many ways, Shareflow is like Google’s Wave product, released in late May. 

In each case, the page becomes a stream of things posted about the topic, with the most recent item posted at the top, and the previous posts moving down the page. However, Shareflow takes a step further than email by letting you incorporate your regular email into the flow."

VRM ListenLog

Keith Hopper outlines his vision for ListenLog as an example (and element?) of future VRM solutions:

A user-driven activity log works well for an application that pulls together audio streams and files from a number of different sources. Of course, online audio providers (vendors in the VRM model) can already track and aggregate listening behavior data, but only for the audio they control. When the user acts as the sole point of integration, pulling together audio from multiple sources, their own consolidated log becomes unique and powerful. Only when the listener is the point of integration does such an approach yield unique value.

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."

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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Enterprise Hybrid Clouds for Business User Apps

Six elements characterize my vision for the future state of enterprise applications.  

They are:

1. Applications delivered through Hybrid Clouds integrating private, public and premise based resources 
2. Applications that are Business User driven with a focus on UX of the Business User 
3. Social enabling transaction, conversation and relationship apps and associated data
4. Device Agnostic applications that synch across devices, web, cloud and premise platforms
5. Flow-ready apps that aggregate, filter, share and visualize user information and activity streams
6. Sensing apps that act on a user's voice, ambient context, declarative context or gestural input 

    

I keep an eye out for signposts that we're making progress toward this "future state" and was pleased to see Ed Sim highlight a proof point of the "Hybrid Clouds" element in his post :

Amazon has taken off with its cloud compute infrastructure but there still have been some limitations from an enterprise perspective.  Mainly, some enterprises are concerned about keeping their data private, about reliability, and storage costs over time.  

Any enterprise looking at potentially leveraging the cloud would love to have a hybrid solution which allows them to manage their own internal cloud and then burst over to a public cloud for either automated failover, extra storage, or to port an application over after using an internal platform for development.