Bruce MacVarish Notes

Adoption of Cloud Communications is an evolution, not a revolution

The emergence of cloud technologies and architectures has re-defined and re-ignited interest in subscription based Cloud Communication models.  There is no doubt that introduction of cloud enables many new and exciting experiences for end users and opportunities for productivity gains for enterprises. 

It seems to me, that while we will continue to hear how “the Cloud” is creating a revolution for end users and enterprises, adoption of Cloud Communications has been an evolution, not a revolution.

As enterprises and Communication Service Providers (CSPs) evolve toward cloud communications, each have different business and technical drivers that will result in a number of different deployment models based on their priorities, path and pace of introduction.

Many enterprises and CSPs have initially focused on deploying private cloud solutions as a complement to their on-premises communication and existing collaboration applications.  This approach enables enterprises to gain early benefits of decentralized communication applications while maintaining a private, secure deployment. 

Other enterprises and CSPs are considering the introduction of public, multi-tenant communication applications delivered as a hosted or cloud service. 

Still others are interested in the benefits of hybrid communication clouds that combine on-premises, private and/or public cloud communication applications and resources.  

While the concept of managed and hosted services is not new, the emergence of cloud architectures has re-defined and re-ignited interest in subscription based Cloud Communication models.  Every day enterprise executives, end users and IT organizations hear how “the Cloud” is a revolution and is transforming their industry.  Yet, when it comes to communication and collaboration solutions for mid-size to large enterprises, the reality is that the adoption of Cloud Communications has been an evolution, not a revolution.

Google+ @ work

From the Google Enterprise blog:

"today we’re launching an initial set of Google+ features designed specifically for businesses, and we’re excited to move into a full preview mode for Apps customers. During this preview period, organizations that have gone Google will be able to use the business features of Google+ for free through the end of 2013 while we continue to add more features and administrative controls designed for organizations."

Google+ features specifically for businesses include:

1. Private sharing for your organization
2. Video meetings integrated with Gmail, Calendar and Docs
3. Administrative controls to set restrictions

 

Twitter Federation

Dan Wineman lights up the federation crew by asking for a federated Twitter.  Dan outlines the benefits as well as the problems when it comes to a decentralized, federated, real-time, social communications app.

"I’d like to see App.net move toward a federated architecture. Broadly, what that means is that instead of being a central service that each client connects to directly, it would become a loosely organized mesh of independently controlled nodes. Users and devices would connect to whatever node they liked best — you can run your own if you want — and the nodes would talk to each other in some clever way to collectively maintain the appearance of a single unified social network.

The advantages are numerous and comparable to those of the web itself: no single point of failure, no concentration of power, no risk that the entire network will be sold to Facebook.

But does this work for a service like Twitter? Can the behavior we’ve come to expect from social networks be reproduced in this model?

Here’s a list of three constraints we’ve come to expect of our social timelines:

• Immediacy: if a post has been made by someone I follow, I can see it in my timeline right away (or close enough that I don’t notice the difference).
• Chronology: posts always appear in order by time posted.
• Monotonicity: timelines grow only from the top; older posts are never retroactively inserted.

The problem appears to be that no federated architecture can simultaneously satisfy all three of these conditions. You can have any two: for example, if you let go of immediacy, your node can just wait until it’s received the latest content from every other node before displaying anything. But that’s not very scalable, and it makes real-time conversation impossible, so let’s keep immediacy. Now we have to decide what to do when content from a far-away node arrives late: if we’ve already displayed newer posts, we have to violate either chronology (by posting the older content above the newer) or monotonicity (by inserting it chronologically into the timeline).

The moral of the story is that the qualities that make Twitter interesting — its mix of conversation, discovery, and one-to-many communication — are direct consequences of its centralized architecture. Without the centralization you can still have something interesting, but it’s a different thing.

I’d love to be proven wrong."

A few of the comments related to Dan's post include:

  Kevin Marks

You're assuming a single conversational thread, but the key value of twitter is the semi-overlapping publics that mean we don't have to read all responses to a post in order, just those from people we choose to follow. Chronology is violated by Twitter, explictly by retweets and quoting. They favour monotonicity instead, but this does lead to repetition. 

Monotonicity is a display choice at the client.
See http://j.mp/twittertheory for more on semi-overlapping publics.
See SWAT0 for discussions fo ow to test and achieve this: http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubat...

• Josh Triplett

  First of all, it seems odd to have a post about federated Twitter without mentioning OStatus, the concrete implementation of federated Twitter that already exists and works.  It implements pretty much everything about Twitter that you'd care about, except for the userbase, which seems like a given for any federated microblogging implementation given that Twitter doesn't allow or support federation themselves.

  Second, these criteria are not binary.  With a decently functioning network, you can have enough immediacy to expect messages within a minute or so, which means you can expect enough monotonicity to only look for new messages within the most recent minute or so of your timeline, a region that normally fits on your screen without scrolling unless you're insanely popular (and thus probably not reading every message anyway).

  • dwineman

    I probably should have mentioned OStatus, but it seems to have different goals. Does it satisfy the constraints I listed, or make them irrelevant somehow?

    And you're right, the constraints have tolerances, and in the absence of multi-party conversations (or to someone catching up a few minutes later) they don't really matter at all.

Chris Saad

So tired of this conversation. Blogging type software with 140 character constraint + PubSubHub + An aggregator = Distributed Microblogging/Twitter service. It's easy.

The Story of Nike+

Stefan Olander is VP of Digital Sport at Nike and co-author of The Laws of Velocity.  Under his leadership, Nike is transitioning to a digital product + services company and is innovating in a number of ways to change their relationship with users.

"It used to be that when you bought a product, that was the end of the relationship. It's classic marketing. 'Great, you bought the product. See you in a year, when the next campaign comes along.' That thinking has flipped on its head.

Now, the purchase of any Nike product needs to be the beginning of the relationship we have with the consumer."

Stefan Olander, @soland

The Story of Nike+ and the lessons learned during Nike's shift from innovating products to innovating at the intersection of user experiences, behaviors and goals is inspirational and instructive.

 

Stefan Olander: Running Nike's Digital Strategy

 

Ranking Attention in Realtime

Bitly, the company that basically ushered the world into short links on sites like Twitter, is playing around with a new service, launching it under its “Bitly Labs” umbrella.

It’s called Realtime, and is available at http://www.rt.ly

Here’s what we know:

Realtime (http://rt.ly) is an internet attention ranking engine, giving you powerful tools for analyzing what the world is paying attention to right now. You can filter and explore activity on the social web by topics, phrases, domains, social networks and more.

(via TheNextWeb.com by Drew Olanoff)

Nike+ Fuelband

 

There is new, untold value when offering innovative experiences for users that help them monitor, analyze, share and shape behavior.

 

Cooperation Flows

I've posted before of the shift toward conversations and relationships within the enterprise and how new value and productivity would come from flow based collaboration apps.

I believe the enterprise is:

• Being redefined around people - not tasks or processes
• Improving productivity by unlocking people's conversations and relationships - not focusing on transactions
• Delivering new value through the flow of my many, loosely coupled interactions of cooperation - not tightly coupled, structured constraints of collaboration.

I found alignment and agreement with these points when reading JP Rangaswami's insightful summary of how workflows of the past are different from collaboration flows of today.

 

JP writes:

"Workflows, like trains, worked in well-defined, closed systems.

Collaboration flows, on the other hand, are like rivers and oceans.

As the Cluetrain guys said, markets are conversations. The oceans and rivers of collaboration flows include all these conversations. The conversations themselves are manifestations of relationships, some bilateral, some multilateral. Sometimes they lead to transactions, surfaced by the capability as seen in the context.

What are these conversations? There’s nothing special about them. Here’s a loose classification of the types of conversations one would see in the workplace:

• Questions needing answers (Hey, how do I do this? Here’s how. Where can I find this? Here it is. Who really knows this? Here’s who)
• Sharing of experiences (I just installed this app, and it was *useless*. Here’s why. I just read this book and it was *fantastic. Here’s why)
• Feedback (I really found your answer helpful. I couldn’t have done this without you.)
• Social filtering (I rate this answer more than the others. I think you should see this so I will +1 it or Like it or RT it.)
• Status reporting (I’m here doing this, I’m there doing that)
• Alerts potentially needing action (If THIS then THAT, coming from a litany of sources)

...and a little later...

These conversations have been going on for aeons. But there’s one major difference. And that is this: the conversations are recorded. Persisted. Archived. So they’re auditable. Searchable. Findable. Besides this, there are other significant differences:

• The conversations are made visible immediately , in real-time
• They come wrapped in context, auto date and time stamped, author identified, location mapped, topic tagged
• The context can be enriched by other participants
• They’re channel- and device-independent; conversations can start in one medium, move to another. They can start on blogs, move to twitter, move to synchronous sound.
• They’re time- and space-shiftable. Synchronous and asynchronous. Mobile in design.
• They work on “publish-subscribe” networked models rather than broadcast and hierarch

I'm also reminded of this comparison of Collaboration vs. Cooperation by @shiftctrlesc and a number of posts by Stowe Boyd about cooperation, flows and the future of work.

As a result of the above, while JP makes a distinction between workflows and collaboration flows, I believe we should make the same type of distinction between collaboration flows and cooperation flows.

For me, the enterprise is being rebuilt around people, conversations and relationships powered by many, many loosely coupled interactions and cooperation flows.

How we access the Web

David Beckemeyer has published an insightful comparison of how people access the web today and how it has changed in the last two years.  

Check out these two graphics from David.

 

This is how we accessed the Web in 2010:

-97% from desktop, 90% Windows, 3% mobile

 

This is how we accessed the Web in 2012:

-54% from Mobile, 56% iOS, 46% Desktop

As David rightly points out:

"The take-away for me is that not only are we headed into a mobile future, but we are headed, for better or worse, into an Apple future, and we better get used to it. If you take the Mac and iOS combined, Apple now owns 45% of the surfing experience, already surpassing Microsoft Windows at 38% – and it’s only getting worse for Windows, as iPad sales continue to steamroll PCs. This “Android Dominance” meme is utter fiction and wishful thinking. Windows Phone? Get real. Unless you’re fine playing in a niche space, if you’re building a product or service and it isn’t designed with mobile first, it’s time to re-think it – throw out your plans and start over. I’m dead serious. What’s more, if it doesn’t thrive in an Apple-dominated mobile ecosystem, it’s also time to go back to the drawing board."

Mobile (cloud) first in an Apple ecosystem friendly way.

 

Social by Design: Design Thinking & Business

I came across another insightful presentation from David Armano (@armano) ... this time on Design Thinking & Business.

My favorite line:

"Design Thinking gets us thinking holistically and differently".

Social by Design: Design Thinking & Business

View more presentations from David Armano

Google Unlocks Voice Data

Google announced that starting today, you can download a copy of all your Google Voice and other communications data.  

This is a huge move by Google that unlocks new value for end users, for application vendors and advertisers by enabling new ways to benefit from our communications and conversation data.

The value of voice communications is no longer found in the connecting of conversations but rather in the data, analytics and relevance derived from the conversation content.