Tags: Facebook, Ban, Lockup, Connections, Social Software, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Media, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Communities, Social Networks, Participation, Scoble, elsua, Facebook Applications, Facebook Apps

Yes, I know. It is Friday and the weekend is just around the corner, but do you want to see something really really funny? Want to find out what my first lesson learned in Facebook has been in the last couple of hours? You are going to love it, although I am not sure I would myself, but, hey, with the spirit of nearly getting started with the weekend, I thought I would share a number of lessons learned every now and then from the overall experience so that you get to see where I am coming from. And here is the first one.

You would remember how I mentioned yesterday that resistance was futile and how I was joining Facebook, right? Well, check this out:

Yes, that is right. That screen shot above is my first lesson learned while making use of Facebook. And that is, not to get too excited about it!, because you would end up facing the same situation like the one I am facing at the moment. I can no longer add new connections to my profile. Ouch!

The above message says that this is a temporary thing and I do surely hope so, because otherwise I would find it rather difficult to explain how can Scoble (Congrats to you and Maryam on Milan, by the way!!) have 5,000 connections and I am just on my 108th! Hummm.

I am sure that it probably has got to do with some kind of spam filter to protect the system, but I must say that when I saw it I was not too happy about it.

Either way, I knew I was joining the party late, so in all of the excitement of building up the profile and connecting with the various social networks I belong to from all over the place, I was not expecting to be faced with this. Thus my lesson learned for the day, while making extensive use of Facebook, is to go slow. That is right. Start slowly, but steadily, and build further up from there. Over time I am sure I would eventually get there in the end.

With all that said, and since I cannot add more friends for the time being, I am now exploring the good number of Facebook applications that my connections are making use of and picking up that final list I am going to go with to get things going. And so far I have noticed that there would be an immediate consequence from enjoying the experience quite a bit thus far from the various applications I have been exposed to: elsua.net. Very shortly it is going to go through some major makeover and whenever it is ready I will share a couple of thoughts of what will be happening and what I meant with consequences. 

For now, I am enjoying (Not!!!) my temporarily Facebook ban and hope to be back soon adding some more of my connections, because yes, the party is still on, and I don’t want to miss it! Would you?

Tags: Facebook, Borg, Social Media, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Communities, Social Networks, Dennis McDonald, Twitter, New Media, Traditional Media, MacBook Pro, Business Value, Value Add, Social Software Adoption, Enterprise Adoption

After several weeks resisting the peer pressure of seeing most of the folks from my social networks on Facebook and been encouraged to join in time and time again; after a good number of conversations and twitterings on the pros and cons of being part of the borg; and, finally, after engaging over the last couple of days in a number of conversations around the blog post I created a couple of days ago on this subject (Facebook ‘Costs Businesses Dear’ - Does It Really?), I have finally decided to give in and re-activate my Facebook account. Yes, that is right. I am back in the game!

Most of the folks I have been having conversations with around the subject of Facebook know that from the very beginning, a few months ago actually, I have somewhat been concerned about various privacy issues, while making use of such social utility as Facebook, in order to keep in touch with the folks that I already know from various other social networks.

However, at the same time, and due to the increasing number of negative commentary from traditional media on the business value of Facebook, amongst many other social networks, I think it was about time that I would jump into it with both feet and try to figure out whether I can establish if it would have a business value for me or not and for those folks I connect with on a regular basis.

Who would have thought about that, right? Originally a discussion that would, in most cases, put people off is actually what is dragging me into Facebook. Funny, eh? All of the traditional media encouraging businesses to be weary about the value add from sites like this one and I get to jump into right on that very same day. I guess they succeeded, don’t you think? … Not!!!

So during the course of the day I have been building up my Facebook profile and one of the things that I have noticed, and which was probably not really a surprise, was the huge amount of people from the different social networks that I belong to who are already members of it and who have been facebooking along. So much so that it kind of felt like I was the last one to join the party.

The great thing though is, like in all parties, the welcomes are incredibly refreshing and re-energising. Yes, I have waiting for a few months, but somehow it feels like I am going to enjoy the ride. And more importantly, I am hoping to be able to contribute to the overall experience and share with everyone how you can certainly benefit from using it. People from my own networks who know me really well have mentioned already that now that I am on Facebook I would be able to see its true potential and benefit from it, as opposed to keep on reading from various sources what their own experiences were all about. Now, I have got the chance of sharing my own and with a proper opinion.

Finally, one of the comments I have received earlier on through my Twitter handle has been that of Dennis McDonald, who is wondering what my approach is going to be: "it will be interesting to see what "best practices" you practice regarding Facebook app adoption. e.g., everything or nothing?" I must say that I haven’t given it too much thought just yet. What I do know though is that I feel it is going to be something in between. There are far too many FB apps. available out there already and there isn’t a chance I am going to be playing around with them all. At the same time, I am not going to have a semi-empty profile, at least, not planning to at this stage.

Thus what I am probably going to do is just take it easy and slowly but steadily build up from there, pretty much like I am doing with my MacBook Pro and my transition into making it my default work machine. It is getting nearly there and so will my Facebook profile. Fancy joining me?

In a time where more and more knowledge workers nowadays are starting to look after their online presence on the (social) Web, sometimes it is actually a bit difficult to get things going. Probably more than anything else because of the huge amount of resources to get started that are available out there. So with the intention of helping out in this particular area to those folks who may thinking about it, but who may not be quite sure where to go, here is a weblog post that I guess I should have shared over here a little while ago. I know. Better late than never.

I am sure that you are now expecting from me to put together a number of different tips on how to get things going, right? Well, not quite so. In the spirit of knowledge sharing and, specially, re-use, I am actually going to point you folks to a couple of weblog posts from one of my IBM fellow colleagues, David Ing (Co-author of Coevolving), who has been making use of those resources in order to get a bunch of other people online and in charge of their own online presence. And quite successfully.

Check out, for instance, "The Why and How of Establishing Your Web Persona" where David gets to put together a very thorough article sharing some really good tips on how you can manage your own online persona to match your needs, interests and whatever else. Here is a quick, brief outline of what you would be able to learn in there:

"A. Why would I want to take control of my Web persona?
B. The first two steps: A webmail address and a domain name search
C. A blog on WordPress.com is free, and it’s easy to move content elsewhere (If you decide so, later)
D. Offer e-mail subscriptions to your blog
E. Write content!
F. Move the content to your own hosted domain"

You would be able to see how David has included some really good explanations for each of the different entry points, but at the same time you will see how he has put together a pretty dense set of helpful links that would provide you with that additional edge of everything you would need to know about. Pretty impressive and incredibly helpful. (I have gone through it myself and I have found a few tips that I was not really aware of and which make just perfect sense). Totally recommended, to say the least.

But that is not all of it, because talking about the topic related to the creation and maintenance of your own blog on the Web, here is another superb blog entry that David has put together and which basically explains how you can go ahead and create / maintain your own blog in your own domain: "Installing and Customising WordPress on Your Own Domain".

To give you a little bit of an advance of what you can expect on that second blog post from David, here is the outline from the article itself:

"A. Some Web site steps leading up to installing Wordpress
B. Install Wordpress
C. Select and upload some themes
D. Activate a style, and set up the basic look
E. Set Options
F. Create a user persona as editor
G. Install plugins
H. Edit the Blogroll and "Hello World" post"

Yes, I know, both of those articles are rather extensive and would need some digesting further, but, I tell you, if you are looking for an extensive user guide on how to get things going with your own online persona beyond the firewall and on to the Web, these David Ing’s blog posts are probably as good as it gets: rather fundamental and resourceful to help you make it successfully.

(A big massive thanks to David for putting together such insightful resources and, much more importantly, for sharing them with us all! Well done, David! Thanks!)

Tags: Web Presence, Online Persona, Persona, Metablogging, Technology, IBM, David Ing, Coevolving, Web Persona, WordPress, Blogs, Social Software, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Media, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM

I don’t have a Facebook account. At least, not yet, as I have mentioned in another blog post I shared over here not so long ago. But from that to say “[...] sites such as Facebook could be costing firms over £130m a day” is a bit of an over-reaction. It is not the first, and I bet it will not be the last time, that we will see traditional media trying to influence the perception of social computing and how damaging it may well be for the workplace.

This time around it is disappointingly coming from a BBC article under the title Facebook ‘costs businesses dear’, which right away, of course, has made the headlines in Techmeme, too. And for a good reason.

If you check out some of the different links that I have referenced above, and I am sure there is plenty more out there that would be worth while a read, there is probably very little that I would be able to add into the conversation. However, this time around I thought I would try to point out something that lots of people seem to have forgotten.

Yes, indeed, that particular study (Not sure where the link to it is, actually) argues the amount of money lost by having knowledge workers hanging out in various multiple social networks, supposedly wasting their time instead of doing their jobs. But what about doing a much more interesting and relevant study that would calculate the amount of money lost, the countless hours gone by day in day out from different knowledge workers trying to find the experts to help them get the job done?

Why don’t we carry out studies that show and demonstrate the huge amount of losses for every single business out there just because their knowledge workforce did not know who to contact to get the job done faster, much more responsively and with plenty more quality? Do we have to remind business how much money they have lost over the course of the years just because one department didn’t know how to reach out to another to help out in a customer situation? How much money and time have businesses wasted on reinventing the wheel at the other side of the world, when that same business implemented a similar solution, but for a different customer?

Where do you feel that businesses would be at the moment if Knowledge Management would have been in the same status and with the same negative reputation as in the late 90s and early 2000s? How do you think different businesses are going to successfully make the transition into knowledge based companies in the Knowledge Economy of the 21st century, if it weren’t for social networks and social computing?

I am sure that, as you have gotten to read through the last paragraphs, you would be nodding away and perhaps sadly identifying your own business suffering from that very same thing. Why don’t we have studies that try to portrait how much money companies have lost for not empowering knowledge workers to connect with one another, share their knowledge, collaborate and innovate as a a result of embracing and adopting social computing techniques?

Why is it that people keep insisting that a successful business is that one that just focuses on a bunch of processes and tools and nevermind about the people and their connections, when we all know that it is the latter, the people, that glue that makes it all work together.

How much longer would the corporate world have to go further, before realising the true potential of social networking; freeing up knowledge workers to do what they do best: share their knowledge with others and collaboratively innovate.

*That* is what Knowledge Management or Knowledge Management 2.0 is all about! *That* is the main reason why KM is no longer a discipline with plenty of negative reputation. On the contrary, KM is coming back, and big time!, into the spotlight, and the main reason for it is nothing more, nothing less than social computing.

Because whether we like it or not, social media is here to stay. It is the perfect complement of a crippled traditional KM system where tools and processes were what ruled and all a sudden there is this balance that knowledge workers are putting together back on to the table realising that the true potential for a successful KM strategy is to actually combine tools, processes and people and all of that through the interactions of social software tools.

So here is an open question to everyone out there … Would you rather prefer to have your knowledge workers wasting their time with their daily social networking interactions in whatever the tool and benefit in the medium, long term from those inter-connections, or would you prefer to have your knowledge workers wasting their time trying to figure where the experts are and how to get their knowledge to help fix that customer problem?

It is up to you. Really. But I tell you something, if I were running a business I know what my option would be. Encourage my knowledge workers to hang out in various social networks, dive into the conversations, use them responsibly and continue building further up on what really matters: connect with people to share their knowledge and collaborate, instead of having to struggle time and time again trying to figure out how to get the job done smarter and not necessarily harder.

James Governor, a.k.a. monkchips, mentioned to me, not long ago, how I should have another look into Windows Live Writer as another powerful offline client, next to Qumana, which is my current default, for the time being. At the time I was not really very sure about it, so I put it in my to-do list. However, later on I found out Neville Hobson talking in very favourable terms about it, too. So that to-do item went higher up into the priority list.

And just this morning, one of my fellow IBM colleagues and good friend of mine as well, Andy Piper, blogged about it as well saying how nicely it is starting to integrate with IBM’s Lotus Connections. Thus right away, with all of those pieces of good advice, I decided to get rid of that to-do item and have a look into it today and test it out, once more.

And to sum up my overall experience with a single word, after having created a number of blog posts in all of my blogs, both internal and external, I think it would be impressed. And very much so, I must add!

There is this last beta client made available over the course of the last few days and so far from what I have been able to see it’s pretty stable. Its user experience and ease of use is at the same level, if not better, than Qumana (You gotta love that Automatically save drafts after N minutes).

However, the main reason that has helped me switch and ditch Qumana for good for the Windows machine is the fact that I just got the confirmation that one of my other fellow IBM colleagues, James Snell, and one of the folks behind Blog Central (IBM’s internal blogging engine) is actually working with the developers from Windows Live Writer to make it compatible with the Atom Publishing Protocol, which will help us walk away from the MetaWeblog API with all of its issues and problems, mainly, the exposure and non encryption of the login credentials.

That, to me, is a pretty good move to make the switch and start getting used to writing blog posts in WLW, so that when the right time comes for such offline blogging client to support APP I can make a smooth transition to it. And forget about Qumana who I have contacted several weeks ago around this very same issue of supporting or not the APP and I am still waiting for their answer.

Sorry, folks, but life is just too short to hang around and wait for something to happen. If you cannot pay attention to the constructive feedback provided by your end-user community that spends more and more time trying out and testing your tool(s), don’t be surprised if they decide to move elsewhere.

So far Windows Live Writer has made an impressive come back into the offline blogging client scene by staying one step ahead of the curve, that is, listening to their end-users and putting together some of the features that we have been asking for, is what will drag ourselves on to it, like I am doing and apparently like Andy, Neville, Monkchips and a whole bunch of others are doing.

They cannot be all wrong, right? … I don’t think so!

Goodbye Qumana, Hello Windows Live Writer?!?

(Oh, and the process of inserting a picture, one of the things I really liked the most from Qumana is just beautiful! As easy as it gets)

Tags: Twitter, Neville Hobson, Jeremiah Owyang, Web Strategist, Bill Ives, FASTForward, FASTForward Blog, HiveTalk, Chris Messina, FactoryJoe, Stowe Boyd, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Co-Creation, Coworking, Innovation, Channels, Tagging, Tags, Tag Channels, Social Networks, Micro-Blogging, Blogging, Groupings, Folksonomy, Thomas van der Wal, InfoCloud, Tweet-r, End-User Innovation, Feedback, Development

I was planning to create this particular weblog post last week Thursday, but in the end I didn’t, more than anything else because I didn’t want to build further up on the frustrations of not being able to use Twitter for most of that day, as Neville clearly points out over at Twitter needs some super strength and agility. Instead, I decided to let it go and enjoy a Twitterless day. But now that things seem to be back up again I thought it would be a good idea to share some further thoughts on why I still feel Twitter is the killer app., as far as micro-blogging is concerned, that is.

As a starter, people keep coming up with some pretty impressive blog posts that clearly detail how Twitter could be used on a business environment to help you stay connected with other knowledge workers while in a distributed world. Latest examples are those from Jeremiah Owyang with his stunning and incredibly thorough overview of how to benefit from Twitter within the enterprise: Web Strategy: What the Web Strategist Should Know about Twitter and Bill Ives, who over at the FASTForward Blog, gets to comment further in a very interesting conversation on another blog post put together by Sara (From HiveTalk) on 7 Enterprise Uses for Twitter.

I tell you, if you would ever want to get a crash course to find out where all the buzz is coming through with Twitter, those links that I have just mentioned above would get off to a good start, along with the 10 Reasons Why Twitter Will Help Improve Your Already Existing Social Networks that I created some time ago and which, to date, still remains as one of the most popular blog posts I have created over here.

But the thing is that not only those blog posts are helping out Twitter become that killer app. for micro-blogging; it is actually the fully committed end-user community who keep coming up with plenty of different ways on how to improve the overall user experience. And perhaps one of the best examples that I am very very excited about is the one put together by Chris Messina, a.k.a. FactoryJoe, over at FactoryCity, under the title: Groups for Twitter; or A Proposal for Twitter Tag Channels. Something that, by the way, has also been mentioned and adopted by Stowe Boyd, and which you can read some more about it over at Hash Tags = Twitter Groupings

In that particular blog post, Chris gets to detail one of the main reasons for which Twitter has become the killer app. out there: the passion to innovate and keep up with the pace of a thriving end-user community who cares about a particular tool and who would want to take things further into the next level.

Yes, that is right. In a very thoughtful and insightful blog post Chris gets to describe one of the features that we strongly feel would make Twitter an even much more attractive Web 2.0 application for everyone out there to try out: combining the concept of groups and tag channels that would help connecting with people in a much more meaningful way than what is happening today.

I am not going to detail what Chris is after, since you can read the lengthy post over at his blog. What I am certainly going to say is that with proposals like that one for social software tools you can never go wrong from a product development perspective Why? Because that helpful feedback on how to improve the user experience is coming from the most valuable source available out there for any social computing tool: its end-user community. That is just how you can keep innovating at a rampant pace keeping up with what end-users are asking for, which in the end will make things a lot easier, as far as adoption is concerned, and will certainly pave the road on where innovation is heading.

It is a collaborative effort. A collaborative effort that goes beyond the enterprise and which keeps getting active involvement and participation from that where it matters the most: the knowledge workers themselves. I tell you what, I am really excited to see what Chris has put together working collaboratively with others, because I can certainly see making it come through and become the next wave of interactions from Twitter.

Only thing remaining would be whether the Twitter development folks are up for the job and would take FactoryJoe’s collaborative work and push it through the next time that the application goes for a facelift. Now, that would be really cool and something for which I would forgive the fact the RSS feed has been broken since almost day one! (Thank goodness for Tweet-r!).

Can you imagine what Twitter would be like if we would be able to set up tag channels for "contextualisation, content filtering and exploratory serendipity"? I doubt it would get better than this, I tell you. And at the same time I am very excited to see how this particular proposal taps as well into some of the superb piece of work that Thomas van der Wal has put together for tagging and folksonomies. That’s just as dynamic, vibrant and exciting as it would get!

Let’s bring it on!