E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Reflections from 2011 – And Health It Is!

Around this time of the year, last year, I put together a blog entry over here under the suggestive heading of “Three Wishes“, where I tried to reflect, once again, and like I have been doing for the last few years, on what I would want to accomplish in the New Year. Not necessarily a new set of resolutions per se, year in year out, but thinking more along the lines of being pragmatic and focus instead on those little things that one could embrace and adopt rather easily and yet have a greater impact altogether. Now, how far off was I eventually? Let’s see … Here’s today’s “Reflections from 2011″ blog post.

In that article I mentioned above I wrote about those three wishes being as follows: Stay Healthy, Sustainable Prosperity and Be More Human. Those were not such a bad idea, don’t you think? Perhaps a bit utopian at large, but even then today, nearly a year later, they are still as relevant as they were when I first jotted them down together in that blog post. I’m not so sure whether we have embarked on sustainable prosperity in the last few months, judging by the current state of affairs with our global financial crisis, specially, when you read articles like this one that postulate the crisis won’t finish till around 2031 (Quite an interesting reading, by the way, that clearly confirms how we, human beings, seem to be really good at repeating the very same mistakes throughout our history time and time again! -In Spanish-) or whether we have become more human.

I will leave that last one up to you folks to decide based on the good amount of happenings and events taking place around us over the last 12 months. I would tend to think we are, slowly, but steadily, judging on a good number of rather interesting articles I have bumped into over the course of the last few weeks / months that seem to shift gears and focus more on that aspect of celebrating and fully embracing our humanity. And I am sure you may have bumped yourself into a whole bunch of other interesting and relevant reads along those lines, too.

Interestingly enough, with regards to “Stay Healthy” I wrote back at the beginning of January the following paragraph:

“[...] So my first wish for everyone out there is to stay healthy no matter what.

To me, that means staying away from the computer for longer periods of time (I know that’s going to be a challenge on its own already!), do plenty more exercise, eat even healthier, get plenty more sleep (I know some of you will be having a giggle or two while you are reading that one!) and, eventually, continue to take much better care of myself, since I know no-one else is going to do it. Not even work! hehe“

Little did I know, as I was putting together those few words that it would all turn out to be quite an amazing and inspiring revolution altogether to push me forward several months later on to what I am today: probably the healthiest in the last 16 to 17 years of my lifetime that I can remember! So much so that over the course of the last few months one comes to realise that what really matters in our today’s-more-hectic-and-busier-than-ever-lives is just something so relatively simple as staying or becoming healthy. The rest, as they usually say, will come along. Hard to believe, but yet, so accurate, it’s scary!

Stay healthy is also going to remain my main wish for everyone out there as we approach the beginning of a New Year: 2012 (Even if it is the last one). Stay healthy has also taken a new meaning for yours truly after quite an amazing 6 months where I have gone through something that I’m still trying to find proper words to describe it, yet, it’s had some of the highest impacts on not only what I do, but also who I am. Short version of the story? Well, in a bit over 6 months I have now lost 18 kg (Almost 40 lbs) and have gone back to the weight I used to have 16 to 17 years ago: 83 kg / 183 lbs / 13 stones.

Here is the long story though of how I made it happen and how it continues to work for myself as I have now stabilised on that specific weight range. It all started back in July when after all of the business travelling with all of the evening meals out, drinks, very little sleep, the accumulated stress and a whole bunch of other things put me on the high end of 101.5 kg / 224 lbs and I thought enough was enough. I had to stop it. It was getting far too much and I needed to find a way out without being it too costly. You know how it goes, once you reach a certain age (Mine will be coming along next year!), where you combine the big 4 with the big 0, you come to acknowledge you need to do something about it before it is too late or else. And since I didn’t like much the else bit, I decided to do something about it right away this year.

Now, before I go any further into sharing further insights based on my own first hand experiences of how it’s worked out for me becoming a lot healthier losing that amount of weight I mentioned above over the course of the last few months, I would want to stress out that this has worked with me really well, but there is no guarantee, nor will I offer one, that it would work out for other folks out there. There are plenty of health specialists and nutritionists out there who you folks should go to, if you would want to start up something similar, specially, at this time of the year when we all have got that lovely resolution of wanting to lose some weight

Ok, with all of that said, here are the three things that I have done this year to help me Stay Healthy and regain back plenty of my own life along with it:

• Regular Exercise: Right off, back in July, when I decided to start losing some weight I knew that, for me, there wouldn’t be any magic diet out there that I would need to follow in order to lose all of that weight. It had to come off from somewhere else and since I used to play basketball in my younger years for a long while I knew that the best thing that would work out for me would be to engage on regular exercise. And that’s what I did. So almost every day (I usually take a break in the middle of the week) I go half and half running and fast walking for about 7 to 8 km non stop (Ohhh, Boira has been a great help in this area, too! Specially, in the last month or so); then during the course of the day I also do about 10 minutes of rowing; some yoga exercises and, finally, some abs, too (Working my way to 100 a day at the moment…).

  I must confess at the very beginning I thought it was going to be rather difficult to build the habit and all, but the reality is that it hasn’t. It’s been a blast all along. The key trick that worked out for me very nicely was to consistently continue doing the exercise till I would build a habit, then the rest would be much easier. And it surely has! 6 months down the line I still go out running / fast walking for one hour to make up for those 7 to 8 km and I still enjoy it just as much as I did at the beginning. 

  However, the beginning was not that easy. Through a good number of experiments, trying to fine out the length of and what time of the day for the exercise that would be the most suitable for me, I figured out that I eventually enjoy doing the daily workout first thing in the morning (Right after I wake up, drink a couple of glasses of water and off to hit the road, or, better, the countryside) and that’s basically what I do still today. In case you may not have seen it, here is a superb .PDF article that explains the “Best Times to Train” with lots of pros and cons for whatever the time so you can find the right one that just works for you. Like I said, I know that for most folks would vary, but, for me, it looks like early morning exercise does the trick. It keeps me going for the rest of the day, too!, and big time!

• Watching what I eat: I bet that this is the one item you would all be thinking about “Ohhh, so you eventually are dieting and everything, right?”. Well, not really. I am not following any kind of specific diet and surely don’t plan to start one now. I eat everything (Meats, fish, fruits, vegetables, sweets, legumes, dairy products, etc. etc.). I haven’t cut down on anything rather drastically, even carbs; what I have done though is I have started watching the amounts of food I eat on a daily basis. I watch out for the portions. Long gone are those meals where the food was overflowing the plates. Now, I just have enough food intakes that allow me to feel full, but not overblown (out of proportion, like I used to do!). I have a light breakfast, a somewhat heavy lunch meal and a coffee / tea break in the afternoon and a very light dinner by the end of the day. Yes, indeed, I don’t starve, nor do I plan on doing it any time soon. Not worth the pain, nor the effort. Rather prefer to concentrate on watching out for large portions and focus instead on medium / smaller ones. 

  One other thing that I have done rather consistently is to drink a lot of liquid as well during the course of the day. Specially, water. I usually drink between 2 to 2.5 liters of water, plus the odd juice, coffee / tea, etc. Earlier on with this initiative I realised that another thing I knew was going to help me in the drinking department was going to reduce my intake of alcohol to a certain degree. So I’m not alcohol-free at the moment, but I don’t drink as much beer, long drinks or wine as I used to do and my body seems to be rather grateful about that, to the point where I am no longer missing it. I have switched from long drinks to scotch on the rocks and every time I get one I surely make sure I enjoy it to the max. It doesn’t happen too often, so better do it, right? The same for a glass of wine or a good quality beer! But that would be it. The next day up early again and off to burn it all. 

• Sleep: I know that this may sound rather ironic and perhaps a bit too funny, but the third thing that has helped me tremendously in building up the habit of losing weight when I’m not exercising, or watching over what I eat, has been something so relatively simple as having enough hours of sleep. Plenty of people out there would probably be saying how sleep is for the weak and everything, but, seriously, I no longer care much about such statements, specially, knowing the many key benefits I have been getting back from making a habit of good long nights of sleep. Sleep is probably more important than food, and I can certainly confirm it’s helping me burn fat at a faster pace than whatever I could ever anticipate (Did you know that your body, as an average, could probably lose about 1 kg per good night sleep? Mine does … hehe), so I am planning on continuing to get my beauty sleep for as long as I possibly can, although I have lately settled down between 7 to 7.5 hours per day.

  Have you ever heard about sleepyti.me? Not sure whether you may have seen it or not, but, lately, in the last couple of months, I have found it very interesting to help me establish the best wake up times based on the good number of hours I intend to sleep, which sleepyti.me has settled down for me on 7.5 hours per day. So I do try to follow it up as religiously as I can and so far it’s working really well. I no longer even question whether I can stay a little bit longer up or not. I reach a certain time of the evening and straight to bed! Building up another habit I have learned to enjoy quite a bit, too! That’s the beauty of it, that I no longer feel bad about sleeping more hours than what I used to in the recent past.

And that’s it! With those three simple things, although I am sure I could add plenty more details about each of them, which I may be able to do during the course of the next few months to share across with folks progress on how things have been moving along further, I came to the conclusion that health as far too important to neglect it, specially, when you can see, live and experience fully some of those amazing results at the end of the tunnel. There used to be a time, and plenty of folks who know me can confirm that, where I continuously neglected both my body and overall healthy just to remain connected online a little bit longer. I have been accused (in a healthy way, I suppose…) about being part of the club of social networkers who never sleep and rightly so, if I judge my online virtual behaviour over the course of time. However, over the last 6 months that’s no longer the case and I can surely guarantee you all that the same would be happening in 2012. There was a time for me to put a stop to how much my online life was trumping my physical health and while I was still on time, I realised that I was rather lucky to change the tide of things right when I could. There is no way back for me any longer.

So if you don’t see me online much over the course of the day, there may be multiple reasons for it… I may not be connected due to technical problems, or lack of network coverage, or the social tools not playing nice, or whatever else. Or, just plainly, and from this blog post onwards, because I may be just simply out and about embarking on my daily workout. Hopefully, you will be, too! Remember, no matter how cool the Social Web is for all of us on how it keeps feeding our brains to unparalleled levels of greatness, enlightenment and learning, we still need to attend to our physical bodies and ensure we are all in good shape with our health to enjoy both the mind and the body, because if we don’t do it, no-one else will!

Have a wonderfully Happy, Prosperous and rather Healthy New Year 2012 everyone!!

Reflections from 2011 – Redefining Your Social Web Presence

After having put together last couple of blog posts about some of my reflections from the year we are about to end around The Social Web and Technology in general, I guess it’s now a good time to share with the world the third one from the series. The one I have been telling people about over the course of the last couple of months as the one that is going to mark a before and an after with regards to my own involvement with The Social Web. You could probably think of it as a redefining moment of my own Social strategy, pretty much like I did in February 2008, when I redefined my own use of email by living “A World Without Email” ever since. I do realise that some folks may not like it, and some other people may relate to it quite a bit. But, in principle, I am going to keep that spirit of living life in a perpetual beta, going through, yet again, another experiment and see how it would move along, except that, this time around, it’s my own virtual life. Welcome to the new elsua!

How can I summarise this new strategy towards social networking in a short sentence, so that you would be able to have a glimpse of what I am about to get started with? Hummm, that’s quite a nice challenge, indeed, but if you have read the last couple blog entries you may have sensed already what it would be like. In case you haven’t though, here is a single one liner describing what I am about to get started with in 2012: Finally, after 10 years in the making, I’ll be freeing up myself from the yokes of both technology and the Social Web in order to get around, connect with my various social network(s), share my knowledge across and collaborate further along on my terms and not longer theirs.

I am not sure what you folks would think, but I’m ready, at long last, to free up myself from the yoke that both Technology and the Social Web have over-imposed on all of us and to no remedy. Or, better said, I am ready to free up myself from those people who control both of those environments to get the most out of us, but at our very own costs; in most cases, our very own energy, efforts, and truly hard work, while they just sit there and wait for it to happen, because they know it will happen eventually. Most of us, knowledge workers, have always had that very strong urge to connect with others, to share our affinities and true passions, to care for what one embarks on, and to help out where we possibly can. And plenty of times we keep going through the extra mile to try to achieve it. And most of the times, we don’t. Rather technology fails, or The Social Web user experience fails. Or both! And what do we do? We keep trying over and over again till we eventually make it through and make it happen. I am tired of having to put up with it all, of having to spend a humongous amount of time trying to customise my virtual social life to meet someone else’s needs (Those of both technology and the Social Web, as good examples to start with), while ignoring and neglecting my own.

Well, not anymore from yours truly. It’s, finally, a good time for me to depart from that incredibly frustrating experience of having to adjust, time and time again, both my working and life styles to the constant failures from both technology and the Social Web. It’s time for me to let real life kick-in, once again, and bring back that very important component all of us, human beings, seemed to have been neglecting for a long while: our very own personal, real life, (business) relationships. Yes, the physical social networking no-one seems to have realised we have been having out there for thousands, if not millions!, of years! I am no longer going to wait for either technology, or social networking tools, to fix their silliness and have me try multiple times to reproduce an experience that I feel should be rather straightforward: sharing!

I am no longer willing to go and pay through my nose for a service, i.e. the Internet, that telcos have ingrained in all of us as an essential must-have. Well, not really. They never had the control and they are not going to start now. At least, not with me. if the connection is there, if technology enables it painlessly, if the Social Web works the way it is supposed to, I’ll be fine. I will be there! Just like in the last 10 years and counting… However, if either of those three factors fail to deliver, I hereby declare I no longer care. Like a very good offline friend of mine would say: “Life is just way too short to have to worry about certain things taking place. You better make them happen yourself and move on, instead!“

And that’s why, from here onwards, I am no longer going to worry about technology itself (Whether it’s connectivity, tools, or social software), nor going to rely on it much to get stuff done. If it works, it works, if it doesn’t, I won’t be bothering. I will be moving on to the next thing, because, you know, there will always be a next thing. Even after the Social Web. And that, basically, means I am no longer going to be around, waiting for things to happen and ask me, again, to spend my energy, effort and whatever other trouble, including my own time, to see if things would work out once again. Like I said, life is just too short for me to worry about those silly things. We should move on to better things, I am afraid.

WOW!! Really? Are you saying what I think you are saying with those few paragraphs mentioned above, you may be wondering, right? I mean, how will I get my stuff done, both internally and externally, both at work, and outside work, if I am no longer going to rely, as religiously as I used to, in both technology and social networking tools. Well, that’s a pretty good question, indeed, for which, at this point in time, I don’t have an answer for. However, I can tell you something else. I’m an optimist, an outrageous, a heretic, a free radical, in short, a rebel at work by heart who knows that if we don’t push the limits on helping redefine and reshape our very own social technology experiences no-one else is going to do it for us. So I’m having enough with it all. I am having enough with having to put up with plenty of frustration, of additional stress I know I could do without, rather low energy levels that keep draining both my motivation and energy to want to do great things, and a huge amount of unnecessary and unneeded tension that I know I just don’t need any longer anymore! And probably you, too!

Indeed, I am not sure how this is going to end up eventually, and whether I will be making it at all, or suffer along the way quite a bit. However, I am very willing to give it a try and see how it goes. That’s what life is all about, I guess, right? Trying new things to see whether they would work out for you or not, learn a lot about them along the way, and try not to make the same mistakes again. In short, keep applying some of that critical thinking in everything we do, because, like I said above already, if we don’t do it for ourselves, no-one else would. And perhaps rightly so. It’s got to get started within ourselves, because, whether we like or not, we are the ones who know best where the issues lay and what we can do about them. And act upon them! Long gone is the time where we remain passive about most of the stuff we used to do. Long gone is the time where we just waited for things to happen. It’s time to move on to better things and keep excelling at what we are already doing.

I am sure at this point in time you may be wondering what it would look like, right? I mean, how will it work for yours truly in today’s technology driven world by no longer being dependent on it, by freeing yourself from its everlasting yoke? Well, like I said, I will be reshaping it over the course of time, but here are some initial thoughts of how I’m planning to tackle both Technology and the Social Web in 2012 and beyond:

• Connectivity: Starting with a biggie, why not, right? Yes, from now onwards, I will no longer care whether I’m finally connected to the Web or not. If within the first 15 minutes I can’t manage to stay connected on a rather decent Internet connection, I will give up on it and move on with the offline world. Perhaps a whole lot more productive than trying to figure out, or troubleshoot, why I can’t get connected in the first place. This would apply mostly to my business travelling, whether to customer events, workshops, meetings, or conferences, seminars, summits, hotel rooms, etc. etc. I’ll be more than happy to live blog / tweet / plus on things around me while I am travelling and certainly share as much as I possibly can, but if connectivity fails to deliver, you won’t see me much, perhaps the odd message to alert folks I’m giving up for the day and move on into real life, where I am sure conversations would be just as good and fruitful, but without the excruciating experience of, time and time again, having to struggle with technology. Not to worry, my dear telcos and various different Internet providers, the b*tching will be rather limited, since I know you can’t care less about trying to improve our user experiences. Your wallet will notice it though. From day one… At least, from me.
• The Social Web – Blogging: One of my favourite social software activities from over the last 9 years (It’s hard to believe that I got started with my first internal blog way back on December 2003!!) will always be blogging. Like I said, if there is anything the last three months have shown me with these rather extensive breaks is that I need to keep writing. It’s healthy for the mind, it’s healthy for the soul. I realise now, as I am putting this round of blog entries that I cannot longer live without it. So what am I am changing in this area?

  Well, as a starting point, I am going to diversify my own blogging style. It’s no longer going to be those rather lengthy, hopefully, helpful, blog posts that I keep sharing over here. I do know and realise that plenty of them are far too complex to digest on a single read. Yes, they are, just as much as they are for me to put them together, since I truly love the research that goes along with it. The amount of extra linking I put together into it, the recommendations I share across on people to follow, including their writings and everything else and so forth. It’s quite a lot of time consuming, but totally worth it. Once you have got the right connectivity though, but since I know next year will be another year where I won’t have it, I better diversify on it. So, as a starting point, my blogging will continue to have lengthy blog posts where appropriate, but when I can’t put them together I will be going for shorter entries, sharper, sharing an initial idea I want to jot down somewhere and rather raw with hardly any additional links or hyperlinks to people’s work. That will need to come along at a later time. 

  The idea would be to keep feeding the blog with, hopefully, interesting content we can all learn from, which is also one of the reasons why I’m planning to make much heavier use of my Google Plus profile to draft some of those ideas, get some conversations going and then perhaps move that dialogue into a blog post for everyone else to see and participate in. And whenever it happens that I’m offline I will move that writing exercise offline as well, which is where I am hoping to rely, quite a bit more, on Evernote on my iPad than what I have in the recent past. Somehow I would want my iPad to become my new moleskine that I can take with me and sync everywhere, whenever I regain back connectivity.

• The Social Web – Twitter and Google Plus: My use of both Twitter and Google Plus will continue to be pretty much the same from what I recently blogged about over at “Google Plus and Twitter – How They Work for Me Hand in Hand“. I will continue to work with both of them as part of “The Big Three“, but with the slight difference that, if good, decent connectivity is not there within the first 15 minutes of trying it out, I’m dropping both of them for what’s left of the day, till I regain that connection again. Like I said, if it works, it works, if it doesn’t, I am no longer going to wait. Instead, will focus on other offline activities, including real life conversations, specially, when I am on the road. 

  Mind you though perhaps on that same context of being a road warrior I will probably be focusing more on tweeting, than plussing, at least, till the overall user experience for Plus Mobile improves quite drastically, including the additional of a native iPad App. So if you don’t see me for a couple of days on Plus, it’s probably, because I am travelling and taking a short break; it doesn’t mean I have abandoned it. Not a chance. Remember, it’s still part of my “Big Three”, along with IBM Connections and Twitter. 

• The Social Web – The Rest: The rest of the various other social networking sites will probably remain the same for yours truly. I will continue to have a light presence in there, although I’m not going to invest much on it, at least, till they all dramatically improve the overall experiences, so that they don’t become more of a drain, like most of them are now at the moment, whether due to privacy issues, terms of service, awkward user interfaces, etc. etc. You name it. So if you would want to reach out to me, the best methods would still be through this blog, a Twitter mention to @elsua or My Google Plus Profile. If it doesn’t get eaten by the system you should be able to receive a response from me within a reasonable amount of time depending on the urgency of the request / query / matter. I will still be there, not to worry, it is just that my response would now probably take a bit longer … But it will get there eventually.
• The Social Web – Content Curation: And, finally, perhaps the biggest new move I will be making in 2012 and beyond. As good as knowledge sharing, collaborating with others, and generally connecting with other people are as activities on the Social Web, I’m going to start focusing plenty more on content curation. It’s the new black, it looks like, and I am hoping to bring it back into my social streams starting very very soon. Time and time again I keep getting healthily bombarded with terrific content I would want to share across, but usually I keep failing to share it along, because I just can’t keep up with it all while trying to add my ¢2, with the issues mentioned above already. So, instead of increasing my levels of frustration and irritation from not sharing those great links out there, I’m taking a different approach this time around and will start exploring the potential from one social software tool I have been following for a little while and enjoying from other folks: Scoop.it. 

  My profile in there is rather empty at the moment, but as we move along into the new year I surely plan to create a good number of different categories and start populating them a good bunch of interesting and relevant readings I have bumped into over the course of the last few months, and which, at some point or another, I would want to refer to once again on the odd blog posts, Plus conversations or tweets.

  I may be looking as well for an external social bookmarking service, to keep that curation going, but I am not too sure at this point in time just yet on what I will be doing. Still thinking about it, so if you folks out there have got any recommendations outside Delicious or Diigo, which have never convinced me much, I am afraid, I would love to learn about how you are managing your own social bookmarks. I have heard lots of great things about Pinboard, but not sure whether it would be worth the investment or not… What do you think? Is it worth while going for it? Would love to read your thoughts on it, if you are using it actively. 

And that’s it! Another rather lengthy blog post about to hit the Social Web out there. Another blog entry, that, like I said, will help shape up, once more, my overall Social Web Presence. Still in the making though and with plenty of room for improvements, I am sure, but I just love engaging on this kind of experiments to keep refining them over the course of time, just like I have been doing for almost 4 years now with living “A World Without Email“, more than anything else because of the unexpected situations and key learnings that will occur and that I am sure will be helping me put a stop with that excruciating and rather painful experience of having to adjust my social presence around certain social networking sites, when I feel it should be otherwise.

Did I complete lose it? Am I way off again? Did I jump the shark far too soon? I seriously don’t know. I guess time will tell, and this blog, too! Because I surely plan to share how the experience will be developing over the course of the next few months. Got any suggestions on what you feel could work, or not? Share them along, too, please! I would love to know whether I have gone completely crazy with all of this Social stuff or whether we are just witnessing the beginning of something bigger, much bigger: Redefining Our Own Social Web Presence with a Focus and a Purpose.

(Ohh, by the way, I haven’t revealed a couple of surprises here and there that will surely continue to shape up and change a few things on how I view self-publishing of new content and not necessarily on the blog alone; I will be sharing more details on each of them shortly as well, as I get ready to prepare last few things, before they go live … Stay tuned for more! It’s bound to provide lots of good fun, too!)

Reflections from 2011 – Focused and Purposeful Social Networking

In a rather thought-provoking blog post shared a few days back, my good friend, the always insightful, Alan Lepofsky ventured to put together what could well be some very interesting predictions for 2012 with a slight twist that I am sure is going to provoke lots of healthy dialogue as we start moving into the new year. Of particular and relevant interest to this article I am putting together over here in this blog would be item #1 on “The Social Buzz Wears Off” where Alan comes to share this rather shocking, perhaps, too harsh statement: “2012 will be the year employees start hating social software“. Goodness! So soon?!?! I mean, we have only been having social software tools for merely 15 years and we are already starting to hate them, as end-users? Boy, look at email, it’s taken nearly 40 years to reach that kind of negative sentiment altogether and we are already claiming the Social Web will be reaching that same status that soon? Really? Well, I am afraid Alan is right, although I wouldn’t call it a prediction for 2012, but more a reality of today, 2011: the current state with all things social. Welcome to the Age of Effectiveness!

I am not sure what you folks would think about Alan’s thoughts in this area, but I think he pretty much nails it with a growing sentiment that plenty of us, knowledge Web workers, have been pondering about for a long while now and which another good friend of mine, Greg Lowe, put together beautifully in a rather inspiring tweet earlier on in the week:

Will 2012 be the year I settle for a single Social Network? I think so. FB, Twitter & G+. I’ll be scrutinizing for effecitveness.

— Greg Lowe (@Greg2dot0) December 27, 2011

Effectiveness, that’s all the rage coming along for 2012, and beyond, with regards to our overall user experience with social networking tools, whether inside, or outside of the firewall. Long gone are the days and the times when wasting time getting the Social Web to work for us was all what we were busy with during our working hours, as well as plenty of our private time. As we move into 2012 it looks like most of us are now ready to claim that we, knowledge workers, should no longer go around social software, but, instead, the latter should work around us, or, more specifically, what we would want to achieve, whether internally, or externally.

Why effectiveness? Well, for several reasons, but I would probably think that one of the strongest cases is to look for ways to fine tune our overall user experience with social at a time where we are now getting exposed to more data, information and knowledge than ever before, and we would want to get a grasp of what’s happening around us without having to focus much more on technology. We are already starting to see how technology is perceived as a means, as a tool, to achieve a goal, no longer an end on its own and we are probably owing that shift of focus of our attention to smartphones and tablets (Specially, Android, iPhone & iPad devices) where technology does no longer take as much preeminence, but instead, our overall user experience does. So, over time, we are becoming more and more demanding with our over social experiences and, as such, that’s where we are realising that we still have got a long long way ahead of us to make it work around & for us, instead of against us, which, funny enough, seems to have been my own experience in the last 12 months.

Greg mentions on that succinct tweet how he will be looking forward to potentially settle down on a single social networking site for 2012 and beyond to stay focused, which seems to be, and rightly so, the focus of attention nowadays for plenty of people, if I may add so myself. And that’s a good thing! Because right along with focus we have another concept I have grown rather fond of during the course of this year: purpose (Or purposeful). And whether most of those social networking sites and enterprise social software solutions would admit and acknowledge or realise about it or not, next year we, social software end-users, are going to become a whole lot more demanding with where our focus will be going (Or should be going), as well as for what purpose.

That shift has already started with yours truly, as I have come to ponder and muse about in this “Reflections from 2011” series of blog posts, where if I was previously blogging about how technology in general was one of my major disappointments from the year, the Social Web is not far behind. And that’s something that I find very worrying. Not because of what’s happened in this past year, but for what’s continuing to happen in the new year and that we seem to be doing very little about to avoid making the same mistakes. But perhaps we should see it with a couple of examples, so that you folks can see what I mean …

Earlier on this year, I put together a blog post where I talked about “The Big Three – How to Handle Your Fragmented Social Life“. In it, I mentioned how I may not be capable of settling down into a single social networking site to allow me get the most out of the Social Web, whether internal or external. So, instead, I decided to stick around with what I still call nowadays “The Big Three“: the three major social networking solutions I have learned to treasure and nurture over the course of time to reach the stage where I can no longer live without them, both on a personal and work levels. You know how it goes. Social software grows on you the more you use it, not because of the social technologies in place themselves, but more because of how they keep helping you manage to stay connected with those people who you care the most for and have learned to trust over the course of time a great deal thanks to that continuous social friction. Yes, the main purpose, if you want to call it that way, for social software, still today: connecting people to people and connecting people to content.

Yet, that overall user experience for myself with those big three (IBM Connections, Twitter and Google Plus) has been less than ideal to the point where I have been struggling more than succeeding on adjusting their ways of working to my ways of working and getting things done. Whether it may be related to their native features, or, better said, the lack of them, or whether the deployment has been everything but smooth, one has come to realise that in order to care for those social tools you love and heart quite a bit, there are some growing pains to put up with along the way. However, that doesn’t mean that those growing pains should be there for good. Quite the opposite. As we are about to enter a new year, we are all probably going to become a lot more demanding, like I was mentioning before, not just to kill off and terminate those pain points, but participate actively in helping re-design that overall user experience to the point where I’m starting to believe that those social networking sites that listen to their end-users the most and learn from them would be the ones that will be succeeding eventually. And big time!

One thing that we should not forget, and this is something that I kept telling the customers I have visited during 2011, is that, as a vendor of both your products and services, the group of people who would always know your own products much much better than you will always ever do, or dream of, would be your customers. Not only because they are using your solutions out of the box with the intended purpose you decided upon from the beginning, but also because those very same customers are the ones who are taking to the extreme your products, hacking away new behaviours, new ways of doing things, pushing the limits of how far they can go with your solutions to help them achieve what they want and not what you want. So those vendors that get to understand that and fully embrace it are the ones that are going to win us back all the way and for a long long while!

Take, for instance, Twitter. If you have been following this blog for a long while now, you would acknowledge the kind of love / hate relationship I have been having with that social networking site for years. I have loved it quite a few times, but I have also loathed many many more. Over the course of time, the user experience has deteriorated so bad, including its third party, or even their own, Twitter Apps that I have been on the brink of giving up on it altogether and never walk back several times. Yet, I’m still there. Why? Because of the connections I have nurtured and cultivated over the course of time, of course, because of the continuous and rampant learning curve one gets exposed to, because of the wonderful and magical serendipity it provides, but, above all, because after a long wait, there is finally a Twitter App that has helped me recover back the user experience I once had with Nambu. And that is Janetter. Perhaps the best Twitter desktop client out there at the moment. At least, for me, the one that has helped me love Twitter again. Why? Because it provides me with a purpose to shape up my focus on where I want it to be. Not where Twitter wants it to be, regardless of what they say or do. Something that before wasn’t happening.

Take another example: Google Plus. The social networking site that plenty of people want to see dead, but that just recently reached the 62 million users mark, which I guess is not too shabby for a walking dead social networking platform, don’t you think? Anyway, like I was saying, to me Plus has become the favourite place to host lengthier conversations that perhaps have got a better place than in Twitter or your own blog. It’s become for me my favourite deep thinking learning place on the stuff I am really passionate about. The overall Web browser experience is amazing; the amount of features put together where Google is bringing Google to Plus at a rather rampant pace is unprecedented. The reach it’s starting to have is one to none (i.e. In the last several months I have been having plenty of customers finding my Plus Profile before anything else… including my own blog!!). Yet the mobile experience has got a lot to be desired for. Yes, I know, there are Android as well as iPhone Apps and they are pretty nifty, but still somehow I think we all know and realise we could do a whole lot more with them. Most of the times they feel like we are just scratching the surface of what we could do with them.

We need to have a better mobile user experience for Google Plus. We need to have better options and feature sets that allow us to bring back that focus and purpose with this social software tool. And to make things even better we finally need a good iPad App that provides that unique experience we all know we can have. And should have, if they would want us to keep using it in the next few months…

You see? This is what I mean with the state of the Social Web. I am sure plenty of you folks could share lots of similar experiences with other social networking tools, like Facebook, LinkedIn, Slideshare, and whatever other mobile social tools, etc. etc. Both focus and purpose are back in the game for the new year. They are the new black! To the point, where seeing how hectic and incredibly busy 2012 looks ahead of its starting time so far, I fear that I would be having very very little time to waste trying to adjust, for the zillionth time, to their needs and wants, versus them trying to adjust to my / our own. If The Big Three, at least, for me, don’t step up and move forward to improve my overall user experience the way I would want to, I guess it will be a good time for me to focus back on where the real social networking activities will be happening from here onwards; that special place we all know we can always shape up to meet our needs and wants and achieve most of what we want: real life.