Conversationware

It’s not a new analogy, but it should assist in understanding social networks, as to whether they are an opportunity, or not.

When I last went to a nightclub, I didn’t expect to form any lasting relationships.

Historically speaking, giving no details, there may have been existing acquaintances or friendships that might have been enhanced, and a deal or two may have been sealed. However, I never expected to come home with any sales leads for the business ready for Monday morning.

If your company specialises in things useful at a nightclub - alcohol, music, kebabs, etc then it stands to reason you need to be all over that network, making yourself look remarkable.

Actually, any consumer business might reasonably benefit if they’re remarkable enough.

I did a quick search to see if anyone else had made the facebook nightclub analogy - and of course, it’s been done rather well

Giles Bowkett says that “the cool place to be” changes and is naturally cyclical.

The google search showed a Jaiku comment - saying that facebook tags and installs tracking devices on the people showing up to its ‘nightclub’.

(I didn’t know Jaiku comments showed up in searches..I wonder if that is common knowledge)

Om Malik got this months ago, as per usual.

I suppose that it’s ironic that one of the businesses that stands to do well out of facebook is nightclubs.

I didn’t know that

The BBC pointed it out in this article.

Apparently there are 1.5M posts on blogs per day.

I wonder what the next ten years will bring, as things tend to speed up don’t they?

This is spot on in my book,

For the record, my book isn’t facebook -

I saw a fair few spelling mistakes today, and it reminded me of the link below.

Perhaps your punctuation is slightly off, and perhaps all it takes is a little reflection and modification.

A dash in time saves nine maybe?

http://www.upassdriving.com

Is this post just mean, or is it a salutory lesson for all of us bloggers/publishers?

Wasn’t it Seth Godin that told us to be remarkable in our marketing? See a link to Seth’s video on my Great Conversations Page.

A very worthwhile watch indeed at 17 mins. I just watched it again.

As yet another social network buzz is starting to die down…..

A recap on ‘what’s happened so far’

Various forms of electronic communication have been invented.

The key aspect to all of them. Asynchronous.

We only have one piece of attention to give at any one moment, and so, asynchronous technology gives us massive productivity benefits - conversations can be carried out over a period, whilst doing other things.

This is true of

• Email,
• IM,
• Blogs,
• Wikis,
• Social networks 

Electronic conversations are also much more powerful because they’re written down, - searchable, discoverable, interactive whilst being less sensitive to time, (timefree)

BUT - the crucial piece is that none of this software truly yet delivers a full conversation electronically.

For all of the marketing sector telling us that they are having conversations with their audience with their blogs - the reality feels more like they are making a ‘presentation’.

A blog is like a presentation in that someone makes their point, and the audience can comment or ask questions afterwards and then leave the building.

This isn’t exactly an example of a roundtable asynchronous timefree conversation is it? I make a comment and then have to remember to come back to see the response, or other people’s questions?

It’s just not intuitive - where is the user interface for our conversations? All over the place on other people’s blogs, that’s where.

Conversations shouldn’t be kept by just one of the contributing parties, and marketers would probably like to continue the conversation with people even after they’ve left the building.

Solve that one and then we’ll enable it with unified communications.

Similar themes

There is a useful ‘zeitgeist’ post by hugh macleod over on his blog, gapingvoid. Echo’s are here at Stowe Boyd’s blog, and I have to agree with both Stowe and Hugh, running a blog is a powerful learning and communicative experience, not to be undersold.

However, it is clear from the comments on the gapingvoid that other people are also still looking for other tools to keep the conversation going, and I think I’m agreeing that there is still some stuff missing (as well as being all over the place).

It feels like it wouldn’t take much to link blogs, comments and conversations, and I’m wondering whether this linked article here at gigaom is alluding to something. Although it talks about identity and Wordpress, the phrases “inside out social network”, and “the social graph” do resonate.

Merry Christmas. We have some innovation in the telco world.

I haven’t seen too many PSTN organisations saying, ‘here’s an API, do what you want”. It could and should be interesting.

RIBBIT, is a hosted telephony developer environment API, enabling flex developers to make use of a Class 5 switch.  

A fuller description of what they are doing is available in the linked PDF.

They have just launched, but have been encouraging some initial development in the past few months on their beta developer site.

In the future, when conversations are managed electronically through software, will this sort of voice handling component help deliver the killer app?

I’m not 100% convinced it’s this one yet, but something like it. I’ll put a fiver on it.

The phrase “mobile presence” is a misnomer, but even so, there should be more done about applications sharing information as to whether someone is currently “on the phone” or not.

As difficult as it already is to share IPT desktop phone status information between organisations - very early days - it is even less common to be able to determine someone’s mobile phone status electronically.

It occurs to me that this situation is unlikely to improve.

The issue is this

• If people are shown to be already on the phone - people won’t call to find out. Thus, there is likely to be a corresponding drop in telephone calls, voicemail leaving and voicemail access, and therefore call revenue.
• Presence reduces call revenues

So, what hope for ubiquitous presence information?

There is a hope if the (software?) application that generates the call in the first place, then makes that information available for the duration of the call.

For instance

IPT software commonly redirects incoming calls to people not at their desk. Do those IPT software systems then show someone as ‘busy, mobile’ for the duration of the call? I’m betting not many of them do.

If the trunk to trunk remains connected, device busy status should be simple shouldn’t it?

And therefore, with the right application development, if all incoming calls are routed through a central location, then another important UC element could be delivered.

What’s left then, is to generate ‘outgoing’ calls from a mobile device through a linked application.

Alcatel’s My Teamwork solution facilitates that, but perhaps it should be a facility of some mobile operating system as well.

Google Android  and Grand Central anyone?

Then, there is the issue of being out of service or ’switched off’….it goes on, this search for the UC holy grail.

More and more it has seemed to me that VOIP doesn’t matter. I don’t see this discussed on mainstream communications news sites, presumably it’s a question of who pays their bills through advertising.

I was contemplating on ways to express this properly, when I read this seasonal post by Ken Camp, looking back at the technological year . He did the job already, - see the extract below.

Voice over IP - VoIP as Plumbing
If there was a shaking revelation in 2007, I don’t think it shook enough people. Having written books and papers about VoIP from a number of different perspectives, my view is focused in a different way that the enterprise customer view. My history in VoIP goes back ten years or more. But the stark reality is in 2007 VoIP became plumbing.

For many years, VoIP was viewed as a major disruptive technology. People expected it would completely change the face of telecommunications. I know I believed that. But I don’t believe that today. I’ve often, in the past, referred to circuit switching, for either voice or data, as nothing more than plumbing. It’s base infrastructure. It’s a foundation.

VoIP has proven that it’s really just another foundation element. The hot technology area is voice as a service. It’s how and where we can use voice services. How we deliver them is irrelevant to customers and users. VoIP truly is just another delivery mechanism. It’s a great delivery mechanism. It lets us maximize the value of IP networks. Cost savings and operational efficiencies can be huge, but at the root of things, VoIP is simply a service delivery mechanism for a service.

There is another element, in as much as voice calls are going to be less frequent, and therefore doesn’t matter as much as it used to. A trend I think will continue over 2008.

Incidentally, I should be careful with plumbing analogies, I am still very high up on uk google search for k.i.t.c.h.e.n.s after a rather overworked analogy back in April on how if you wanted to buy one (unified communications was the k.i.t.c.h.e.n), you shouldn’t be held to ransom by your plumbing provider (voip).

Anyhow, thanks Ken, I enjoyed the rest of your post.

Exposing a combined desk and telephone presence is like giving out your front door keys.

So, are your parents and best friends welcome around at ANY time?

The likelihood is that even if they have keys, the visit would still be agreed in advance. Either that, or perhaps you’d have a standing arrangement for a certain day of the week.

Work is a bit like that standing arrangement, a pact between colleagues to be available

But does your availability pact extend to everyone in your business, to any more people than you’re sharing projects with at that time, your immediate teams?

Does your being available ’depend’?

Because answering ’depends’ could mean you need to ‘manage’ your presence, and imagine setting presence when putting the kettle on.

So, even if someone is shown to be at their desk and not on the phone, they might not answer your phonecall…..it depends on

• What they’re doing,
• Who YOU are
• What you want to talk about.

Arranging conversations in advance 

My current experience is that even with presence tools, because they don’t automatically answer the above questions, we’re more often arranging conversations in advance.

there is an invitation…..then permission…for you to talk to them at a time, about something.

Most people email an invitation - but this is unrelated to real time communications and there has to be a better way than that. 

Even a ringing phone is an invitation, but ok, it’s basic, and the trouble with a voice invitation is that by the time you’ve asked, you’re already speaking to them. As an aside, having one dimensional presence tools does lend more weight to voicemail, which is probably the best invite to speak - if you use voicemail properly that is.

Presence on it’s own won’t replace voicemail

But back to the main point. Isn’t sending invitations much simpler than managing presence? I think it could be.

Would you turn up to your customer’s office without arranging it in advance?

And so, therefore, is presence the wrong tool for anything other than close relationships, which already have an element of assumed permission?

–

Some other people’s posts on presence

Collaboration Loop (again) article on presence interoperability

Melanie argues that this is the holy grail for UC, but as you can guess from the title of this post, I’m not ‘holy’ convinced (groan)

Yes, the customer is king, and I would definitely love to see callcentre skillsets aggregated and shown online so that I could click to talk at my own convenience, but other work relationships are more complicated than that.

Alec of Iotum was the first to make me think about availability instead of just presence.

My understanding is that availability is ’presence’ with an overlay, which means that the questions - “Am I at my desk, am I on the phone”…should be supplemented with;

“do I want to talk to you” (right now) 

- Availability does need that vital permission component -

But that’s my own interpretation and words

Dan York argues that presence is critical, but doesn’t necessarily relate it to a telephone call, as he sees voice calls declining in importance.

I very much agree that voice is less useful than it used to be - but for some additional reasons, it deserves a future post.

Presence will be critical, but only once this permission requirement is worked out, and it needs something new, a better way to initiate and manage a conversation. It should definitely be conditional.

I caught this post from Nick Fera it struck me that many of us are still experimenting with the best ways to handle email.

When you spend a large part of a day out of the office (it varies whether I set OOF), don’t you find that by the end of that day, you will still have processed everything?  It happens to me a lot.

This is strange, because when I’m away from my desk and not on Instant Messaging, then I would expect more email, not less.

I’ve been mulling some reasons for this ‘disconnect’. Perhaps all or none of these are true for you?

1. By the time you get back, some other, helpful, people have already responded to the email reducing your workload

2. By the time you get back, the emailer has found an answer on their own and has emailed again to say so

3. You haven’t been generating outbound email, so therefore (obviously) you  have less inbound responses to deal with

4. The session is more productive when doing email in batches, because it’s not using interuption time (up to 15 mins to re-focus on the original task I hear)

The extrapolated theory then could be as follows

“helpful people, those more willing to communication instantly, get stuck in email threads”

To be more productive, be less helpful?

- or to put it another way, perhaps this is why service levels in your favourite company having been dropping since email was invented.

Are voice calls quicker than using email? I would say only if you know they’re available.