Conversationware

Being in business is fast becoming a celebrity shoot out.

Isn’t buying an iPod very similar to calling a number and voting for our favourite singer, dancer, aspiring business person, whatever? ….It’s a contract, we buy, and Steve Jobs promises to come back next week to entertain and delight us with his designs and deliver us a unique experience.

I’m tempted to compare the iPhone purchase to a tactical vote - because ’the public’ likes the look of the current vote leaders even less. Looking at it like that, then it’s no suprise people will pay more ($550) to keep their favourite in the game. It’s just the equivalent to phoning in twice.

On some mass level, the public longs to buy into and be a part of the corporate celebrity story, if only to give it more legs (cue a kate moss clothing joke), and give us the next chapter in the soap that is corporate stardom.

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I’m an advocate of Gmail, with instant messaging, voice and voicemail built in - this coupled with desktop notification is significantly more useable for me than collections of web and client software from other vendors. Especially impressive is the ability to pick up gmail (and voicemails) on your mobile There is now a meebo-like web embedding of a group web chat facility,

The integration of a RSS reader with the email is more than convenient and with feedburner joining the ranks, I can see all of these things eventually supplementing the google desktop search tool to deliver me a very personalised search and delivery of tailored information.

Google has provided google docs, online hosted documents for groups to share, be updated and notified about. The aquisition of Jotspot hasn’t really hit yet, on the surface at least, but I’m looking forward to some basecamp type project collaboration from that, and now with google aquiring Zenter, we can have online slideshows and presentations too.

Youtube is starting to get quite useful, and I didn’t even mention google maps yet, which apart from giving me a quick, and slick, way to calculate journey times, has now gained a user business review facility

People question whether it is right to trust all your information to google, in the same way we trust banks with our money. But when I used Google Checkout to pay for a new laptop recently, instead of paypal, it occurred to me that many of us already do.

Where’s our unified communications Google? I know we can get voicemail through the mobile email, but surely that’s only the start.

RSS is abit like having your paper delivered when normally the local shop is sold out

Here is another video, this time an RSS primer to pass on to all our laggard friends and families who haven’t been playing with readers yet.

The video is pilfered from these Common Craft people.

I wanted to experiment with including a You Tube video in a post, so here it is. The one I chose to use as an example, so you may have already seen it, is a backgrounder for Web 2.0 technology. Reviews were mixed :-), but it’s relevant at least.

This is thanks to a plugin for wordpress found here. It was the plugin that I most easily understood - which is as good a reason as any to recommend it.

All I need to do now, is work out how to create and post demo videos to you tube.

Del.icio.us is so simple, the potential usefulness passes you by at first. It’s the sort of service that makes you wish you’d spent more time reading the instructions six months ago when you first signed up.

A little introduction here, if you don’t know it.

See a webpage, click a button in your browser, save it with tags, and always find it again. All that useful stuff you can’t remember where it was? Not any more…very cool.

Using a reader, and subscribing to what colleagues and family find interesting, that’s a very simple way to reduce overloaded email inboxes!

However, if there is any element of competitive intelligence involved, then why not keep it in the family and install (10 users free), bookmarking, specifically for within the company.

Cogennz collective intelligence is a British Web 2.0 product, good show, and obviously therefore a step ahead

Not proper Unified Messaging. But I’ve promoted Unified Messaging for so long - 12 years and counting, and I have to say that the market did recently seem relatively cooler towards the subject until Microsoft made their Unified Commmunications announcements.

So, Microsoft’s approach is a good thing, but still, from being a hot subject a few years ago, there is more shrugging of shoulders than there used to be.

I detect that attitudes stem from just how much email is being received by key people - and it is those very people who normally most benefit from productivity and increased levels of service that Unified Messaging can deliver.

I can see the thought process…”I get way too many emails, and you want to stuff my mailbox full of voicemail?” It’s a false argument, as everyone has to handle voicemail anyway, so their real point is that currently, voicemail is instantly recognisable and can therefore be prioritised.

The worst result of bad unified messaging is a ‘lumping’ of important voice messages into a sea of email dross

Therefore - to mitigate this issue for potential users, make sure your new unified messaging system distinguishes voicemail from email properly. This can be done in a few ways;

• When looking at your Outlook/Notes inbox, the voicemail should show a phone icon instead of a straightforward email envelope
• There should be a “This is a Voicemail” type statement in the subject field, and the number of the person who left you the message.
• Voicemail should have notifications by phone, and especially SMS (if no mobile email available) as an overlay to their email box or desk phone, to include the sender’s info! (helping users prioritise)
• When users dial in by phone, the UM system should separate voice, fax and email into separate queues that the user can choose to access. Most people will choose the voicemail queue to action first.

Better still, why not explore how to get rid of email overload, and start reducing inappropriate traffic through email. This is how I got interested in new media solutions

I take this quote from Business Week Article from a Dresdner Kleinwort Web 2.0 technology pioneer,

Thill says using the wiki, along with blogs and instant messaging, has cut down his e-mail use by at least 75%, and his colleagues have reported similar results. Now, he only needs to go a single wiki page to view all the key metrics for 80 Web sites monitored by his department. Whereas sifting and sorting that data from 80 sources could otherwise take weeks, he says, through the wiki, each user only needs “about 30 seconds” to plug in his or her data and make it immediately available to the whole team, all of whom are promptly notified by instant message or e-mail.

All apart from the email notification bit - amazing how few people use newsreaders - this would hugely ease life for the usersphere. I’m not sure 75% is achievable for all of us, but I seriously think 50% of my emails are inappropriate to the medium…sent and received.

Browser based applications are better than client software. Particularly for Unified Communications.

That’s a feeling I’ve had that’s been growing, particularly after reading a lot about this new web version lately, is it Web 2.0, or should that be Enterprise 2.0?

Looking back, when experimenting with web based applications in the late 1990’s, there was a lot missing.

Desktop based software had a certain familiarity, and it didn’t cost as much as using the internet (I didn’t have broadband in the 90’s). And then, there was the instant reaction you got from the desktop as compared to the click and wait of the browser.

Times have changed

Browser and web technology have enabled a real ‘desktop feel’ to browser accessible software and Broadband means that there is practically no cost to the amount of time and data used. But, my feeling of companies’ attitudes is they still feel that browser based applications are not as good, and I have to conclude that this stance must be based on those early experiences.

I suspect anyone newer to computers will already be convinced that web is so much better than desktop, for a number of reasons, and perhaps its just that us old timers have learnt to live with the pain.

For example, whenever an old desktop application needs upgrading, there is a big upheaval, potentially hazardous to the health of helpdesk staff.

• What are the consequences if the upgrade stops half way through?
• What versions of operating systems are going to be supported on the new versions?
• What happens if people using different versions of the software have to interract?
• What other interoperability issues exist with completely unknown software from thousands of other software developers?
• What security implications are there for this desktop based software, is someone going to write a client based exploit?
• What backups are required for the desktop software held information?
• What about synchronisation?

Do all these questions place a huge demand on developers? Will it slow development down? You bet.

Client Server technology is great, but compare the upgrade process - with web based systems you can tell the users the system will be offline on Sunday night, upgrade the server. It’s done.

Browser based software benefits include

• Easier backups
• Easier failover and disaster recovery support
• Easier access from multiple machines
• Easier support
• Easier integration of the system facilities into other processes
• Easier collaboration
• Easier to outsource (hosted services anyone?)

A colleague at a friendly company mentioned recently that they had abandoned the project to rollout CTI telephony integrated to their Microsoft LCS client.

The problem was that all versions had to be in synch, or the rollout just didn’t work. The payback wasn’t considered worth the extra support calls to the helpdesk that the rollout was generating, so it was canned. And these guys supply UC technology! 

In other words, using several client based software solutions, integrated from multiple suppliers - as the word unified implies - was just asking for trouble.

I had a look around, and found this 2004 post which starts to crystalise the argument for me. I read “When wizards stay up late” in the past, and similar books which made the point that Microsoft empire was built on schmoozing developers. No more it seems.