Collab-Or-Ate

I was reading How to Create a Successful Web Site For Nothing (or Almost Nothing) in today’s WSJ, and my jaw dropped at this paragraph:

There’s one more free and easy way to improve the design of your site — using HTML programming code. Fortunately, you don’t need to have programming skills to use HTML. All you need to know is that a block of HTML — essentially, a bunch of gobbledygook words and symbols — can add extra features to your site.

I guess they didn’t have room for the 3 sentences it would take to explain what HTML is, but dismissing it as “gobbledygook” seems a little extreme. The section in the article about how to get your website found by search engines was actually kind of useful. No gobbledygook required.

Last week there was an interesting article on CNET about Why Facebook left ‘Scrabulous’ alone that comments on Hasbro filing a copyright and trademark infringement claim against the creators of Facebook’s Scrabulous.

The CNET article points out that “Facebook’s insistence on being a ‘neutral platform provider’ in the situation” is a little odd, “because, to state the matter bluntly, it isn’t.”

“[Facebook] has a history of tightly policing activity on its developer platform, banning “Secret Crush” over a spyware claim, locking down applications believed to be spamming users, and occasionally raising developer ire with some of its more stringent regulations. The site even temporarily blocked Top Friends, a creation of widget powerhouse Slide, when a security hole was discovered…

“Facebook wanted to keep Scrabulous around. In claiming a ‘neutral’ stance, the company was actually taking the activist route.”

So it makes me wonder, is it possible for a community site or social network site to remain neutral about its content? When you build a site, and especially when you are also studying the behavior of the users of the site, you do not want to be the police, monitoring and deleting content deemed inappropriate. But, as this situation on Facebook reveals, by doing nothing, you can’t claim neutrality because you are implicitly endorsing the content. It could be argued that it is only because Facebook removed some content that they can’t claim neutrality. But what if they did nothing about illegal content such as child pornography? Do they need to comply with laws? Copyright laws? If yes, then that means they have to be the police, a role no web2.0 community developer wants. It is a tough situation.

Luis Suarez, an IBM employee and one of our earliest and most enthusiastic Beehive users, has an article in the New York Times this week where he shares his amazing story: I freed myself from email’s grip. Luis has replaced his regular use of business email with phone calls, instant messaging, his wikis, his blog, and Beehive. There an interesting set of comments in response to his article on Lifehacker.

It is exciting that Luis sees our social network site Beehive as part of his set of critical business communication tools. Part of his reason for this is that Beehive is a public forum where he can answer things once, rather than many individual times.

My primary hypothesis as to why Luis and other employees are excited about checking their Beehive profile page and dread their email inboxes is that while the email inbox is one huge, enormous, always-growing to-do list, a social networking site is by definition social and there is a much lower level of obligation to reply or do anything in response to messages on the site. In many cases, there is no expectation to reply to that “friend request” or that friendly comment on your family photo. You are free to enjoy the environment and contribute content and comments when the mood strikes, and that is it. Who wouldn’t want to hang out there, as compared to within their piles of email?

If someone asks you something within Beehive that is 100% about work, it is similar to when a colleague asks you about the project while you are on your way to get coffee. You are available and willing to hear the question. You can defer the question or even ignore it, but in all likelihood your colleague is likely to get a response from you because you are in a context of being social, open and friendly.

So, can, should, or will social networking sites replace email? They can’t, shouldn’t, and won’t because they aren’t task-oriented inboxes. Employees crave an obligation-free communication environment, which is why they flock (buzz) to Beehive. And while they are there, sharing with each other, there many instances where the topics turn to business and real work gets done. But if social networking sites replace email, they wouldn’t be any fun any more!

With the election season is in full swing, I’m reminded of this interesting experiment run by Bailenson, et al, at Stanford just before the 2004 presidential election:

One week before the 2004 presidential election, participants completed a survey of their attitudes concerning George Bush and John Kerry while viewing photographs of both candidates side by side (See Figure 1). For a random one-third of the subjects, their own faces were morphed with Kerry while unfamiliar faces were morphed with Bush. For a different one-third, their own faces were morphed with Bush while unfamiliar faces were morphed with Kerry. The remaining one-third of the sample viewed un-morphed pictures of the candidates.

Post-experiment interviews demonstrated that not a single person detected that his or her image had been morphed into the photograph of the candidate. Participants were more likely to vote for the candidate morphed with their own face than the candidate morphed with an unfamiliar face. The effects of facial identity capture on candidate support were concentrated among weak partisans and independents; for ‘card carrying’ members of the Democratic and Republican parties, the manipulation made little difference. [more]

We have more affinity for people we perceive to be more like us and subtle changes to a person’s picture have the power to make us like someone more or less. So be a critical consumer of not just the words but also the images of the candidates! Resist the temptation to vote based on gut feelings about affinity and similarity, because these factors can be easily manipulated.

Today’s WSJ has an article about keeping track of all of your friends’ activities on different social networking sites: Social Services: Lots of sites let you keep track of your friends. The problem now is keeping track of all the ways to keep track.

I was kind of surprised by the article: basically this space of social aggregators hasn’t changed much in the past 12 months. Spokeo is the most viable option and it has been running for at least a year. But have you heard of it before? The problem of keeping track of your friends’, family’s, and colleagues’ activities keeps getting more and more complicated with everyone now joining multiple sites. (”Did you post your status on Facebook or Twitter?” “I looked for that picture you mentioned…. is it on your blog or flickr?”)

Maybe the reason a single browser aggregator isn’t dominating this space is that people are pushing updates to other applications, either mobile or RSS readers. That’s at least my solution. Or just not keep track :).

The Associated Press wrote an article that talks about our social networking project Beehive: Next generation of business software could get more fun:

You can tell just from looking at the Beehive program under development at IBM Corp. that something is different. Beehive’s color scheme is bright yellow, not IBM’s standard blue. The cheerfulness reflects the fact that Beehive is meant to encourage far-flung co-workers to like each other more.

Beehive is an online portal for employees to describe their expertise, so valuable knowledge doesn’t get lost inside the bureaucracy. Those kinds of tools are common, but Beehive adds an unusual dose of Facebook or MySpace. The 27,000 IBMers using Beehive can post pictures, video and one-sentence updates about themselves. They can share lists of “things I can’t live without.”

Such personal touches often are missing when people work at a distance from one another, says Joan Morris DiMicco, an IBM researcher developing Beehive. Co-workers in different locales can’t wander into each other’s offices and see family pictures on the desk. They don’t shop at the same places or have children in the same schools.

These tidbits, DiMicco believes, help people understand each other better. And the usual communication tools like e-mail, instant messaging, phones and even videoconferencing do only so much to fill the gap.

The Associated Press: Next generation of business software could get more fun
USA Today: Virtual apps try to build camaraderie, productivity
CNN: ‘Virtual watercooler’ makes workplace more fun
Washington Post: Next generation of business software could get more fun
Red Orbit: Virtual Communities Boost Employee Productivity

A mention of Beehive on BusinessWeek’s Blogspotting: IBM’s del.icio.us: A big hit and also on the Intranet Blog: Could Facebook be a real intranet? IBM is onto something…

“The research goal of Beehive is to aid IBMers with various people-centric challenges within the workplace. We broadly categorize these challenges into “relationship building” and “people-sensemaking”.

Relationship-building challenges include, for example, new employees struggling with making connections that are important for their current project and professional growth, remote workers having difficulties with team building and staying in touch with their team members, or employees moving on to new assignments who are not easily able to stay touch with former colleges.

People-sensemaking includes, for example, the difficulties of discovering people with the right skills and common interests, or learning more about someone personally as well as professionally to facilitate making contact, or getting to know about ongoing projects and activities beyond your immediate team.”

Study: Just Viewing Apple’s logo makes you creative and just viewing IBM’s logo makes you responsible

Isn’t research great?

from Le Monde, via overstated.

Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal had an article about the challenges facing today’s information worker in terms of job satisfaction.

In the information age, so much is worked on in a day at the office but so little gets accomplished. In the past, one could see the fruits of his or her labor immediately: a chair made or a ball bearing produced. But it can be hard to find gratification from work that is largely invisible, or from delivering goods that are often metaphorical. You can’t even make a mark on a paper in increasingly paperless offices. It can be even harder trying to measure it all. (Satisfaction’s a tough job, WSJ, 2/19/08)

This article rings true for me. When work becomes exceptionally busy with meetings, powerpoints, decision-making, and travel, it feels like there isn’t anything to show for it at the end of it all. But back in the good old days (before the Internets?), after hard work there would be stuff built! and things made! To get some of that old fashioned satisfaction I’ve spent my past five weekends installing shelving around the house, in part because we need it, but mostly because I’m finding it so satisfying to set about a project that results in something tangible.

So what is an information worker to do? Could social networking tools come to the rescue?

Sounds like a stretch, but hear me out. I’ve been thinking lately about who uses social networking tools. What types of workers are most drawn to these tools? If it is the case that project managers, the prototypical information workers, use social networking tools more than engineers, the prototypical builder in a software company, then it may be because SN tools offer them something lacking in their existing day-to-day work.

What do social networking tools offer information workers?

• measurement! you can count your friends! you can count your connectedness! most importantly you can compare yourself to others and see how you stack up. If you can track it, it feels like you are accomplishing something.
• using the skills you have, you can build something. An information worker, who is skilled in communication but not programming, can build a digital representation (a profile) of him/herself quite easily using a social networking site. Engineers don’t need the technical infrastructure of a social networking site to build a webpage, but project managers do.
• connecting and maintaining social networks. This is the most obvious one. Social networking sites are designed for this purpose and I believe it suits information workers perfectly. Part of their job is to stay connected with “key stakeholders” and maintain these relationships. SN tools are the way to do this in the information age.

I’ve been working for a year now on Beehive, with Werner Geyer, Beth Brownholtz, and Casey Dugan. We can finally (officially) talk about it outside IBM, starting with Lotusphere, and there has been some buzz generated by that, in the press and the blogosphere:

In the press:
• eWeek: IBM`s Social Beehive and Discovery Search
• Business Week: Managing the Global Workforce (This is a more general article about IBM and mentions Beehive at the end as an example of how IBM is dealing with a globally distributed workforce.)
• CIO: IBM Shows Off Social Software for Business

And on the blogs:

• Judith Hurwitz’s Weblog: Is there a Link Between Social Computing and Business Networks?
• Collaborative Thinking: Lotusphere 2008: IBM Research - Glimpsing The Future
• Lotusphere 2008 - Day 2

I’m still in Orlando, digesting my first trip to Lotusphere. Here are some of the thing that surprised me:

Although I’m staying in this enormous hotel complex within walking distance of Disney’s parks, I am not in a Disney hotel. At least that is what they tell me. After they wish me a magical day. Very confusing.

The opening session was more like a rock concert than any conference I’ve been to.

The highlight of the opening for me was definitely when Mike Rhodin (the “Steve Jobs” of Lotus) introduced a new server called Foundations that can… fit inside a DHL envelope! I can only find one mention of this on the blogosphere, but I found this to be an absolutely hilarious reference to last week’s MacBook Air.

The surprise guest keynote was Bob Costas?! Last year it was Neil Armstrong.

There was also an opening panel discussion called LotuSalon, “inspired by the famous Salons of Paris during the 18th Century Enlightenment.” Hmmm. The most interesting part of the panel was realizing that in addition to knowing invited panelist Golan Levin, from graduate school, it hit me halfway through that I also knew another one of the panelists, Ze Frank, because we were in the same freshman dorm at Brown (shout-out to Unit 33!). Small, random world.

There was mention of Notes running on the iPhone, despite what Fake Steve Jobs says. But it was downplayed and almost just mentioned in passing. Oh well.

That was Monday and after that I pretty much spent the rest of the week inside the Innovation lab demoing our project Beehive.

Last year around this time, I blogged “Basically, Lotusphere is like Macworld for Notes users.” At the time, I was kidding. No more joking around, it really is!

So this week, we had Macworld, where Jobs announced the MacBook Air, a drool-worthy new sub-notebook.

But next week, we have Lotusphere, where IBM is going to announce that Notes has been custom built to run on the iPhone. As Engadget says, we kid you not. I’m pretty surprised and now have yet another reason to want an iPhone. Good-bye, Blackberry Pearl, it was nice while it lasted.

I’m attending Lotusphere for the first time, so I will report back on all the Apple-friendly announcements, as well as hopefully a few announcements related to my own project.

This is a response to Chris Poile’s comment where he points to an interesting article by Cory Doctorow on Facebook friending….

What do you think the world (AKA the social networking website world) would be like if you didn’t need to confirm your friends on Facebook (LinkedIn, MySpace, Friendster, etc…) ? In that universe, it could be argued that friends lists would be meaningless. But as Chris, Cory, and many others point out, you often feel obligated to friend-back people you don’t particularly feel friendly with in our current universe, so how meaningful are friends lists now? You can draw a firm line and say you will only friend people you have met face-to-face, but that subset of “friends” still includes a lot of “non-friends” like the bully from high school.

If friends are unconfirmed, you would be freed to build your list anyway you like. You could actually create an accurate list of who you think are your close friends and colleagues. Or you could leave it empty. Or you could fill it with millions.

You could decide on a whim to add or remove people without offending anyone. Or would you still offend people? Is there so much pressure to reciprocate the friending (this pressure created by these websites, not by anything in our “real” lives) that we would carry that over to a universe with no required confirmation?

Real friendships are often not perfectly balanced. I consider my sister to be one of my best friends (yes!), but as we jokingly discuss, she might not even consider me a friend at all, but rather just a sister. I recently tried and failed to convince her to join Facebook so I can friend her. So where does that leave me? My Facebook friends list is totally wrong! I wish I could add her without requiring her to confirm or even join the site.

What do you think a no-confirm-required friending model would look like in practice?

Do you read as much as you wish you did? Do you pretend that you’ve read more than you have?

I’m not going to hide anymore. I recently, openly confessed that, except for during that rushed last moment before a paper is due and I don’t have any post-millennium “related works” in the related works section, I haven’t read an academic paper this year.

I also haven’t been reading books. A month ago I hauled off a pile of (presumably) wonderful non-fiction books to the used bookstore that I hadn’t touched. I’m in a bookclub, where we read one fiction book a month. I haven’t even purchased the last four books.

(So you don’t think I’m illiterate, I’ll also confess that I read, well skim, the WSJ and the NYTimes everyday, and I justed finished a historical novel, Loving Frank. So it isn’t like I’m totally not reading, it is just that I don’t read nearly as much as I wish I did.)

Last week I read a review of yet-another-book-I-won’t-read called “How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.” And since I read the review, I feel qualified to give my opinion on the book without having read it. It sounds great! Apparently the main gist is:

Not to worry, Mr. Bayard counsels. Just because one hasn’t read a book doesn’t mean that one cannot talk about it with the same confidence as someone who has, and perhaps with greater acumen, not having to get bogged down in messy details.

What a relief! I will attend my bookclub this month, with or without having the book, and I will give my opinion!

I know I’m not alone in hiding my non-reading. Particularly in the field of research, where we feel we should be reading everything related to our own research, it is hard to admit we aren’t. The most concrete piece of evidence I have that researchers fake it is at least 50% of the papers that reference my research have significantly misstated my research findings. If those authors are not reading my papers, then oh my gosh, who is??

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