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Facebook devours Twitter…a simple strategy

Facebook is about to eat Twitter for lunch. I’m slowly recognizing that more and more of my activity is migrating from Twitter to Facebook. I’ve also been wondering if Apples upcoming IOS 5 integration with Twitter is a strategic mistake on Apple’s part? What will it take for Facebook to finish Twitter off? Here’s my lists of recommendations of what to do and not do.

Give me a separate “subscribed” news feed – I want to be able to toggle back and forth between people I am subscribed to and people I am friends with in my newsfeed. An integrated view is nice, but sometimes I just want to see my friends and vice versa.

Public Subscribe Button – I already have a button for follow me on Twitter and a button to friend me on Facebook. What we need now is a Subscribe to my public Facebook feed button. It should allow folks to easily subscribe vid Facebook.

Default responses to site discussions via Facebook to “public” – Imagine the community engagement when people bring their subscribers to the discussion via promotion through their public feed.

Stop Auto-generating friend lists – I like the ability to generate custom lists to categorize my friends, but honestly I really only feel the need right now to have two lists. Friends and subscribers. That said, I’m overwhelmed at all the lists Facebook has auto-generated for me. I want to shut that feature off. I don’t need lists for where I live, where I went to school, where I’ve worked. It is almost like getting flogged for having too diverse a social graph.

Search baby, search – Real-time and historic search of my newsfeed and the overall public stream equals absolute killer feature. Facebook will have Twitter (which has never managed search well) and Google trembling.

Integrate subscribe concept into Pages – I’d like a more discreet ability to add page content to my newsfeed. Currently, you can “like” a page and it will show up in your stream, but it also shows up in your profile. It would be nice to have an ability so subscribe to a page without public disclosure or (implied) endorsement of the page.

Originally posted at www.devost.net

Related Reading:

Social Media: Change, Control and Security

Gain Decision Advantage With Innovative Enterprise Software

Social Media Mimicry in the Workplace

Let’s face it: the social media that many enterprises hail also pose big problems. Employee use of the Internet–particularly social networks–is a big timewaster. A new Nielsen study found that Americans spend 23% of their online time on social networks, with an increasing amount of that browsing time spend spent on mobile apps. Like the sarcastic Captain Renault in Casablanca, we’re shocked, shocked that a good deal of this browsing time is likely spent during work hours.

Much blog traffic (and some blogging itself!) comes from people browsing during work hours, sapping productivity. The web’s endless amount of lolcats, memes, and demotivational posters aren’t all the products of the stereotyped 12-year olds or basement-dwellers of the popular imagination. Unfortunately, participation in social networks doesn’t just drain employee productivity but also exposes enterprises to malware. Many companies ban Facebook and Twitter to try to stop their employees from using it on the job. A third of British companies, for example, ban social media completely. Others have tried to regulate the time employees spend. Some also believe that banning Facebook would be like “banning the telephone”–a futile and counterproductive endeavor. While this problem is in some ways as old as the Internet and personal computers (anyone complaining about Farmville doesn’t remember MineSweeper), it is also not going away. So how have enterprises dealt with this over the last decade?

Many firms and government organizations have reacted to social media by trying to mimic it within the workplace, not only creating a better means of collaborating but also drawing employees into a ecosystem that shares prominent features of the networks they use for pleasure. Reacting to a slew of popular books and ideas about the wisdom of crowds and the wealth-creating power of networks, these organizations have set up internal wikis, blogs, and social networks. Within the Intelligence Community (IC), Intelink features blogging, a wiki called Intellipedia, and other features of social media.

As Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales notes, company wikis are widespread–although not all are really useful. The idea that workflow should revolve around collaboration is now mundane rather than revolutionary. Management consultant Ori Brafman, author of the Starfish and the Spider, counts the Army among his many fans. The problem lies in gauging the sincerity of networked approaches. Despite many years of social media and much public enthusiasm over crowds and networks, it is unclear whether or not social media use in the workplace is leading to greater collaboration or simply putting a futuristic sheen on institutions that fundamentally still reflect the influence of Taylorism.

Of course, one problem with social media as it currently exists is the lack of user centralization. Keeping track of blogs, Twitter, Facebook, RSS, Google+, LinkedIn, FourSquare, Friendfeed, and other networks simultaneously requires software solutions. Some applications, most notably the expanded suite of desktop software like TweetDeck or Seesmic Deksptop (two of my favorites) allow you to receive and post content to many different social media accounts at once. But is there anything like this for the workplace?

One collaboration tool in an increasingly crowded market that CTOVision will take a look at in the future is Jive Software’s suite of business collaboration and social software tools. Jive’s collaboration suite creates a unified stream of collaboration applications that much resembles the best features Facebook, Twitter, and even iTunes. It filters to emphasize the most important updates based on rich social information such as favored keywords, use frequency, degree of connection to the poster, and similarity to other things you like. Streams can be “tuned” using like, dislike, and hide buttons. Many features, such as @mentioning, announcements, direct messages, and private threads, are centralized in one place. The task list tracks your other activity, interfaces with apps, and a recommended tab based on commercial “genius” features brings you content that you find valuable. We’ll have more in-depth blogs on this later, but we’re definitely looking forward to taking a look.

Related Reading:

Healthcare Technology and the Growing Importance of Social Collaboration

Social Media: Change, Control and Security

Gain Decision Advantage With Innovative Enterprise Software

 

The Future of Cyberspace Security: The Law of The Rodeo

This is an update of my now annual assessment of the future of technology associated with good and evil in cyberspace which was first posted here.

Cyberspace is our interconnected information technology.

Predictions of the future of technology are increasingly starting to sound like science fiction, with powerful computing grids giving incredible computational power to users and with autonomous robots becoming closer and closer to being in our daily lives vice just in computer science departments. Infotech, nanotech and biotech are fueling each other and each of those three dominate fields are generating more and more benefits that impact the other, propelling us even faster into a new world.   Depending on your point of view the increasing pace of science and technology can be good or bad.  As for me, I’m an optimist, and I know we humans will find a way to ensure technology serves our best interests.

But a sad fact of the human condition is that bad people will likely be with us long into the future.  And sometimes good people can be tempted to do bad things, so we really need to engineer solutions that
keep the bad guys from benefiting from technology and keep those who can sometimes be tempted from giving in to their darker side.

So is is possible to engineer perfectly secure systems?  Consider the law of the rodeo:  “There’s not a horse that’s never been rode, and not a rider that’s never been throwed.”  I like the analogy since it reminds us that all computer evil can be mitigated.  But it always fights back.  Good and evil will continue a fast paced rodeo dance long into the future.

To engineer secure systems for the future we need to continually assess where we are and what the near term future holds for our technologies.  Here is a couple short predictions that could be useful
in this discussion.

  • Remote power is here today and will soon be widely distributed.  This will allow small power consumption devices (like keyboards, mice, bluetooth headsets, hearing aides, small sensors) to be provided power by RF energy.

– Power generation from motion is almost ready for prime time.  This will allow devices to gain energy from vibrations, like the vibrations in a bridge when a car passes over it, or the vibrations in a wall of a
building when the wind blows past it, or the vibrations caused by a person’s movement through the day.

– Communication capability (bandwidth) between fixed facilities will increase 1000 fold over the next five years. Cellular systems are on a dramatic improvement slope.  My view: AT&T seems to lead in speed this year.  Verizon will probably lead next year.

– More users will be on the net.  There are about 1.3Billion PC’s connected to the Internet today.  There are about 3.3Billion active cell phone subscriber accounts today.  Those numbers will grow.

– Storage, especially flash storage technologies, is decreasing in price so much we can afford to store data anywhere on almost anything.

– Chips are being designed in ways that actually beat the old Moore’s Law projections.  This is being done by placing many cores on one chip.  Very high data rate capabilities are being connected directly to the cores on these chips.

– RFID is becoming so widespread we can place devices on everything that allows devices to report back what they are and what they are for and where they have been.

– All this capabilities are being networked together, including increasingly direct device to device connections via capabilities provided by enhanced protocols (especially IPv6).

– Consumer devices, especially consumer communication devices, are becoming increasingly capable.  What used to be called a cell phone is now a phone/video recorder/video editor/entertainment/mobile office device with location aware data (GPS).

– Web2.0 and Social networking sites/tools such as Facebook will expand till one day 100% of the population will have active, up to date, authoratative online profiles.

– Cloud computing capabilities are not only being delivered to companies, but to end users.  Google leads the pack in this space, but Microsoft and Adobe are up and comers.

There are many other elements of the future relevant to security discussions, but the projections above lead to some interesting conclusions on their own.   So lets think through some of the impacts
of the above.

– Bad actors who want to exploit systems will increasingly not have to worry about them being powered off.  They will be on all the time.

– Bad actors will increasinly be able to expoit social systems to gather data pre-attack.  However, the powerful trust models of social networks may offer a counter to some of these attacks.

– Many paths into devices will be available for unauthorized users to exploit.   And if they are compromised by people or code that intend on generating denial of service attacks, huge amounts of bandwidth will exist for them to attack from.

– When a bad actor gets through defenses into data stores, they will likely find a wide range of data to exploit, since it is becoming so easy and low cost for us to store everything.

– Having things networked together means it can be easier to penetrate a target by finding one weak link that is connected to the infrastructure.

– Areas of people’s lives they once thought private, especially their cell phones and the data on their cell phones, are increasingly becoming attractive targets to hackers.

What is needed in an environment like this?  I can’t pretend to know all the solutions but here are a few points I support:

– Enhanced firewalls and intrusion detection devices.

– Better configuration control, for all devices.  When a device is out of configuration is must be brought back into compliance immediately.

– Better laws and treaties concerning cyberspace. Deterrence policies by governments.

– More attention to standards and to industry organizations (including supply chain quality  organizations) is a must.

– Better training and education for all (I mean ALL) humans connected to the grid.

– Better, continuous upgraded anti-virus solutions.

– Automated response to attacks.

– Enhanced, easier to use encryption.

– Enhanced, more secure identity and authorization technologies.

More Reading:

For more on these topics see the CTOvision Guide to National Security Technology and

Is Your CTO Making You Stupid?

Nicholas Carr writes in ways that makes people think.  I really enjoyed reading his latest in the Atlantic titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” This article covers some rather significant trends that IT is pushing into the global social fabric.  The changes he talks about are disturbing.  They are infecting people like a fast spreading disease.

There is a chance you are suffering some of these symptoms yourself, so by all means read the article.

Or if your attention span is going, here is how Nicholas Carr describes the symptoms :

” Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. ”

I hope you dive deep into the Carr article for more details, but if you have the disease yourself you might not.  So here is a gist of key points:

  • Google and others have made research simple and fast and easy.
  • Almost all data can come into your head via your browser.
  • People read fewer (or no) books.
  • People are loosing the ability to read and retain info from long articles.
  • The Internet, through your browser, is the medium of choice.  Newspapers and print are on the out.  TV is heading out fast.
  • We also write through the web, and that is changing the way we think.
  • We too frequently are relying on computers to mediate our understanding of the world.

What do we do with this cautionary info?  One immediate think all of us should do is remember to carve out time in the day, every day, to read, write and think.

But if you are an enterprise technologist you should also consider what this means for you and your organization.  Some ideas:

  • The systems you are designing, developing and fielding to your workforce may serve your workforce better if their interfaces are more intuitive and less textual.  People will want to interface with enterprise systems they way they interface with the Internet (present your applications through browsers and summarize results and seek rapid human feedback on what they like or don’t like about the results).
  • To the greatest extent possible, build systems that present fast results.
  • And present information in ways that let humans interact with it.
  • And present information in ways that ensure the humans are in charge of the process and in charge of assessing the relevance of results.
  • Don’t stop innovating.
  • Stay on the net yourself so you can track where it is going.
  • Get engaged in social media (if you are not already).  That means Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, and Twitter (especially Twitter– it really changes your mind).
  • Translate those many lessons into the enterprise technology you field.

If you can do that and if you can stay focused on the mission all your users will thank you, and in many ways I think you will be helping make your organization smarter.  If you don’t do that then the odds are great that you will just be part of the noise.   You may even be contributing to making your organization stupid.

Any thoughts/comments/suggestions on that topic?

More items of interest from CTOvision

OLPC: The Future Is Changing Again

There have been several recent announcements by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project worth note.  OLPC is a nonprofit organization founded in 2005 by Nicholas Negroponte and others from the MIT Media Lab with the goal of providing one laptop for every child on the planet.  So far they have delivered about 500,000 systems.   That’s huge by any standard.

The first new announcement is that project leaders have now announced that Microsoft windows will run on the devices.  The laptops will have a duel boot mode so Linux will also be an OS.  The decision adds cost to the laptop, but not much.   More memory is required to run two OSs, and Microsoft is charging $3 per CPU in licensing fees.

The second recent announcement is a new design.   The current design is a smart, futuristic looking device that looks great and provides great functionality in a form factor that can take a beating.

The next version, due in 2010, is a smaller model that has dual touch screens and no keyboard.

This will give great flexibility to the device, since one touch screen can act as a keyboard when needed or act as a page in a book when needed or be used in several other ways by applications yet to be created.   The new version will reportedly only consume a watt of power.

All this is interesting and intellectually stimulating.  These trends are also important for enterprise CTOs to track.  One is the continuing  and accelerating trend of “consumers first” when it comes to IT development.  Increasingly developers are focusing on consumers and that is having an impact on the IT developed for big enterprises.   That trend has been underway for a long long time (evidence the 3.3 billion cell phone accounts active in Nov 2007, or the huge success of Facebook).   Hot technologies like the iPhone and OLPC are accelerating this trend, and, although as an optimist and technologist I am really excited about that trend, it certainly makes life harder for CTOs.

Another critically important point for CTOs to think through is the cyber threat environment and how it is changing with the rapid, widespread adoption of very low cost very powerful computers.

A bit more on that is in my previous post at:

https://ctovision.com/2007/10/good-and-evil-in-the-future-of-cyberspace/

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