Multiple Skins- A Common Shortcoming of Social Networking Sites

I have a strong interest in Social Networking Sites because I see enormous potential for positive change and productive collaboration across all dimensions of the social grid. I just wish I didn’t have to use so darn many of them at the same time.

If you’re a participant (or a “joiner,” to use the vernacular of Charlene Li) of Social Networking Sites, chances are you use more than one. I’ll bet you may even use more than a couple of them. For some “joiners,” users have subscribed to multiple Sites because other users and acquaintances have sent them invitations to join networks that they are using. You’ve been “friended” by someone you know. For others, you may use multiple sites out of the necessity to adequately represent the multiple aspects of yourself. I call this the phenomena of “living in multiple skins.”

I have multiple skins. I have my professional skin for my life as an IT Consultant. This skin has a list of professional credentials, accomplishments, experiences relevant to the work I do as a Consultant. I’m also a professional artist, and that skin has a list of credentials and accomplishments as well,… but are completely different from my Consultant’s skin. It also has a portfolio of work that is important to include in the profile of that skin. I’m also a father, there’s another skin. I’m an investor, and I need a skin for that. I play and coach ice hockey, so there’s yet another skin.

I’ll bet you could describe yourself in a similar way, needing multiple profiles to adequately describe all the skins you may wear each day. This is a common problem that everyone shares, but remains unsolved by the Social Networking Sites out there today. Unless you’re satisfied by slicing off a single persona from your real-world life to project into the online world, you’re in the ranks of unsatisfied Social Networking Site users. I, for one, want to take all my skins with me for my cyber persona.

Now, before I’m taken too literally in these comments let me say that the problem is not as simple as developing a site that allows multiple profiles to be linked to a common user account. The Social Grid is very dynamic and needs to remain that way. If one of my skins is that of an authority on early 20^th century French films (It’s not, but to use an example), it’s not necessarily a great idea to mash that up with my IT Consultant’s profile on LinkedIn. The Social Networking Sites focusing on film, or should we say a focus as directly relevant as practical for that topic, is the right place for that profile. Similarly, if I’m a user of a dating site I probably want to make sure there’s a separation between that profile and my professional profile.

The Social Network architecture we need is one that leverages an intelligent interface to appropriately link our multiple skins together, much in the same way that the dynamics of our real-life personal interactions dictate the changing from one skin into the next. It’s an architecture that images the dynamics of relationships that exist in our multiple professional and personal lives.

Collaboration: Email vs. Wiki

This comes by way of Espen Anderson’s blog: http://www.espen.com/archives/2008/03/email_vs_wiki.html  and (From Chris Rasmussen via Anthony Williams.

Per my earlier posts on email technology’s fit for today’s business processes, I think this diagram presents a very clear argument on its own.

 

 

Email is Dead! Long Live Email!

I am firmly in the camp that sees email as an outdated technology, and one for which the utility for current day business processes is waning at best.  I have seen commentary from the Web 2.0 community saying similar things, but I decided to send an unsolicited query out into cyberspace to see how broadly this position is held. 

 

A few weeks ago, I posted a question asking if email is an endangered species in the technology jungle.  I received a lot of responses.  While the number of responses is not large enough to represent a statistically authoritative sample set, I found the feedback very interesting.  In summary, here’s how it played out:

 

Group 1:  “Blasphemer!… Are you nuts?”

 

This group of people took the time (which I appreciate) to write back to tell me they could hardly believe I’d ask such a silly question.  Along with the responses came explanations for the position that email is great and is here to stay.  Among those reasons were the fact that you can use it to send attachments (email as a file transfer mechanism), everybody uses it (ubiquity), and it allows one to thoughtfully pause to recompose drafts before sending (I’ll tag this as temporally distant).  The group that thought I was crazy for asking the question accounted for over 40% of the responses.

 

Group 2:  “Yes it’s probably dead, but until the current generation of users die off we’re probably stuck with it”

 

This group agreed with the premise that email is at least broken, or has in some way become flawed in its usefulness for current day needs.  However, these people feel that we’re resigned to live with it for better or worse because of a mature critical mass of users that are dragging it along into the (near) future.  This group accounted for roughly 30% of the responses.

 

Group 3:  “Yah, you bet-cha it’s broken.”

 

These people seemed relieved to blow off steam to complain about the numerous ills of email.  Among them are the high degree of overhead and infrastructure resources (costs) that are associated with the simple task of sending a message, the delivery mechanism for rapid proliferation of malware, the lack of temporal immediacy, poorly suited to facilitate collaboration, and of course the great white elephant- Spam.

 

On the Spam subject, some users volunteered some very interesting quantitative data.  Ian Eiloart, who manages the email system at University of Sussex, said that 95% of incoming email is rejected as Spam.  Of the remaining 5%, approximately 5% of that accepted email is also Spam. 

 

Dennis Stevenson (http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/cio/original-thinking/archives/whats-in-my-inbox-21285) shared some interesting personal research and says that while he still uses email out of necessity, he’s shifted much of his communication to other Web 2.0 technologies that are more appropriate for exchange with users with whom he has some type of working relationship.

 

By the way, the Group 3 responses represented approximately 20% of my informal study.

 

Group 4:  No strong opinion one way or another.

 

The last group of respondents did not have a strong opinion on whether email is a broken or dieing technology.  I greatly appreciate these people taking the time to respond to my question, and they offered their perspective on the ways they use email for their daily jobs and personal correspondence.

 

So, what is there to say about all this?  First of all, it came as a surprise to me that so many of the users who replied to my query strongly feel that email serves them well.  I wouldn’t have guessed this, which again shows the value in asking dumb questions.  I also have to say that I do recognize the value statements that group of users has raised.  Yes indeed, we use email for all those things (sending messages, including file attachments, documenting (richly) dialogue, and so on.  It’s also true that it’s unavoidable in business today.  Everyone uses it, and pretty much has to.  In fact, email communication is likely the most widely used written medium in business.  My point is though, that this comes at a cost.

 

In my opinion, the utility of email (“Utility” in this case meaning, fit for purpose) is not well suited for business communication processes today.  Yes, it’s a mechanism that is a component of many (maybe most) business communications processes, but that doesn’t mean it’s well suited for those purposes.  When I say this, most of what I’m thinking about is the temporal immediacy of the conversational dialogue, and the opportunity to facilitate collaboration between business colleagues.  Email isn’t a communication technology that is immediate, and the degree of overhead, redundancy, and delay associated with the technology does not bode well for collaborative processes. 

 

For the other knocks against email, it’s difficult to separate the features of the technology itself (it’s architecture, standards, operational aspects) from the way we use email.  For example, one can say that email is a very expensive way to send a message or transfer a file.  There’s a whole lot of overhead in sending an email message in terms of the protocol and format of the message itself as well as demands on the enterprise infrastructure to process, store, deliver, and archive messages.  Some of those costs though, have to do with the way we choose to use and operate email services.  When someone copies me on a message in which they’ve said “thank you” to a co-worker for example (one of my email pet peeves), there is lots of data overhead associated with this nine-character message (the message header, the 50k legal disclaimer that gets tacked to the nine-character message, the storage it will occupy forever on several hard disks on our servers, et. al.), not to mention that there’s probably very little business value in me knowing that Scott told Bill “thank you.”

 

I believe it’s true, as  Group 2 points out, that the presence of email in our business communications processes is likely here for a while, and will be transitioned by Web 2.0 (or Web 3.0?) technologies based on the momentum brought by younger users.  I think there’s an opportunity too, though, for this transition to be accelerated by increased availability of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise.  If you’re keeping up with the trade literature, there are hints that this is a movement that is gaining momentum.

 

As always, I’ll greatly appreciate your views.

 

Chickens and Eggs

I lead into this discussion using the well known adage that says, “Which came first- The chicken or the egg?”  Granted, it’s a bit trite, but many a glass of wine has been tossed back over discussions about cause, effect, cause.

Recent developments in physics are re-confirming what has been told by ancient metaphysics for millennia.  One such point in this regard is the notion that we create our own reality by manipulating the energy around us.  While this is a notion that is deserving of focused discussions in its own right, I will leverage this notion as an analogy for a quick comment on the development of technology. 

Let’s take communication technology for example.  Many of us can remember the emergence of Email as an application, and as a communication technology.  It really wasn’t that long ago.  It could be said that Email was the killer app of the ARPANET (remember that name?), and when we talk about ARPANET we’re covering ground in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s.  I believe it was 1971 when Ray Tomlinson sent the first networked email, and within just a couple of years Email accounted for more than 75% of traffic on ARPANET.  ‘Sound familiar?  It would seem that Email has been the cocaine that drove us to accelerated consumption of content and messaging which now consumes such a large part of our day.

For anyone reading this BLOG, it’s surely the case that for most everyone you know, Email is a fundamental part of daily life.  Not only does Business depend upon it, but we depend upon it for our personal lives as well.  With the fact that Email is securely rooted in our daily personal and professional lives, I will say too that I’m one of those people who are firmly in the camp that says Email is a technology that is struggling to be “Fit for Purpose” (to use an ITIL term) given the nature of contemporary communication processes.

So what does any of this have to do with chickens and eggs, or with creating our own realities?  To me, this is a good analogy to describe the fact that we create technologies that we need to facilitate our desired business behaviors.  That is, we are not addicted to increasing amounts and urgency of communication because Email and IM enabled it.  Rather, we need to communicate with more urgency, and collectively we’ve enabled the emergence of technologies that accommodate the state that our business behavior demands.

In a future post, I’ll share the results of my query of a number of users with the question of whether email is dead.  I was surprised by the feedback and perhaps you’ll find it interesting as well.

 

Cartoon credit: Joel Coughlin

Who’s using Electronic Social Networking Sites?

One day, while updating my myriad of profiles on the Electronic Social Networking sites that I use, I stepped back and recognized what an odd problem this is that I have to manage content on several different sites just because I use different ESNs for different purposes.  Since I’m one person that lives in several different skins, and because I’ve yet to find an ESN tool that well represents all sides of me, I continue to put myself through this administrative headache.

I began to wonder to what extent I’m alone with this problem.  Using the feature on LinkedIn that allows you to post a question out to the user community, I solicited feedback from other users about what sites they’re using, what they’re using them for, and which, if any, they especially like.  I share the results of this with you below.

I received a fairly healthy response to my question, and looking at the responses gathered I can separate them into three groups:

ESN as a Rolodex 

The first group is the users who are using ESNs as rolodexes.  These users said that they use a small number (one or two) sites for this purpose, and are more or less hoping for a return in the form of job offers or business development opportunities.  This group of users also seems to see more value in the quantity of “connections” or “contacts,” rather than the quality of the contact or the depth of relationship with them.  These people are fishing in cyberspace. 

Business Value 

The second group is looking for business value from ESNs, but are not quite sure they’re getting it yet.  These people are conscious about the quality of their contacts (while exactly what “quality” means to one person may differ slightly from the next).  They are not contact collectors, and frequently refuse connection requests from other users if they don’t know them well and/or if they see them as insufficient value.

 Unrealized Potential 

The third group is comprised of users who are contemplative and skeptical about the real value available through present-day ESNs.  Like the second group, they are mindful of quality of connections over quantity.  They are even more apt to decline or ignore invitations to connect because they just don’t see it as that important to either party.  Interestingly, this group also offered the most insightful feedback and suggestions on how ESNs could be improved to deliver true value.

Credit for the illustration used with this post goes to Clayton Brothers.

Social Networking Sites

Electronic Social Networks are something in which I have a very strong interest. Popular examples of what I’m referring to as an “ESN” are LinkedIn, Plaxo, MySpace, et. al. I’ve been a user of several of these (and one in particular) for quite some time. As new ESN’s have emerged over the years, I’ve been drawn into a presence on others as well (‘said another way, I’ve been sucked into subscribing to a new service because a friend or contact fed their address book into the site, which caused me to be drawn in as well).

The growing number of these sites, and the divergence and convergence of use cases among them are a source of interest for me and the early roots of my exploration of this space. Beyond that though, I see a huge potential in this technology. For one thing, I see a potential for ESN’s as an accelerator of business processes through the facilitation of collaboration and immediacy of communications that these tools offer. I also see a potential for broad social benefit, through the opportunity to consolidate and amplify streams of thought, and through the amplification of innovation and creativity through collaboration.

As I share some of my thoughts, observations, and collected information on this topic, I welcome any thoughts and observations you’d care to share as well.