I’ve now been a Tramponaut (er, Tramp? Trampoliner? Trampo?) for a week, and it’s been an amazing start. Everyone here is as smart as I hoped, even nicer than I thought, the stuff we are working is actually MORE important than I thought it was originally, and boy, do we have a lot to do.

All in all, a truly fantastic time and place for a start up to be.

I’m thinking about lots of things, and I’ll write more on them later. Here’s what I’m thinking about this morning.

We’re very hard at work nailing down the last chunks of functionality on SONAR, and this gives a few of us the luxury of spending a little more time thinking further out than “bap or ciabatta?” when we go down to Franco’s to get lunch (takeaway back to the office, of course – must multitask! Eat and solve world hunger… or maybe just spend more time obsessing over FaceBook).

This is extremely cool because we get to imagine what happens in a world where we make our customers data available to them in profoundly new ways. But it presents some interesting challenges.

With SONAR 1.0 we are solving a problem that I think almost every Enterprise on the planet has, however they either don’t really know it, or they are ignoring it because they have no way to address it. The most efficient expert networks usually run below the formal infrastructure of an enterprise. They are organic structures that don’t use “modern” protocols for communication. There are exceptions, most notably in labs or widely disparate disaggregated online communities (WoW raids, anyone?), but these aren’t the general rule.

I can’t recall “subject matter expertise requisition forms” in any of the enterprises I’ve ever visited. Mostly things boil down to who you know and how well you get along. That’s how things have always worked. So what’s going to happen when our customers embrace our technology? What more will they want? How will they use the product? What new things will they do to it that we can’t imagine yet? We WILL have “OMG you did what to our poor sw? that is soooooo cool!!!” moments. This could be followed by Al telling me “woo hoo! We can have that done in a quarter!” or by Craig saying “oh… no… that will pretty much completely blow our architecture up”.

We can’t really ask the enterprise this kind of stuff, because we’re not even fully at the “prove to me this thingy does anything useful” stage. We haven’t even really developed the right language to describe things, frankly. And our customers probably don’t really understand how big of a problem they have, no less tell us about new problems they will see once they are past the first set…

There’s a scale of product-fu:

1) Starting out prod fu: wait for RFP, submit bid, build solution. Wait again.

2) Experienced prod fu: ask a bunch of customers what they want, validate the problem set, boil it down to something smaller than “everything”. Build that. Repeat.

3) Elite prod fu: Work with customers to understand their problems. Work with analysts to understand the space. Work with technologists to understand what is possible. Combine and make your best fit solution to solve one or more problems that most customers either don’t know about or have no solution for so they ignore it.

Right now we do elite prod fu. Not only must we engineer product to solve today’s problems, we have to be super smart and dig even deeper into the space and identify the additional problems the introduction of our SW will uncover. We have to understand the way enterprises work so well that we can see past the introduction of SONAR to a future where it does what it’s supposed to do, and thus uncovers existing-but-unrealized problems.

We predicate this on the fact that we don’t understand all of the problems that Enterprises face. Der. We can’t, but we assume that the problems are there. We, and our customers, don’t have the tools to uncover them yet. HOWEVER there’s stuff even beyond this, and for that we need ultra-major-cosmic-black-belt-prod-fu.

There will be brand spanking new problems – ones that truly don’t exist at all yet because they can’t, because the things that create the baseline to make them even possible don’t exist yet. Our customers will have them. We have to figure those ones out, too.

4) ultra-major-cosmic-black-belt-prod-fu: Build solutions to problems that TRULY don’t exist yet, but which will be, at least in part, based on things we (and this is the BIG we – it’s all of us in technology) are going to do to create them in the future. NO ONE can tell you about them.

In some cases, once you’ve figured them out yourself, just talking openly about these things will get you a PhD, arrested, committed, branded a heretic, or all of the above. When you get this one right, you have to be careful as you can actually spook people. It’s like being a really really really good fortune teller. From the outside it looks like magic.

This is one thing that makes the state of play here so interesting – we have the opportunity to anticipate the future invention, in the truest sense of the word, of problems created by systems that don’t exist yet.

How cool is that? Very cool.

Peter

Last week Mike made the case that Facebook won’t replace LinkedIn, arguing that people prefer to manage their professional contacts separately from their friends. In my previous post I’d suggested that Facebook migh replace LinkedIn. In the light of Mike’s article I’m going to explain why I think this is likely to happen.

I created an account on LinkedIn three years ago and connected to a handful of friends, customers and collaborators. After that my account languished for a couple of years until the end of 2006 when I refreshed my profile and connected to some more people. Right now I’ve got 33 connections, qualifying me as a miserable norman-no-mates in LinkedIn land.

To put it bluntly I don’t like LinkedIn. I always feel a little bit dirty asking someone for a LinkedIn connection. I think this is probably because the platform offers such a coldly reductionist view of what a business relationship means. In LinkedIn all that counts is a person’s job title, where they’ve worked in the past and how many high-powered connections they’ve notched up. This dehumanises people and relationships, rendering them down to their mechanical and factual base. To use any system is to express complicity in the values it embodies. LinkedIn doesn’t reflect my values or my experience of professional relationships.

In May this year I created an account on Facebook (late adopter that I am) and got swept up in the usual ferment of friends and apps. The people I’ve listed as friends in Facebook cover a wide spectrum from purely personal to purely professional. But I’ve met all of them (with one exception) and I like all of them. Unlike LinkedIn, Facebook gives me a rounded picture of each person that might include their music and reading habits, glimpses of their family life, photos and video clips, updates from their Twitter feeds and so on. It’s important that the Facebook platform encourages people to interact in a playful way. I’m liable to find professional contacts slapping me with a kipper or turning me into a zombie. When was the last time that happened on LinkedIn?

In my experience successful businesses are built on strong relationships which include both professional and personal elements. I believe people have an innate preference to interact with each other across multiple dimensions, regardless of conventional work/life distinctions. LinkedIn makes absolutely no contribution to this whilst Facebook provides lots of helpful mechanisms. That’s why I predict people will increasingly use Facebook for their professional connections as well as their personal ones. Watch out LinkedIn!

After my presentation at last month’s Web Essentials event hosted by Library House I was asked whether I thought Facebook would be widely adopted as a social networking platform inside the enterprise. This is an interesting question as it touches on the different underlying requirements for consumer and enterprise applications. Facebook is currently getting strong adoption from business folk, something that MySpace and Friendster never achieved. Last week Siemens’ inhouse web strategist disclosed that 6,000 of Siemens’ employees were already on Facebook and most of them had joined during the previous month. This led Robert Scoble to suggest that the company might soon be producing dedicated apps for the platform and that in time Facebook could even replace Siemens’ intranet.

Facebook as a replacement for the corporate intranet? It’s an intriguing thought, but I think Mr Scoble is wrong on this. There are three main barriers:

Insufficient Security and Privacy Options
Part of Facebook’s triumph is its simple (but subtle) permissions system. As a user I can choose whether my profile page is visible to everyone or just my friends. Groups can be open to everyone, their content can be restricted to members or they can be completely invisible. I can also associate a group with a network such as a school or business. People can easily grasp these authorisation options and they offer enough range to cover most social preferences. However they don’t offer the level of granularity or sophistication needed for serious enterprise usage. Businesses have a wide variety of security and privacy policies and every internal system needs conform to them 100%. There’s no margin for error or compromise where highly sensitive information is concerned. Security and privacy are peripheral functions for a consumer platform they are absolutely central for an enterprise platform.
Too Reliant on Manual Updating
Facebook, in common with other consumer social networking platforms, relies on manually entered data to build up a picture of who your friends are and what you’re interested in. This works fine for social purposes, where updating profiles and friend lists becomes a leisure activity in its own right. But this isn’t true in the enterprise. Systems that rely on manual updating (such as knowledge management tools based on tagging) tend to deliver limited value in the enterprise for the simple reason that people never get round to updating them. To deliver sustained value, enterprise social networking platforms must have automatic mechanisms to update themselves and maintain an accurate picture of people’s networks and interests.
No Integration with Enterprise Systems
Enabling third-party developers to write plug-ins (or “Apps”) for Facebook has made a huge contribution to its success. My Facebook page includes a random selection of my photos imported from my Flickr account, details of the artists I’ve been listening to on LastFM (with a button to play my personal radio station) and links to the last six entries from my personal blog. It’s easy for Facebook to link with other consumer platforms like this because they all share simple authorisation models and the data being exchanged isn’t sensitive. However the sources an enterprise needs to integrate with, such as their corporate email system and document repository, hold extremely sensitive material and have sophisticated authorisation regimes that must stringently be adhered to. This isn’t what Facebook was designed for.

These issues don’t mean that Facebook has no role in business. Far from it. I think Facebook could well replace dedicated business networking services such as LinkedIn. Indeed I’ve already made a number of valuable business connections through Facebook. But the very factors that underlie Facebook’s success in the consumer world limit its application inside the enterprise. If it had been designed for enterprise needs it wouldn’t be seeing such wide adoption in the consumer world. In the end it’s horses for courses.

Apparently Jeff Pulver has stopped using LinkedIn for business social networking. This comes on the back of various other luminaries doing the same and predicting the replacement of LinkedIn by Facebook as the defacto Enterprise networking platform. I think they’re missing the point. Not all ‘friends’ are created equal; socialising and networking are two distinct activities. The divide between the two groups has decidedly fuzzy edges but it still exists.

I used MySpace for networking within the music and art communities. Many of my ‘friends’ were random strangers whose music I enjoyed or artwork I liked. LinkedIn is very similar. While I know most of my contacts I’m not necessarily friends with all of them. On Facebook, however, I know every person in my friends list. Incidentally, I think the term ‘friend’ is far more suited to Facebook than it is to MySpace and that’s why it’s taking off so virulently - the behaviour it encourages is far closer to that which we display in real life. Sociomimetic, Charles?

Facebook mimics my offline social network. I know everyone in it and keep up with them either directly - a drink after work or an email exchange - or indirectly, through other friends. I still do the former but Facebook has taken over the information distribution role of the latter. LinkedIn, on the other hand, substitutes for the stack of business cards I have mouldering on my shelves and collection of half-recollected email addresses that languish in my address book. These aren’t people I necessarily keep in touch with frequently but I certainly don’t want to forget about them.

LinkedIn is a network but it’s not really social. It’s about collecting not interacting and that’s how I want my networking to be. I don’t put my friends and my business associates in the same bucket. There’s some overlap (everyone at Trampoline is in my friends list, for example) but I certainly don’t want to turn the CEO of the company I was consulting for last year into a zombie. It’s simply not appropriate.

I’m definitely not saying that Facebook has no place in the enterprise - I expect it to function like a virtual coffee machine or water cooler - but I don’t think the form of socialising that it promotes necessarily threatens LinkedIn. In fact, I think the two could play very well together… A LinkedIn Facebook app, anyone?