Blog | Archive for the ‘Organisations & Technology’ Category
Facebook won’t replace LinkedIn
By mike | Thursday, August 2nd, 2007
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?
Posted in Organisations & Technology | 1 Comment »
A Behavioural Shift in Our Emails
By alistair | Tuesday, July 31st, 2007
Since we started using our own internal Sonar deployment as a test bed, we’ve been noticing a subtle but distinct shift in the way we compose emails. We’re taking just a little bit more care to write informative subjects and supply more context, whether we’re consciously aware of it or not.One of the main characteristics of the email noise that pervades the enterprise is a lack of persistent context. I long ago lost count of the number of hours of lost on fruitless trawls through my inbox for some nugget of information that I *know* is there, languishing in some long-forgotten recess of my mail client, but I just can’t find it because it’s lost in a morass of meaningless subjects, like “meeting notes”, or “tomorrow”, or – everyone’s favourite – “Re:”. A communication medium such as email, without the situational or emotional context that is generally inferred from ambient knowledge such as a previous verbal conversation followed up with an email, or from the non-verbal clues that provide up to 80% of our meaning, can inevitably lead to serious misunderstandings or just….. noise. A potential goldmine of crucial information – somebody’s inbox – quickly becomes a black hole of knowledge that can never be found again.
What we’re finding since implementing Sonar is that the knowledge that our emails are going to be processed and have themes extracted from them is making us – consciously or subconsciously – put that little bit of extra thought into providing that context in our sentence construction. It only takes a second to change a subject line like “meeting notes” to “notes from production meeting”, or change “tomorrow” to “tomorrow’s development tasks”, but that extra context makes the world of difference when you’re dredging back through your inbox, months down the line.
It also means that the picture of organisational expertise that Sonar can build up can be rich, informative, and ever-evolving. It’s changing the way we communicate, in subtly varied ways, making us provide more relevant information and, frankly, cut out the crap – and that, to my mind, can only be a good thing.
Posted in Organisations & Technology, SONAR | 1 Comment »
VP Development wanted
By rebecca | Tuesday, June 12th, 2007
We are looking for a VP Development to oversee the technical wing of Trampoline. The role reports to the CEO and will involve extensive work with VP Sales (to be appointed). The VP Development will establish Trampoline’s software as a secure technology suitable for enterprise adoption and conduct high-level technical liaison with customers and partners. Internally, he or she will organise development resources to meet business objectives and manage recruitment of technical personnel.The successful candidate will have experience leading a major security initiative in a top-five software vendor and a worldwide profile as a thought-leader in secure computing. The salary is competitive with share options and the location is Shoreditch, London.
To apply, please send your CV and a cover letter outlining your suitability for the role to Rebecca Kemp – rebecca DOT kemp AT trampolinesystems DOT com
Posted in Events, Organisations & Technology | No Comments »
Congratulations to Last.FM!
By alistair | Wednesday, May 30th, 2007
The BBC is reporting Music site Last.fm bought by CBS for a tidy old sum of £140m. Not bad for five year’s work. Founder Martin Stiksel said it was an “exciting opportunity”….. no kidding!Congratulations all round guys. Last.fm is a great service that we all use here in the office every day, and we’re looking forward to getting access to “every track ever recorded and every music video ever made”.
Posted in Organisations & Technology | No Comments »
Enron Explorer hits Boing Boing and del.icio.us
By alistair | Wednesday, October 25th, 2006
Since we got Boing Boing’ed yesterday, Google Analytics shows that we’ve had over 21,000 page views so far – and that’s just to the front page. Unfortunately the GA javascript can’t be included in the main app, as it’s pretty much all AJAX requests, so we’ll have to wait for analysis of the Apache logs for full statistics.I also put the Enron Explorer on del.icio.us 4 days ago – it’s now been echoed by 112 people, including one who speaks Russian, by the looks of it. Google Analytics confirms that we’ve had visitors from 71 different countries, interestingly enough including two from the Cayman Islands and one from an anonymising proxy – Kenny Boy, that’s not you is it….?
Some of the comments are fantastic :
fpaulus “Interesting (both technologically and economically) walk through the Enron e-mail archives”
markwithasee “searchable database of all of enron’s internal email from 99-02. WOW.”
RStacy “A look into what the future could look like in corporate transparency and analysis.”
slightlyfleury (ahem – best not repeated here!)
some of the tags that people have applied to it (under the posting history on the right) are also interesting – I always find it intriguing to see how other people see what we’ve done.
Posted in Organisations & Technology, SONAR | No Comments »