Earlier this week, as I did my civic duty, I found myself bored to tears in a jury room, waiting to be called. It was actually a bit funny. The day started with a video about jury service, including interviews where jurors said they were excited when their names were called for a trial.

Sitting in that jury room with nothing to do, I began to understand the excitement.

I only had my phone with me. Note to self, next time prepare like you’re going on a plane: laptop, power, movies, headphones.

I managed to kill an hour playing Sudoku, but after that, I got restless. The jury room had wi-fi, a nice perk, and I remembered Paul mentioning Flight Control to me as awesome and totally addictive. I’d read that in a couple reviews, too.

So I decided to buy it, and happy day, it’s on sale right now.This blog isn’t an iPhone app review blog, and I’ve stopped talking about apps (other than the Oracle People app) because that’s not what we do. I only chatter about apps I enjoy.

I enjoy Flight Control.

The game is simple. Land the planes on the corresponding colored runways by tracing a path with your finger and don’t crash them. Easy peasy, until you have a bunch of planes, flying at different speeds all over the place.

It’s a phenomenal game for the iPhone platform, easy to learn and easy to play. It’s also easy to succeed right away, but it gets increasingly difficult, an attribute of all good games.

For me, this is the addictive part. I was able to play the game immediately, with success, and as it got harder, I kept playing, bolstered by that initial success. Plus, I was bored to tears with nothing else to do.

I enjoy the design aspects of the game. I wonder how that design meeting went. Was the idea universally praised, or did it require a few meetings and a prototype to get the green light?

A while back, Paul mentioned that his iPhone was more gaming console than anything else now, and I was skeptical. I’ve changed my mind. There are some very imaginative games out there that use the iPhone in creative ways, e.g. with the latest version of Flight Control, you can play with another person simultaneously and divert planes to their airports. Can’t wait to try that.

Plus, you never know when you’ll be stuck with nothing to do.

What do you think? Any iPhone games to recommend? Find the comments.

Update: I finally acted on recommendations from Rick and Paul that Fieldrunners was a great game. Aside from being one of Time’s top ten video games of 2008, the game is produced by Portland company, Subatomic Studios.  It has not disappointed; I’ve been playing it for the past hour or so, great fun.

Connect, my latest product, has reached a critical stage in its life. It’s the first product I’ve managed from its inception, so I’m getting interesting new experience as it grows.

It’s pretty robust and has most of the big features people need in a social platform. So, we’re trying to decide what’s next: build something new or add incremental features.

Photo by woodleywonderworks on Flickr used under Creative Commons

Our last release increased the codebase quite a bit, and Rich and Anthony are busy documenting and refactoring the code and writing tests for all the new stuff they built. I know, it’s backwards, but we pushed pretty hard to get it done on a timeline.

Since they’re tied up, Paul and I have plenty of time to noodle what we’d like to do next and what we should do next. Every product team is faced with this decision, and there is never an easy answer. So, in addition to pondering our future direction and strategy, I’ve been thinking a lot about the challenges of managing a product.Our charter is innovation, which is pretty broad, but we’re supposed to be thinking of what’s next and how it can be used. Technically, we’re not a product team, but Connect has morphed into a product. So, we have no choice.

Once the code is stable, what should we build, more features or innovative stuff? Our team is small enough that we really have to pick one or the other, which makes the decision difficult.

More Features
Now that we have a large base of users, it’s tempting to keep adding on features to Connect. A few of the common asks: chat, nested groups, email integration and file management.

All of these would add value to Connect, but should I invest effort to build them?

The most difficult thing about managing a product is balancing what your users want with the direction you feel the product should take. You should know the direction, and it should account for what’s best for your users, whether they’ve asked for it or not.

Which is where you run into problems.

If I don’t build a highly requested feature, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m not listening to users. In the case of Connect, we have specific constraints preventing a couple of those features. I’m transparent about those issues with users, and they accept, sometimes grudgingly.

What about the others?

This is where it gets dicey, i.e. when you and your user disagree about direction.

Requirement is a funny word in product management. It can mean something needed to comply with government regulations or something that a user really wants. Figuring out why a requirement is a requirement provides a challenge in the latter cases because they frequently boil down to opinions.

With a couple of these features, I think the investment of effort would far outweigh the utility of the feature, which takes effort away from really useful stuff.

This is a tough call to make, but it’s one that product teams do all the time. I try to be transparent about the reasons, and at the end of the day, your users should trust you as the domain expert. Unfortunately, with a social product, everyone who’s ever used Twitter or Facebook is an expert, which makes for some fun requirement debates

Innovative Stuff
I don’t really want to keep adding features to Connect nonstop for a couple reasons:

1. The codebase is big, and I don’t want it to outgrow our ability to support it.
2. Adding new features prevents us from focusing on innovation.

Innovation within your product (or outside it) always competes with sustaining tasks and building new features for users.

This is why software is hard.

So, Paul has some rad ideas that would be a huge departure for us, but seriously cool and totally new, mind-blowing type stuff. He’s the big idea guy.

This works great for me, since I’m not that guy. I’m the make-it-better guy. My ideas are practical ways to build cool stuff without mucking with Connect’s codebase–analyzing the data, creating visualizations, building a reputation system, building clients.

Nothing terribly sexy, but all models that have yet to be fully realized within large enterprises.

Decision Time
We haven’t decided what to do next yet, and we probably won’t for a couple months while Rich and Anthony clean up their code.

Most product teams try to take a balanced approach, combining innovation with incremental improvements. I’m not convinced that’s the best model, but I haven’t seen many others. I’d be interested to see how large open source projects like Firefox or Ubuntu handle this issue.

Anyway, this was a bit meandering. I just wanted to get my thoughts out there and see what others had to add.

Find the comments.

Oringinal image by Marcin Wichary on Flickr used under Creative Commons

Hard to believe it, but the Walkman will turn 30 on July 1.

Thanks to the ‘tubes for reminding me of this, specifically to this 13-year-old kid’s review of the Walkman, compiled after using it in lieu of his iPod for a week.

Well worth the read, if only for a laugh, and an interesting study in technology advancement over the years, especially through the eyes of someone who’s never used a cassette tape.

Protip for you kids out there: Tapes have two sides.

I assume most of you had a Walkman or a similar device back in the day. Upon reading that post, I immediately began digging for one of my old Walkmen (or is it Walkmans?), which I know my parents sent me in a dump of old stuff last year. You know, the “here are the boxes of crap you left at our house when you moved out decades ago, but never had the decency to remove yourself” shipment.

Unfortunately, I think I tossed it in the trash, along with a slew of old cassette tapes. I guess that should read “fortunately”, at least if you’re my wife. It’s amazing how much crap I accumulate. Too bad too, since I know that bad boy had stickers all over it; see, I’ve always plastered my stuff with stickers.

Anyway, looking at the Walkman Museum, I found several that I know I had. I must have gone through half a dozen of those over the years.

ZOMG I’m old.

Photo by Ernst Moeksis on Flickr used under Creative Commons

The events surrounding the reporting of Michael Jackson’s death last week bring up issues with news reporting that I think are worth discussing.

Granted, this discussion isn’t new, but it’s interesting, at least to me.

Twitter offers a new channel to reporters, due to its immediacy and network effects, i.e. it’s very quick to publish and easy to spread a story to thousands of people. Obviously, this appeals to mainstream media as a distribution channel.

However, as we saw last week, Twitter doesn’t wait for standard journalistic practices like fact-checking. In the case of Michael Jackson’s death, Twitter (and TMZ) turned out to be correct, but I wonder if this will have a detrimental effect on future news reporting.

News outlets like to have exclusives and scoops because being first and exclusive adds readers and viewers. Adding readers and viewers means more advertisement, which means more money. Balancing the desire to be first and exclusive with accuracy has always been a fine line for every news-reporting outlet. After all accuracy builds trust, which also means more readers/viewers.

Twitter completely breaks this model because anyone can say anything and pass it off as truth, or mistakenly have it interpreted as truth.

Of course, by the time the dust settles and fact-checking proves or disputes, it’s far too late to sort out the mess.

So, what good is Twitter then?

It’s very good for first-hand accounts of news, again assuming the person tweeting is actually on the scene. The Hudson River plane crash is an excellent example of the effectiveness of Twitter. We even had a news story of sorts come through Mix last year, when Debra Lilley was trapped in an elevator before OpenWorld.

Beyond first-hand reports, it gets a bit dicey.

The good news is that Twitter users showed a high level of suspicion last week, as evidenced by the traffic spikes many sites experienced as people tried to verify what they read on Twitter by hitting various news sites around the ‘tubes. Similar bumps were seen after the Hudson River crash was reported on Twitter.

So, is it enough to assume that people don’t believe what they hear from Twitter, at least not without checking for themselves?

Not that it’s possible, but it would be interesting to see if people check first, then re/tweet, or vice versa. I’d like to think it’s the former, which is the behavior I saw on Thursday. This may be the case, since many of these tweets are associated with people, and therefore carry reputation with them, i.e. there’s some risk to crying wolf.

So maybe we apply the trust model to tweets.

If that’s the case, then citizen journalism won. If not, we have a problem.

Traditional media will continue to feel pressure from services like Twitter/Facebook, as they are scooped by blogs and on-the-scene reporting. What remains to be seen is how they handle it, e.g. the AP has taken steps to define what its employees, specifically its reporters, can say via Twitter and Facebook.

Policies make sense, but I wonder how much longer mainstream media will put up with reporting news that broke first on Twitter. At some point, wouldn’t they prefer saying that they broke the story first on Twitter?

So, what do you think? Do people put too much faith in citizen journalism, or do you think everyone has the right amount of skepticism to make it work? How should mainstream media react to services that threaten to scoop them?

Find the comments.

To name a few:

• Hudson River plane crash
• Iranian election riots
• Several earthquakes in multiple countries, e.g. Southern California, Mexico City
• Wildfires every year, e.g. Fall 2007
• Terrorists attacks in Mumbai
• Virginia Tech shootings

The immediacy and speed of updating Twitter when news happens around you makes, coupled with its network effects, make it a very good tool for spreading news before news reports can be produced and broadcast.

This afternoon may be a turning point for Twitter and citizen journalism.About 30 minutes ago, I saw a FriendFeed alert saying simply “RIP Michael Jackson”. This is big news, since after all, MJ is still the King of Pop, or at least no one has stepped up to take that crown.

I immediately went to see what was trending on Twitter, and sure enough, “rip michael jackson” was the top trending item, point to a sketchy report from TMZ posted at 3:20 Pacific time.

TMZ isn’t exactly a credible source IMO, so I went to CNN for the skinny. As of about 3:30, CNN.com was reporting MJ was admitted to the hospital for cardiac arrest. Odd.

After a refresh, the story changed from admitted to coma according to “sources”.

Finally, as I began to write this post, Twitter was already questioning the validity of the report, which lead me to start writing, and now, the LA Times has reported MJ’s death, but only after their servers took a header from all the Twitter traffic.

And now, CNN has updated the status to deceased as well, a full 20 or so minutes after TMZ broke the story with help from Twitter.

My timeline isn’t super accurate, and I’m sure there will be *numerous* posts on this trail of events in the next 24 hours.

So, what’s my angle?

Well it started out to be a snarky rant about TMZ and the sheep of Twitter, but now, I’m in full 180 mode to make myself look good.

Not really. I’m happy to admit I doubted the TMZ report and the initial tweets. Besides, I’ve used Celebrity Death Beeper (disclosure, I know the creator) for over a decade to stay on top of this type of, erm, news. That’s how I learned that Farrah Fawcett had died earlier today.

So, now the snarky tweets and goodbyes have started. This post (h/t Kasper Sorensen on FriendFeed) was pretty funny.

This is a clear win for citizen journalism over mainstream media. I guess journalistic integrity got in the way.

I use the term win loosely. It’s only a matter of time before someone cries wolf in a tweet, accidentally or intentionally, and Twitter trends wolf cries all over the place. I don’t think that’s good.

I don’t have any answers here. Citizen journalism and Twitter as its outlet definitely have a place in modern news reporting, but definitely don’t forget to add the salt.

Ack, even as I try to finish this post, Jeff Goldblum’s death is being reported on Twitter. I guess we’ll find out in a few minutes if that’s a wolf cry or a surreal combination of events.

Assuming Twitter and the ‘tubes can handle the traffic.

Today, Facebook opened its walls to allow search engines to index anything you publish, meaning the layer of trust can be removed, and all your updates *could* be released into the wild.

The change has been rolled out to a select few beta testers, looks like those who already have public profiles. The ensuing uproar has brought a clarification from Facebook about future rollout plans, i.e. they say they’ll respect the privacy settings you have in place to keep your posts private.

I’m not really bothered by this change. People don’t pay enough attention to what is and isn’t indexed by search engines, e.g. Twitter updates are, unless you protect them, and let’s not forget that MySpace has always been indexed for all the world to see.

It is a departure for them. The Facebook experience has always been one of a controlled environment, where the symmetric follow model protected you from outsiders. Plus, they’ve always been the anti-MySpace, more private, less noisy.Sure, there are infamous examples where this false sense of security caused heaping doses of fail, but still, the overall experience is one of a protected atmosphere, within a circle of trust.

But now, with one setting change, your Fourth of July BBQ photos could go from being shared with a couple dozen people, to being shared with a billion around the World, give or take a couple hundred million.

That’s bound to cause some concern, but as long as Facebook makes it clear how to set privacy controls, the change itself isn’t a huge deal.

So, now the experiment begins. Facebook is used by (and implicitly trusted by) 250 million or so people.

How will this affect their perception of the network? Some bloggers are speculating that News Feed posts will be exposed via API to commercial third parties for pay, which would further erode the trust of users. From Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post on Read Write Web:

The worst case scenario is that Facebook will not open a free message search API for outside developers, instead it will make bulk access and analysis of all these public messages available only to commercial firms able to pay in order to harvest the data for marketing purposes. That seems pretty likely, unfortunately.

Facebook is, after all, a business, and the promise of marketing to social networks has been the elephant in the room for years. To date, it hasn’t been the advertising Holy Grail, but opening up personal network posts would help. I’m sure Twitter is pondering this too because all those mundane details you tell your networks help advertisers know more about you and more importantly, how to advertise to you.

Back to trust for the big finish.

What’s the answer here? Facebook and Twitter are businesses. They offer a free service that’s awesome, but at some point, they’re going to need viable business models and revenue streams to make their VCs happy.

So, do they lose our trust? Should we quit and find a free-as-in-beer service like Identi.ca? Would that even work, since these services have achieved a critical mass of our contacts?

I have no answers, only questions. I do expect that the loss of trust will hurt Facebook a bit, but it probably won’t matter in the long run.

Anyway, find the comments.

Photo by anne.oeldorf on Flickr used under Creative Commons

The debate about whether FeedBurner’s inclusion of FriendFeed subscribers is a good or bad thing has me thinking how to determine a person’s reputation and influence.

As I keep saying, trust is the key component to New Web. Without trust, it’s difficult to build a community around anything.

Reputation and influence are the next big things in New Web. We’ve been noodling how to establish reputation for a while now and have some ideas for internal use on Connect.

What’s the big deal?

Beyond people you actually know, i.e. met in meat space, worked with on a project, how can you tell if you want to pay attention to someone? Sure, there’s a profile that might help you make the call, but how do you decide to read a person’s blog, follow her/him on Twitter/FriendFeed, friend her/him on Facebook, etc?

There are rudimentary methods that I’m sure everyone uses, since consumer apps don’t provide any reputation scoring (and centralized reputation is a pipe dream for now).

I’m sure you know them already.

Blogs

• FeedBurner subscribers count
• Google Reader Subscribers Greasemonkey script
• Technorati authority
• Post frequency
• Comments per post

These are highly subjective and don’t really help you vet the content, but I guarantee that a blog with more subscribers is frequently viewed as more influential, which is why the recent FeedBurner change to add FriendFeed subscribers borks up the system a bit. Of course, the system was already borked.

I usually add new blogs based on the recommendations of friends (ahem, trust), or I’ll test drive them for a week or so to see how the content and commentary is.

A lot of bloggers now show you how many Twitter followers and FriendFeed subscribers they have, which only makes things more messy. Does having a lot of followers on Twitter make you more influential?

Cue the segue.

Twitter, FriendFeed

• Number of followers
• Ratio of followers to following
• Overall activity
• @ reply or commenting frequency
• Cursory review of the person’s blog, applying the blog methods to determine reputation and influence

I lump these two services together because they both employ the asynchronous model for networking.

As with blogs, I also employ the recommendation of friends model both direct and implied, i.e. by looking for overlap with my network.

As Twitter has grown by leaps and bounds, it’s become more difficult to know who’s worth following and who’s not.

Facebook

• Number of friends
• Number of shared friends
• Overall activity and commenting
• Profile information
• Cursory review of the person’s blog

I’d argue that because of the trust built into the synchronous model employed by traditional social networks, they produce the best and most consistent reputation. The addition of friends in common was a smart move to help people vet potential friends that can easily become part of a reputation system.

It’s only a matter of time before Facebook adds some kind of reputation scoring to their network and adds it to their Facebook Connect payload. This will be the first shot in the war for reputation/influence, which will be part of the war for identity.

So what?
Reputation and influence will be very hard to establish, due to their inherently personal nature. If tomorrow Twitter or Facebook announced a reputation score, people would go nuts comparing themselves, bragging, complaining and dissecting and questioning the algorithm.

Speaking of algorithms, Google is an interesting player in reputation because they have so much data about you and what you do online.

For a long time, forums have calculated scores for members based on contributions, activity, etc. This model works, but it hasn’t been applied outside forums or across networks. This is a good starting point, but it needs major tweaking.

There are solid patterns that can be followed to create reputation and influence scores, and the score should be a combination of algorithm plus user’s scoring of each other, similar to the forum model. The algorithm needs to be smart enough to know when people are gaming though, which is complicated.

Overall, determining a score on the consumer web is a very tough row to hoe.

Not so much inside an enterprise where core values create a basis, e.g. use the company handbook as a starting place for corporate values on which to base reputation. With a baseline, it becomes easier to model reputation and influence based on social activity.

What do you think? Is this a pipe dream for the consumer web? Can reputation be scored inside a company? Did I miss something big?

I don’t know everything, natch, so find the comments and enlighten me.

Last week, the FeedBurner numbers shot up from about 1,000 readers to more than 1,500. I’m behind on my reading, but so far, I haven’t seen this covered anywhere but on the FriendFeed blog.

Some movement in subscribers is common. However, this was an interesting surprise, since FeedBurner often erroneously lowers (not raises) the number of readers, sometimes by 50% or more.

Anyway, this is a welcome addition if you’re a blogger, mainly because it feeds the ego, but also it adds another channel to follow for comments and discussion of your content.

I’ve been a FriendFeed user since it was in private beta, and I love the app. The team behind it constantly adds useful features, months ahead of more popular services like Google Reader, Twitter and Facebook, only to see bits and pieces of their work added to these apps.

FriendFeed is an interesting hybrid. It combines the aggregation of Reader with the immediacy of Twitter (and now Facebook), adding that oh-so-important trust layer on top.

In the latest redesign of Connect, we added RSS import, modeled after FriendFeed’s offering. Lightweight aggregation like this provides an easy way to keep track of multiple sources in a single place, and even though it fractures the discussion, this may be the only choice you have.

In our case, we don’t have the bandwidth (or stroke, frankly) to integrate all the systems used internally for work, so we use feeds to centralize other content systems.

Even though it’s a powerful and useful app, FriendFeed’s traffic has remained stable, despite the usage spikes experienced by other services, prompting some to declare that FriendFeed is the coolest app no one uses.

My biggest problem with FriendFeed is controlling the noise. Unlike Twitter, each user can add multiple channels, making it exponentially louder. They have added some controls to curb the noise, and overlap with Twitter, but I still get overwhelmed each time I jump back in to give it another go.

Recently, the integration of FriendFeed comments into blogs (e.g. Disqus’ Reactions feature) has made it easier to see and reply to commentary about posts. This helps with discussion fragmentation, but it hasn’t yet helped me use FriendFeed for daily information gathering and conversation, its main purpose.

It’s too early to declare failure, especially based on traffic alone, but I do wonder about the FriendFeed team. It doesn’t feel  good to see your innovation appear in other services while your traffic remains relatively static.

I do believe it’s early in the hype cycle. Look at Twitter for an example. Remember back in late 2007 when Twitter made an appearance in a CSI episode? Now, it’s all Twitter, all the time, in all media. As an example, the finale of the Ultimate Fighter this past weekend featured numerous references to Joe Rogan and Dana White on Twitter.

So maybe FriendFeed’s time will come, as n00bs get overwhelmed with goodness from the ‘tubes and seek out a way to aggregate all their content. Hey, FriendFeed may actually accomplish what RSS has failed to do. I certainly hope so.

What do you think? How do you use FriendFeed (ahem, John), and if you don’t why not? What makes it successful for you?

Find the comments here or on FriendFeed

There are big changes from last year’s inaugural run. First off, it’s no longer called Suggest a Session, but rather Vote for Sessions.

From the name, you can get an inkling of the biggest change, i.e. you won’t be suggesting sessions this year. Instead, you’ll be voting on 150-plus sessions that didn’t make the cut during the open call for papers in April.

Other changes, you’ll need to vote for at least three sessions before your votes will be counted. According to the FAQ, metrics from last year show that the many of votes were cast by submitters for their own sessions. So, this change encourages people to vote for more than just their own sessions. There’s no mention of a limit on the number of votes.Also new, the total votes for a session won’t be displayed, even on the “Top Proposals” list, which says it’s ordered by popularity. This addresses one problem from last year, i.e. popular and new ideas dominated the lists, leaving many worthy sessions in limbo. They are also providing sessions ordered randomly and by title, as well as categorizing the sessions by stream and by track.

More new stuff, the session list itself is public, not behind the login wall as it was last year, although you have to login to Mix to cast a vote (or three).

Also, the UI has changed a bit from the standard Mix look and feel. At first, I thought the changes would be Mix-wide, but they are limited to the Vote for Sessions page only. Maybe they’re beta-testing a new interface, or maybe it’s just to delineate the voting from the rest of Mix.

I’m curious to see how these changes are received. Last year, Suggest a Session collected 281 talks and the top 25 made the cut. This year, there are 150-ish talks up for voting, and no mention of how many will be selected.

I haven’t been involved with Mix at all, since we handed the reins to Marketing back in January. So, I can’t provide any insight into why changes were made. I assume the Oracle Mix blog will have a post soon, and you can also ping them on Twitter (@oraclemix).

Head over to Vote for Sessions and make sure to vote at least three times to have your voice heard. Voting ends July 3. There’s no mention of when the winners will be announced.

Find the comments if you like.

So, like any good blogger, I’m going where the traffic is.

The 90-9-1 rule interests me for a number of reasons beyond the obvious applications it has to driving participation in Connect.

It’s an interesting study in psychology, especially when compared to social networks that inject trust into the equation. I really would like to see similar metrics for symmetric (ahem, classic) networks like Facebook and MySpace because of the addition of trust to the social equation.

This offhand mention in the Harvard Business School study alludes to trust as a motivating factor for participation:

“On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production.”

As enterprise adoption of social networks advances, their participation metrics will also be intriguing. Do more people participate when you add another comfy trust blanket on top of the network? I have to believe that just providing a place to share information inside the corporate firewall drives participation, if only because it is sanctioned by the company.This gives people a safety net of security, policy and repercussions that you don’t have on the consumer web.

This is a bigger deal than you’d think. We initially launched Connect in June 2006 with LDAP integration to ensure everyone had an account. This is standard operating procedure within an enterprise and a win over the consumer web. OpenID is a reality in corporate environments by necessity.

Even so, we hit several walls with people trusting us with their credentials, which drove us first to add SSL and then to support Oracle SSO. So, even inside the firewall, people are guarded with their credentials, and rightfully so.

Trust is a weird thing. If the metrics are correct and 70% of people create 90% of the content on typical social networks, this is huge when compared to 90% creating only 10% of tweets and 95% of blogs being essentially abandoned.

What else could it be, if not trust?

In the asymmetric follow model, anyone can follow you and @ reply you, pretty much the same with blogs.

Trust dictates how and if you respond. If I know you and trust you, I respond differently than if I don’t know you. It’s human nature. People trust other people they know. They do not trust the Internet.

Consumer networks create the semi-illusion that what you say and do is among friends, whereas blogs and Twitter do not. At least Twitter users shouldn’t have that illusion, especially after we’ve seen some famously embarrassing fails.

Granted, there are loads of cases of fail on social networks, but the key point for me here is that trust prompts participation. Good judgment is ancillary to this fact.

It’s important to remember that New Web is still in its infancy, and participation doesn’t come overnight, especially after hundreds of years of the old media model, i.e. a few sources broadcast, you consume. The prevalence of email doesn’t help either.

For a large majority, the ‘tubes is a place to consume information, old media style, and read/send email with parties you trust. It’s not anything like that cocktail party we were promised.

This is bad for New Web. If 90% of New Web content is created by a precious few of us, how boring, opinionated and derivative is that?

I want new content and information. I want more opinions and disagreement (ahem, not flame wars), more collective intelligence.

Maybe this is too egalitarian, but that’s the promise of the ‘tubes, right?

So, what to do about it?

I’m not alone in believing that Gen Y will shape the future of the web and drive more people into participation. So, there that. Being a digital native isn’t for everyone, but people will gradually be drawn into New Web by its participants. Once there, they’ll pick and choose what’s for them and what isn’t.

The overall result will be increased participation across all age groups.

The growth of Facebook across older demographics shows this is already happening, so maybe I’m just echoing what is already working. It’s too bad Twitter doesn’t have similar demographics. That would be interesting. Although I did read somewhere that Twitter adoption has been slow among those under 25.

Take that with a grain of salt, since Twitter doesn’t collect age data, making me wonder about any study’s results.

Texting seems to be the accepted mode of operation in younger demographics, which makes sense, and hey, there’s trust in there. Surprise.

Anyway, my theory is that participation begins as imitation.

My usual advice to anyone who’s wary and unsure about how to get started is to jump in and lurk. You can’t expect to start a blog or a social network and follow a bulleted list to success. Start by doing. Read and comment on blogs. Join a social network. Join Twitter. Discover what works and, more importantly, what doesn’t.

Beyond influencing personal behavior, this creates and establishes trust.

So, for me, participation equals trust.

What do you think? I trust you to sound off in the comments.

Image by FearfulStills from Flickr used under Creative Commons

I really do love new stuff, especially when it comes to software and has a “developer release” or “alpha” or “beta” tag on it.

I can’t help it. I’ve tried to stay away from buggy releases, but I always come back, if only to feel like I’m playing with the latest, greatest version.

Are you like that?

Anyway, buggy releases can really can bork up your day, especially if it’s software you use for daily stuff, e.g. a browser or an O/S.

I’m generally very tolerant of software bugs because: a) I know software is hard and b) I know the risks of using pre-production releases.

So, what follows is a parade of fail, shared for your amusement. Keep in mind as you read that I’m not blaming anyone or all that unhappy. It’s really my fault for chasing shiny objects. Feel free to laugh or commiserate, bonus points if you can spot the solution to my failures.Firefox 3.5
I love Firefox, and I always enjoy the beta releases because it gives me a chance to see new features and play with all the cool stuff they’re building. I can never wait for a production release.

So, I jumped at the first beta release of 3.1, eventually rebranded as 3.5, and I’ve been running it happily for a while. My biggest complaint with Firefox is its consumption of memory and CPU and relatively slow Javascript performance, compared to Chrome and Safari 4.

A few months ago, Rich mentioned the 3.6 alpha version (a.k.a. Minefield) was better at JS and fast. So, I ran it for a while. I think part of its performance improvements were attributable to the fact that I had to reboot every day to take the latest nightly build.

I switched back to 3.5 in beta 3 when it dropped and then took beta 4. Hunky dory. Until one weekend, I was using Google Reader to catch up on a backlog of unread feeds. Like most Reader users, I use the JS keyboard shortcuts liberally, and for some reason, Firefox freaked out after about three hours of hitting “j”. FYI, “j” and “k” move you between feed posts.

So, 3.5b4 crashed, hard, and my CPU sounded like it would collapse. I noticed Firefox was consuming 90-97% of CPU while I was reading.

In a hurry to finish my reading, I switched back to Minefield, which didn’t help and as a bonus, caused a profile corruption.

Side note, in Firefox 3+, your profile data are stored in places.sqlite. If you corrupt your profile, you’ll lose bookmarks and other stuff, like your back button, etc. It’s a bit ugly. Luckily for me, a quick Time Machine restore saved me from rebuilding all that. Hooray for backups and for Time Machine. More on that in a bit.

After that, I started using Safari 4 and Chrome for JS-heavy sites.

I’m now running latest preview release of 3.5, and unfortunately, I’ve hit a few regressions, one of which affects my ability to add images to posts, view the word count, autosave posts and add tags. Bummer.

To give you an idea of how much I love new stuff, I now have to use Chrome and Firefox to add an image to a post. Firefox for writing and image resizing, Chrome for uploading the image.

I know. I suck.

Chrome for Mac
Like I said, I now use Chrome for JS-heavy sites because Chrome does a great job with Google sites. Surprise!

Chrome lacks Flash support, and it’s rough around the edges, lacking privacy controls, cookie management, etc. Downloads go into the default, which can be an adventure if you’re like me and used to choosing the download location.

Some JS functions seem to die over time, e.g. inserting a row in a Google Spreadsheet or archiving a message in GMail. They come back after a restart, or at least, they have so far.

Overall, Chrome is pretty solid for a developer release (he said, knocking on wood). Plus, it’s really fast and doesn’t use as much memory and CPU as Firefox does, which is a bonus.

I don’t have any epic fails to share so far, but give it time

Jaunty Jackalope 9.04
I love Ubuntu, and I ran it relatively trouble-free for a year with 8.04 and 8.10. The only recurring issue I remember was using a non-sanctioned OpenOffice 3 install on 8.10. Rather than use the one that came with 8.10, I installed the RPM from OpenOffice, which caused a panic each and every time, regardless of which app I ran. That was easily remedied by reverting to the Ubuntu-specific version in Synaptic. I know, RTFM.

My upgrade to Jaunty was another story. Rather than wait, I chased that shiny object and went to 9.04 before it was stable for my configuration.

I hit the Intel video drive issues, which have since been patched.

I also experienced periodic freezes (accompanied by blinking lights) that required a hard restart. Plus, GRUB wouldn’t load every time I did a restart.

Thanks to some digging and help from Jim, I resolved the GRUB issue (unplug all the USB devices), and I isolated the cause of  the freezes, Cisco VPN client.

Too bad I need that for work.

Luckily, there are a few options, a custom vpnc install, turning off one of the CPU cores, and a Java-based SSL solution.

I went with the latter because it seemed easiest. The instructions for getting vpnc to work are inside the firewall, making it potentially tricky to execute them, i.e. I have to use the buggy VPN client to get inside the firewall, which means the clock is ticking as I work through the steps.

Wouldn’t it serve me right if Cisco VPN caused a panic while I’m in the middle of trying to work around that very issue? Ah, irony.

Unfortunately, the Java solution required running Firefox as root to install the cert correctly. I never did get it working, for whatever reason, and while I was trying, I hosed up my profile by bookmarking a site that had some interesting information about how to disable dual core, forgetting that I was running as root.

Fail.

Since I’d hit that before and have backups, I’m currently restoring it. However, on Ubuntu, it’s not as easy as Firefox.

I’m using Simple Backup, which has been unpacking and restoring my Firefox 3.5 profile for about an hour now. I guess the happy little message “Restoring, this might take some time” is accurate.

Anyway, assuming I ever get my profile back, I plan to follow the instructions to disable dual core while I’m running Cisco VPN.

Part of my problem here is frustration. I love new stuff, and I’m pretty tolerant, until bugs prevent me from working efficiently. Then I get into trouble, especially in the afternoon, when I’m even less lucid than normal.

Anyway, after spending an afternoon tracing my steps of fail, I felt that I should share them with you.

I know I’m mostly to blame, so feel free to laugh in comments. Rest assured, I will continue to chase shiny objects though and blog about my failures.

Find the comments.

Yeah, it’s creepy and risky, but then again, broadcasting your location is always risky, whether you do it via geolocation or Twitter, just ask Israel Hyman.

In fact, if you tweet from an iPhone Twitter client that uses the location feature, Twitter magically updates your profile location with the lat/long coordinates.

Since Twitter profiles are indexed, anyone (follower or not, Twitter user or not) could divine your location, if your updates are public.

I’ve been trying to figure out which iPhone app did that to my profile, unsuccessfully so far. FYI, you can reset your iPhone location settings by following this tutorial.

I’d argue that using a geolocation service like Shizzow or Brightkite is much safer because they build in privacy controls, but it’s yet another network you have to build. That also could be a good thing, since you can control who’s in the network and what each person can see.

My main complaint with most geolocation services is that I have to do work to update my location.I added the “most” to that gripe because on smart phones, you don’t have to do work, which is nice. Still, I’d like better up front access controls. The work part applies to my laptop.

I actually find geolocation more useful when I’m out and about with my machine, for co-working, hanging out, etc.

Google Latitude does the updating for you, but it’s not fully baked yet. Plus, it’s another network, and I’m not at all happy with the iGoogle gadget implementation. So, I don’t use it.

I’m a big fan of Yahoo’s Fire Eagle location broker, which aims to be the central storage place and access manager for your location. The approach is smart: centralize location, add fine-grained privacy controls, and provide an API in bunch of flavors so app developers can uptake it to bake in geolocation goodness.

The biggest problem with Fire Eagle is that the apps integrating with it don’t do full integration, e.g. Brightkite updates my location and is allowed to read it, but doesn’t. So, if I update Fire Eagle manually or automatically (more on that in a minute), Brightkite will never know.

I just checked now, and Brightkite hasn’t updated my location in five months, probably since I fiddled with their iPhone app.

That’s a huge bummer and not likely to go away any time soon, since sites want to drive traffic to their services.

Anyway, returning to the automatic update bit, I read about Clarke this week. Clarke is a little background app for OS X that updates my location to Fire Eagle every five minutes. Easy, peezy.

As with all Fire Eagle apps, Clarke uses OAuth, and when you authorize it, you get a big old warning about the vulnerability. Once you’ve authorized Clarke, it just works in the background, using Skyhook to triangulate your approximate location.

There are precious few options for Clarke, e.g. it would be nice to turn it on/off based on times, as Brady notes, also nice would be the ability to skip an update if you’ve remained stationary since the last one. Still, I like it so far.

Over the next few months, Firefox 3.5 will roll out geo updates by browser. This is the Geode project, fully integrated. Frankly, I’m curious to see how automated it will be. I’ve been underwhelmed by the Geode so far, since the location it provides for me is always wrong. Maybe I’m doin it rong.

I expect location services to stay hot over the next year, but they will always run into adoption problems. Location is an area where enterprises can do better.

Why? Because there’s trust behind the firewall.

A few months ago, we added location to Connect (it’s not working after the latest redesign), and I’m still hoping to find the golden use cases that will prove my theory.

Anyway, stay tuned for more on geo. I’m determined to make it work.

Coincidentally, as I mulled over this post, John pointed me to today’s xkcd strip. Enjoy.

What do you think? Is geo-location too creepy? Do you find it useful?

Sound off in the comments.

Image by our pal Eddie Awad on Flickr used under Creative Commons

Mark your calendars for June 16.

The Oracle OpenWorld Blog announced today that Suggest a Session will be back on that day for this year’s mega-conference (which will be October 11-15, 2009 at Moscone in San Francisco as usual).

If you recall, last year’s Suggest a Session for OpenWorld was a big hit. Confused?

Here’s a recap:

If you have an idea for a session you’d like to attend or present, bounce over to Mix and add it. It helps to give as much detail as possible, including any speaker suggestions and agenda thoughts you have. Use this as the hook to get votes.

The top vote-getters will be added to the conference agenda. I just hope the other sessions won’t judge them as “online winners”.

And yes, I did just quote myself.

Why would you want to suggest a session?

Maybe you missed or didn’t know about the Call for Papers, which ended in April, or, maybe you have a burning topic that you don’t think will make the agenda. Never fear, submit your idea and get out the vote. You can do it.

As an aside, I’m rallying Chet to submit a talk on social media something or other, now that he’s an ambassador of sorts.

Since we’re not involved this year, I’m not sure of the exact details, other than voting will be via Oracle Mix, but watch this space (and the Oracle OpenWorld and Oracle Mix blogs) for the skinny.

Remember the winners? Did you attend their sessions? What did you think?

Can’t get enough OpenWorld coverage? Get your fix in these other locations:

• Facebook group
• Twitter (@oraclemix, @oracleopenworld)
• LinkedIn group
• YouTube channel
• OpenWorld 2009 wiki

I’ll bet you’ll soon see an Oracle OpenWorld page on Facebook, too. There’s also a FriendFeed group if that’s your preference, although I’m not sure it’s “official”. As the conference approaches, someone will undoubtedly create a Flickr group too and publish the hashtag everyone should use. If you want a nostalgia break, here are the Flickr groups from 2005, 2006, 2007, and not one, but two, from 2008, here and here.

Suffice to say, OpenWorld generates a lot of UGC, and I expect this year will be more of the same.

Oh, almost forgot, the Early Bird rate for OpenWorld ends August 14. So get cracking.

When you register, tweet it and add to the this year’s UGC, which is already building.

And no, I’m not buying you all beer

Good timing, since debating which browser is best will undoubtedly start an argument.

Anyway, the release of a developer version of Chrome for the Mac has definitely got me excited for the impending GA of Chrome on my platform of choice. Even better for me, that don’t-download-it-yet release of Chrome has been followed in suspiciously quick succession by a development preview of Firefox 3.5 and the release of a GA version of Safari 4.

The browser wars are back with a vengeance, and I’m stoked because “war” means competition will push all three of these browsers to innovate and create a more awesome ‘tubes experience.

I’ve never liked having only one browsing option, so having two-five browsers installed at any given time means I can take early releases, even if they’re not yet ready for primetime, because I always have a stable release installed somewhere.I’m sure you’ll see tons of detailed comparisons and tests, and there may be many like it, but this one is mine. So, here are my impressions of these recent releases.

Chrome for Mac
Since Chrome debuted back in September 2008, I’ve heard lots of good things from Rich and others. However, since I don’t run Windows, my usage had been sparse, only on a VM. The Mac version has been loudly demanded, apparently by Sergey Brin as well, from the get-go.

I dabbled with the Chromium builds on Ubuntu and Mac, but they were sorely lacking in standard browser functionality like tabs, preferences, proxy settings, etc. Rich tells me that Google open-sourced the code, sans these features, so the developers had to build them from scratch.

Yikes. This makes me worry about what the open source version of Google Wave will include, or not.

Anyway, Chromium is awesome fast, especially with Javascript-heavy pages, but without the standard stuff. Chromium’s a no-fly for me.

The developer build of Chrome has a lot more, and I’ve been using it happily since its release.

It’s insanely fast with Google apps like Reader, Gmail, and Docs, natch. In fact, one reason I jumped to Chrome was to avoid the poor JS performance in Firefox 3.5 beta 4, which routinely used more than 90% CPU and 400 MB of memory when I browsed Reader with a Gmail tab or two open at the same time.

However, there are some missing pieces in the developer release, like Flash. Some people, like John, think this is a feature, but like it or not, Flash is a big part of the modern ‘tubes. Without it, you lose YouTube, Hulu and other video sites.

There are other oddities too, e.g. expanding the post editor in WordPress works backwards, which is kinda funny, and because it’s a developer release, you expect that stuff.

Overall, I’m geeked to get a production build, and I will probably jump to Chrome as my primary Google app browser because of the JS improvements.

Firefox 3.5
I love Firefox. You should know that by now.

The 3.5 betas were solid, and my only lingering issue is how big a resource pig Firefox is. As I mentioned, I jumped from beta 4 to Chrome specifically to avoid the JS issues I saw with Google apps.

Then, they dropped the preview release, and I started seeing cool stuff like how Firefox 3.5 uses HTML 5 to treat a video like a web page. If you have 3.5, I highly recommend checking out the preview video; this is very cool stuff. I also recommend you follow the Upgrade the Web in 35 days series on hacks.mozilla.org. They will be discussing and demoing all the sweet features in Firefox 3.5 up to the GA release. Exciting stuff.

I’m working with 3.5 now, and I have to say this version seems to use less resources than beta 4 did. However, all my JS-heavy apps are open in Chrome.

There are some weird issues that I didn’t see in beta 4, e.g. the WordPress lightbox for managing media opens full-page with no way to get back to the post, and the tags box floats off into infinity. Not a big deal, except these are regressions.

Safari 4
I was using Safari 4 as my compliment to Firefox 3.5 beta 4 due to its speedy JS handling. Since it shares the WebKit guts with Chrome, it runs just as fast. I know they quibble about which is really faster, but honestly, I can’t tell a difference. Both are really fast and faster the Firefox.

I read recently that Safari, at least the beta version, stores tons of data, even when you use private browsing. Apparently, using Top Sites secretly creates XML files each time it refreshes, and the OS X Quick Look feature generates webpage previews that are never deleted and stored in an arcane location.

Beyond the annoying, undocumented disk space pilfering, this feels like Apple spying on you as you browse, and I wonder about the security implications of using Safari 4 for work.

For instance, say you use Safari 4 to browse inside the corporate firewall, and your laptop is stolen or lost. A savvy black hat could quickly get a full picture of sensitive corporate information, based on the sites you visit. Not good at all.

Until they fix this issue, how can anyone use Safari with any level of confidence.

Anyway, those are my impressions. I doubt any single browser will be able to rise above the others for me, but choice is good.

Oh, in case you were wondering about IE8, this video with Dean Cain is the latest I’ve heard about it.

So, what are your thoughts about the browser wars?

Find the comments.

Photo by powerbooktrance on Flickr used under Creative Commons

You’ve probably heard of the 90-9-1 rule of communities, outlined here by Jakob Nielsen.

If not, here’s the summary:

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

News over the past couple weeks underscores this theory. First, we hear from the Harvard Business School that “the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets.” Further, “a typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.”

Not all that surprising. If you use Twitter, think about your usage. Generally, people join, plant the obligatory “checking out this twitter thing” flag and then disappear, frequently forever.TechCrunch then adds metrics from Purewire to the pile. From their research:

• Followers
  • Accounts with 0 followers: 29.4%
  • Accounts with 1 to 9 followers: 50.9%
  • Accounts with 10 or more followers: 19.7%
• Followings
  • Accounts following 0 people: 24.4%
  • Accounts following 1 to 9 people: 43.4%
  • Accounts following 10 or more people: 32.2%
• Tweets
  • Accounts with 0 Tweets: 37.1%
  • Accounts with 1 to 9 Tweets: 41.0%
  • Accounts with more 10 or more Tweets: 21.9%

So, 80% of users follow fewer than ten others, 70% are followed by fewer than ten others, and 78% have tweeted less then ten times.

Makes you wonder what the big deal is with Twitter. Twitter isn’t for everyone, and you may never find it valuable. I’ve been saying that for years.

Then, this NYT article (h/t Slashdot) references data from Technorati citing a 2008 survey that found only 7.4 million of the 133 million blogs they track had been updated in the past 120 days, or put more directly, 95 percent of blogs are essentially abandoned.

All these data run counter to the hype around the New Web. All that talk about user-generated content and crowdsourcing intelligence seems wildly optimistic in the face of the actual numbers.

From my experience blogging and tweeting, I can’t say I’m surprised. Most people don’t have the time to keep a blog running regularly or to build a following on Twitter. Even if you dedicate yourself to these activities, you’re bound to hit patches of boredom and frustration.

As much as New Web tools are compared to cocktail parties, I often wonder if the party is being held in the Grand Canyon, and I’m having one of those dream where I’m talking and then yelling without making any actual sound.

Insert the “these things take time” adage.

It’s true here, with the caveat that time could be infinite.

Seriously though, New Web and the technology supporting it are racing way ahead of human adoption. Most people just aren’t ready to jump out of the lurking crowd and into the 10% participating.

The Harvard Business School study added one interesting gem that alludes to the way to get people to jump.

“On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production.”

They don’t cite any other statistics, which is a bit maddening, but extrapolating, the numbers suggest that social networks have the potential to break through the 90-9-1 barrier. If 70% of the content is created by the remaining 90% of users, why not? This is a much more even distribution.

I think we all know why. Trust.

Whether it’s based in reality or not, the majority of people trust social networks that use the symmetric follow model, i.e. we’re friends or we ain’t. I can’t think of any other reason why participation is higher on “typical” social networks.

This is a good lesson for broadcast-friendly services like Twitter and blogs. If you want engagement and participation, you need trust.

What do you think? Do these numbers jibe with your behavior?

Sound off in the comments.

It’s a panel so, if you don’t want to invest the full 60 minutes, you can skip to Rich’s demo, which happens between 13:24 and 20:59.

He gives a quick demo of Connect and shares some OpenSocial gadgets that he and Anthony have been toying with for possible addition to Connect.

The highlight for me was when light applause broke out after Rich’s section, to which Chris says, “Feel free to clap”. I guess people weren’t clapped out after the Wave keynote.

You’ll notice that Rich is featured on the video summary, and you can see our sticker on his laptop.

Anyway, enjoy. Great job Rich.

Image by LWY on Flickr used under Creative Commons

On Friday, I received a summons to appear for jury duty.

First, let me say that I’m in favor of civic duty, the right to a jury trial, all that.

I don’t think I’m the only one who dreads a summons to jury duty though. This is the first time I’ve been called in Oregon, and they don’t have an automated way to let you know if you’re actually needed or not. In California, at least one county I lived in had a call-in number that would let you know if you were excused or not. This saved me a trip to the courthouse at least once.

Anyway, over the weekend, I was watching Let’s Go to Prison. In one scene, the protagonist bemoans a jury trial as a group of people too dumb to think up an excuse to get out of serving. Funny, but not so much.

This sums up common perception of jury duty very nicely, and assuming it’s mostly true, it influences the ability to get a fair trial by a jury of your peers.

I think the process of serving on a jury needs an overhaul, and I’m probably not alone.

I have some ideas.

I started by thinking about what I dislike most about being called to jury duty. First and foremost, the timing is always bad, mostly because you can’t control when you’re called, or how long you’ll need to serve.

They usually give you a few week’s notice, but no one likes the prospect of having to take off work sit on a jury.Plus, depending on how your employer handles jury duty, you could be out of pocket.

Here’s my idea: use prediction market for scheduling.

For each rolling calendar of say twelve months, call all the people who will be required to serve and provide them with five or so choices for days they can be called. This provides people with the ability to schedule around their personal and work lives.

On the court side, you could use the information to determine when the pool of jurors will be large or small. This could, in turn, influence the scheduling of trials.

Scheduling could also help people get an idea of the committment required of them, e.g. if my service is expected to be a day or two, I can more easily find room for it in my schedule. A week, not so much, but there’s no way of knowing, so everyone tries to get out of it due to the negative prospect of serving on a long, draw-out trial.

This behavior negatively affects the pool of available jurors, which may affect the ability to assemble a jury of peers.

My guess is a lot of people are like me. We’re generally in favor of jury duty (and civic responsiblity), but we’re all busy, making jury service a hassle. If I could fit jury duty into my scheudule, instead of vice versa, I’d probably be more receptive to serving. I’d also more able to serve if I knew when and how much time to block out time for an actual trial.

I also think incentives would be useful, e.g. let people know that serving three or more days exempts them from being called for a year, etc. The prospect of being jury duty free for a longer period would definitely create an incentive for some people to serve on longer trials.

Also, if the court offered incentives to people who agreed to serve during a period that was lean on prospective jurors (e.g. during traditional vaction periods or around holidays), they might be able to fill juries, rather than change the court schedule.

Obviously, there are significant legal issues at work that I’m not considering. Still, I think that modeling jury service as a market could help all parties involved.

What do you think? What would make you more willing to serve on a jury?

Find the comments.

I know one of these conflicted with Rich’s panel session, “OpenSocial in the Enterprise”. Rich was both bummed he had to miss it and worried that after the morning’s rousing keynote, no one would show up for his session.

Although he didn’t bother to blog about his own session, Rich (and others who attended) reported that his session did have a nice turnout, despite the conflict with a Wave session, and that his demo of Connect+OpenSocial went well. I happened to be using Connect during his demo, and a colleague posted pictures of Rich talking and of his demo.

Apparently, Rich was surprised to see pictures of himself presenting on Connect during the actual session. I tried to get a comment in before he was done, but alas, I didn’t move quickly enough.

The recordings of the enterprise sessions are not yet published, but when they are, I’ll embed them here for your viewing pleasure.

Rich has received his Wave accounts, and I took it for a spin today. The irony is that you really need contacts to see the features at work, but many of the attendees haven’t got their accounts yet. I’m trying to think of a pithy tree in the forest analogy for water.

Anyway, I had to call Rich and get him logged into his other account to check out the real-time typing feature, which is pretty sweet. The release is definitely a development one. It didn’t crash on me, but it wasn’t very fast. Rich told me he had several crashes.

Still, there’s enough there to get started.

Should be fun. Stay tuned for more details.

Oh, and if/when you get an account, let us know so we can wave at each other.

In a weird coincidence, I heard Soundgarden’s “My Wave” earlier today and immediately thought of Friend of the ‘Lab Floyd’s penchant for beginning his posts with song lyrics. Not sure why he’s stopped doing that, it’s a great little calling card for his posts.

Anyway, as Rich mentioned, he and I riffed for a while on the phone yesterday about Wave’s potential within the enterprise.

From the beginning of the ‘Lab, on of our goals has been to investigate a simple theory:

Work should revolve around people because people do work.

Seems simple enough. No matter what product or service a business provides, people are involved.

Enterprises may coalesce around objects like transactions, which are easily modeled by software, but fundamentally, every business has people running it. The struggle faced by many businesses involves mixing automated processes with manual work that requires people. As enterprises collect more and more electronically stored information, the constraint becomes people’s ability to find, analyze and process information.

This is a tough nut to crack. Portals, knowledge management and now, social platforms have moved to solve the consolidation and collaboration issues faced by enterprises.

Now, Wave provide a new framework for modeling human and robot (automated) collaboration.

Aside from the shiny objects the Wave demo showed (natural language processing, real-time, playback), the addition of robots to collaborative waves shows interesting potential for combining existing business process with the right people. Rich talked about his ideas for Recruitie and Expensie, and their are literally dozens of these robots that could be built on top of the business processes and workflows that are core to enterprise applications.

Think about your job. It’s pretty likely your work requires process that’s a combination of software and human interaction. What do you do?

Doing something can be boiled down to an action verb, e.g. submit, approve, procure, create, coordinate, build, test, buy, etc.

All those verbs are mapped out in flow charts or task lists somewhere, and frequently, they have been turned into software a.k.a business process automation.

Looking at Wave, you can see how these action verbs become interactive waves, peppering in a combination of people and robots along the way to completion. Even fully automated processes could benefit from waves. After all, success and failure of a process are updates that interest people, e.g. if you’re a DBA, you probably care that your batch processing completes, and you definitely care if it fails.

The federation interests me too. There are loads of processes that involve parties who don’t share networks. Remember extranets? If federation of Wave instances works as demonstrated, you could easily include outside parties like customers and suppliers for collaboration.

Even though the Wave demo showed mostly consumer-facing flows, the enterprise side has a ton more to offer developers than the consumer side. Think about it. The number of disparate tasks people do at work far outnumbers what people do online.

If Google really does open up Wave, the real advances will be in the enterprise. Once someone builds an Amazon robot, what’s left aside from tweaking it?

There are a lot of unknowns here, natch, e.g. security, compatibility, technology constraints, integrations, uptake, interoperability. You know the drill

Still, I’m as excited as Rich to get my grubby little hands on the code to start testing all these ideas.

It’s funny. About three years ago, I had an extended conversation with an SVP here about Google as a viable enterprise player, one that eventually helped land me this job. To this day, people don’t see it. Google’s all about ads, enterprise is a second-class citizen, they aren’t secure, etc. You know the manifest of objections.

Google’s huge. They have the iron to pull off real SaaS, and they’ve quietly built a pretty solid enterprise offering. They understand the enterprise, and frankly, I think they’re happy to be written off by pundits in the enterprise space. Oh, and I include Amazon in the not-really-enterprise-yet category, too.

If you haven’t yet, I recommend you allocate 80 minutes for the Wave demo.

If nothing else, the demo is entertaining. Plus, if you haven’t seen it, you might think like Joel does about the cluttered interface. I have to agree; it’s not very minimalist, which is typically the hallmark of Google’s UI. I assume the web interface could be replaced with another more traditional, email-style one. The platform and protocol matter more to me.

Share your thoughts here, positive and negative. This shiny object isn’t going away anytime soon.

Today, he unveiled it. You can download OraTweet here.

It’s provided free of charge, as-is, and requires Oracle 10g or 11g and APEX 3.1.x or higher. Oracle XE has not been tested, but Noel says it should work. Matt has confirmed that XE does work, with the addition of a script to load the images into the db.

What do you get?

OraTweet provides you with everything you need to start micro-blogging inside the firewall (or anywhere really). The web front-end is built in APEX, and you can plug in IM/SMS integration. The API allows you to build native and RIA clients (think Adobe AIR) as well. It’s all in there, pretty much everything you’d expect, including the ability to post to Twitter.

Noel also built server-side groups into OraTweet. So, you can create an OraTweet group and anyone following the group will see tweets @ that particular group. We have an @AppsLab group that we all follow, so tweets @AppsLab appear in my timeline. No need to tweet @ each of us individually, which would eat a lot of characters.

This type of grouping is useful if you have a team or a project with many members. Groups are lightweight, easy to create, follow and delete, which helps when you have an ad-hoc project or a unit of work to complete as a team.

Client-side grouping can be built using the API, similar to how clients like TweetDeck allow you to group your tweets.

OraTweet also keeps micro-blogging public. There are no privacy settings to protect your updates. This is by design, since OraTweet grew up as a way to communicate outside email and IM, both of which support peer-to-peer privacy. Noel also didn’t build in direct messaging because it seemed like overkill, since we all have inboxes already.

I’m excited for Noel. His little side-project, started about a year ago, has seen heavy viral adoption inside the firewall. People are uncovering new uses for OraTweet every day.

So, head over to oratweet.com, give a test drive, let us know what you think in comments, including your use cases.