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October 27, 2009

Tweeting at a conference, not rude, just ineffective?

Learn one thing about Twitter: it is a unique medium of 140 character
or less communications. It's like the haiku of the real-time Web. If
what you have to say is often longer than those 140 characters, maybe
you're using the wrong medium.

Dig this. When you're at a large conference with (say) 20 people live
tweeting every interesting sentence from every speaker, are you
thinking about your audience? I seriously hope not, because you're
often delivering them a bundle of jumbled thoughts. And when you start
retweeting each other, and then people not at the conference start
retweeting *that* everything stops being real-time and becomes
wrong-time. We don't yet have filters and interfaces that can make
sense of this stuff.

Dig this too. There are alternatives. While celebrations of YouTube
and Twitter happen at dedicated events, you're overlooking less-used
social technologies with great features, like Viddler and Posterous.
Look at my last few Posterous posts: they were from a conference I
attended. But instead of burying my nose in my BlackBerry for two
days, I listened and took notes, and when I saw something worthy of
250 or so words, I wrote a short post for Posterous and pushed the
info to Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Xanga, Plurk, and more. What's up.

Experiment with Web 2.0 technologies. Think about your audience. Do
what's valuable for your community. Engage.

via markdrapeau.posterous.com

This was worth quoting in full. Mark Drapeau raises some good points. There is no doubt social media is changing how with interact at conferences and other events. But now that we've had a bit of time to experiment with Twitter, which was fine, perhaps it is time to step back and look at what actually works best?

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Filed under  //   conferences   social media   technology adoption   twitter  

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October 3, 2009

Mashing up in context content into Websites with SideWiki and Twitter

Its been quite interesting reading the mixed reactions to Google's SideWiki. There appears to be a great deal of misunderstanding about how SideWiki actually works, because it doesn't actually deface pages... rather it simply allows comments stored by SideWiki about a particular page to be shown in context with that page. One of the things that immediately caught my interest with SideWiki is the API.

There are already a couple of 3rd party plugins that tap into that API:
Kutano is interesting in its own right, as it allows users to view tweets related to a particular page and they simply incorporated SideWiki into their browser plugin. If you don't like the idea of SideWiki, then you won't like the idea of Kutano as it has been effectively doing the same thing - just using Twitter as the mechanism for submitting 'comments'. BTW Kutano is by no means the only plugin that allows Tweets to be added and shown in the context of a Web page - e.g. AddATweet (and there are probably plenty more).

SideWinder's bookmarklet is helpful if you use a browser not supported by Google's Toolbar or one of the other 3rd party plugins.

The screenshots show the Kutano, SideWiki and bookmarklet view of the same page.

     
Click here to download:
Mashing_up_in_context_content_.zip (331 KB)

Like it or not, what SideWiki, other in context microblogging tools, and even bookmarking sites represent isn't some kind of abuse, its just where the real time Web is heading.

And wouldn't this kind of functionality be great on an intranet? It would be one way of upgading legacy apps with some social capabilities?

Hat tip to RWW.

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Filed under  //   comments   Google   Kutano   real time Web   SideWiki   Twitter   Web 2.0  

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September 12, 2009

Going where the users are? Email + Microblogging

via techhit.com

Hmm. I'm not entirely convinced about this, however there is an argument that if you want to ease the introduction of new information work practices into people's work routines then you need to go where the users are. I was a big fan of Xobni when I was last using Outlook regularly. However Twitter and LinkedIn are very different paradigms to integrate into Outlook - Xobni augments what you are already doing in Outlook with additional information, but tools like Twinbox (the example above) is introducing a brand new information stream in parallel to email.

I also wonder if integration with an enterprise microblogging tool might actually be the better use case for this kind of integration? For example, Socialcast is an enterprise microblogging platform and they have talked about providing plugins for Outlook and Lotus Notes (I'm not sure if they actually came to fruition).

On the other hand, Socialtext's Signals takes a non-email activity stream approach. Their desktop applications (a cross platform RIA) combines microblogging with notifications about wiki page edits, blog posts, comments, profile changes.

What do you think? Is an email client the right place for enterprise users to learn about microblogging or are we just reinforcing the email interface. Or perhaps we should just give people as much choice as possible?

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Filed under  //   email   enterprise 2.0   information management   messaging   microblogging   outlook   socialcast   socialtext   technology adoption   twitter  

Comments [4]



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