Facebook Fatigue

I am tired.

I am tired of how much Facebook is discussed on the web 2.0 blogs out there. I'll be the first to admit that I am a Facebook addict and I've written several articles referencing it. But web 2.0 is so much more than Facebook.

As of late, it just seems to be everywhere. Perhaps it's the Microsoft investment, or the responses from Google on OpenSocial. Whatever it is, I am tired of it. To be honest, I really am bored by the recent direction Zuckerberg has taken. It just seems everything is tied to advertising and if Facebook is the poster child for web 2.0, I fear we're going to miss out on a lot.

I can't really blame them. Google stock continues to grow and advertising has been very very good to them. Why wouldn't Facebook follow suit? Perhaps I am just in a funk, and I will find Facebook enlightenment again. Although, I am starting to read other similar posts that have the same tone. Nicholas Carr has a good post, "The Social Graft" with his typical tongue-in-cheek style which also seems to question Facebook's direction (or was that arrogance?).

No doubt, there will be more to come. What do you think about Facebook dominance in web 2.0 discussions as of late? Too much? Too little? Don't care? Some questions to ponder as I close off yet another post about Facebook.

You are the Centre of the Universe

A simple concept that sometimes gets lost in all this discussion about mass collaboration and social networking is around perspective. More specifically, the perspective that the individual is the centre of the universe, and everything else revolves around them.




The concept of collaboration should not focus only on the "WE", but celebrate the "ME". In fact omission of this will lead to "group think" and inappropriate consensus building. For those designing social computing applications, the implication is that an attempt to build a "platform" without the ability to tailor the experience to the individual will only be partially successful.


We can start to see this adoption of user centralization blossoming in the Web 2.0 world as discussed by Bill Ives in his recent blog titled "Everyone in Web 2.0 Seems to be doing Profiles". Without this "profile" and understanding, your contributions are limited to your ambitions and efforts alone. Profiling, then starts address the "opportunity" aspects of engagement.


What if Wikipedia, had profiling information (or leveraged profile information from elsewhere), the casual reader may be alerted of an article that fits his profile that is either recently updated which they mind find of interest or they may be asked to help the cause by identifying articles that fit the profile but require more input or validation.


WIKIPEDIA HERE'S AN IDEA.....


I don't know about you, but I don't spend my Friday nights trying to find articles to update in Wikipedia. But I might be motivated to update an article if I was asked to do it and it fit my interests and expertise and was readily visible with no search required.


We should see more and more "profiles" being created into applications, and ultimately people will get frustrated by the numerous profiles they have to maintain, and perhaps that's where Google will jump in and create the ultimate profile and social graph. ;)

Facebook VS Google: The Battle for the Web 3.0?

Earlier this year, we heard some interesting statements from Mark Zuckerberg, founder of FaceBook as he talked about being the "Operating System" for the Internet. The concept was that as more people adopt Facebook, and by opening Facebook to enable third party application development on their platform, they could in theory, host the majority of the Internet experience.

Many had written Mark off already, as evidenced by his presence on Business 2.0's (a CNN magazine) "10 People who don't matter" list in 2006. But.... Perhaps, Mark's turn-down of $1B+ from Yahoo! was a wise move. If his vision holds out, Yahoo could be an "application" on Facebook. Recently, the discussions around Microsoft acquiring a 5% stake in FaceBook for $500M would estimate the total work to be approximately $10B. Some might now be asking.... Does Business 2.0 (a CNN magazine) matter?

But then along came Google...

According to TechCrunch, Google will launch a set of API's on November 5th that will allow developers to leverage Google's social graph data (data about your social network/relationships). Starting with it's social networking application, but potentially harnessing all of it's applications. That level of social intelligence could start to create a very different type of social Internet experience.

Think about that for a minute... Eek... Did you just get the shivers?

I guess we'll see on November 5th whether Google is serious about being an alternative to the Facebook OS. Perhaps this is the foundation to which the battle of for the Web will be played.

Social networking in the Enterprise is not the same as on the Web

BusinessWeek ran a story last week, "Digg's Mob Rules", about the recent challenges faced by Digg. The dilemma is about a very popular Digg article detailing how to illegally copy HD-DVDs. Having been requested by a copyright consortium of heavy hitters, Digg removed the article, only to have the tens of thousands of Digg participants re-post the article or variations of it.

Digg owns the forum but the content is borrowed. This argument could be applied to all social networking forums. If Digg imposes it's "value" system will it risk alienating it's audience? Will it risk the authenticity of mass collaboration? . Clearly the Digg rules around banning pornography, or hate messaging seems to work through the self-governance model because the large majority would agree with the rules. But what happens when the crowd disagrees?

Whatever the answer turns out to be, this topic illustrates a key differentiator between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. And really the point I want to discuss.

In Web 2.0, the social-network IS the business but in Enterprise 2.0, the business is only harnessing the social-network for it's real business.

The implications of this statement is that Governance with a capital "G" has an important place in the enterprise even if web 2.0 doesn't tolerate it. In my opinion, the goals of business are specific and doesn't include providing a completely open platform for democracy relating to all business decisions. It's about running the business.

Definitely there will be arguments that providing a free forum with no governance can provide insight to the deepest parts of the organization. Or that this is an attractor for retaining employees. No doubt these aspects can be harnessed. The line though is to what extent.

Even the whiz kids of the Web 2.0 era have clearly opposed complete democratization of decision making. Apple's Steve Jobs gave clear design instructions for the iPod to not have an ON/OFF switch even though his designers wanted it. Even Google itself was turned down by everybody at first as a viable business requiring Sergey Brin & Larry Page to go it alone. Had they based their decision on the opinions of the masses we may never have seen the likes of Google!

Top-down decision provides agility in pushing breakthrough concepts ahead even when the majority of people "just don't get it". Agility is one of the biggest competitive advantages a company can have.

So what does governance look like? Well that's another blog.

Thoughts?

Why Best Practices can Kill Innovation.

Not too long ago, I was asked to take a look at what SAP was doing and see if I was interested in helping define how our company could leverage their "Next Generation" of ERP. To be honest, the thought of working on SAP was less than thrilling. But, I knew my boss, and I very much respected him so if he asked, then he must have seen something and the minimum I could do was look at it.

My hesitation stemmed from the perception of SAP as simply an ERP. SAP is a whole business built on defining the world's "best practices". The logic went like this... SAP's business is defining the "best ways" to handle functions which are not "core" to other businesses. Since these functions are core to SAP, they are able to spend massive amounts of R&D on these functions and with a customer footprint as large as SAP's, they are able to define best practice and productionize it into their product suite. The clients of SAP therefore benefit from best practices.

What I disliked about this is that, by definition, a best practice is a system/process which has already been done and repeated and proven to drive efficiency across several organizations. It runs counter to innovation. By implementing these best practices you will be as good as anyone else who also implemented these practices.

Now some would argue, that if it's not "core" to your business (aka "context"), then why would you care? Instead of wasting R&D on these, just focus on core competency of your organization and allow others define best practices for everything else. For example how many companies write their own Word Processors? This is true. But as the processes become larger and larger, they encroach on areas that are core to an organization and in the quest for efficiency, we turn a blind eye to opportunities for creating true differentiators. For example, if a company differentiates itself on it's "customer service" and it has implemented a best practice CRM suite, they have successfully become as good as everyone else who has implemented this suite.

By implementing the best of the best, they ignore opportunities to change their processes and truly differentiate the experience with the customer. Instead, they've become dependant on a third party to innovate on their behalf. Where is the line between context and core? And could there be elements in the context which can brought into the core?

So do you throw out everything and start from scratch? No. The key is to use it as a starting point only and allow for innovation from there. In some situations, if it's really core to your business then you may indeed have to start from scratch. Consider Google... Their "core" was in their proprietary advanced search engine algorithm. Google's business was not about servers or massive data warehouses. BUT rather than using "best practices" in data warehousing technology, and purchasing a massive data warehousing environment like IBM, Oracle or Teradata, they took many many many PC's, stripped them down, strung them together and created their own proprietary datawarehousing. NOT core to their business.... OR was it?

So back to SAP... It turns out that those clever folks at SAP have realized this as well. Their proprietary nature has given way to open standards which if their vision pans out, means we should be able to use their best practices as starting points. Through the SAP NetWeaver technology (SOA based ERP), companies will be able to to dis-assemble best practices and build unique and differentiated processes which can lead to a competitive advantage.

The big question though.... Will companies actually drive innovation now and take advantage of best practices as only a starting point? With all the hype SAP is putting behind NetWeaver, and the hype around SOA? I suspect for most big companies the answer is "no". Well at least not immediately. Why? Well, that's another blog for another time but it has something to do with our fascination on efficiency.