I’ve been following the work of W Brian Arthur for over three decades now, starting with his paper on “Samuelson, Population and Intergenerational Transfers” in 1978 or thereabouts, while I was reading Economics at university. During the 1980s, he was responsible for introducing me to the concepts of increasing-returns models, understanding path dependence better, working out the importance of positive-feedback loops and so on. His work on looking at the economy from the perspective of a complex adaptive system was also a key influence on me.

He may have written many books, but the two I’ve read were both brilliant: Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in The Economy (back in 1994) and The Nature of Technology (which came out a couple of years ago). More recently, I made reference to his article in the October 2011 issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, on The Second Economy.

The article is all about this great invisible network of things extremely busy talking to other things so that people like us can get on with our lives. Don’t write it off as yet another “internet of things” article, Professor Arthur deserves real respect. His description of the evolution of the web of interactions between machines is of fundamental importance, particularly once you understand that it’s all about software, particularly when you realise that this is what happens when Wal-Mart grows up.

You can see the sequence, can’t you? There was a world before Wal-Mart, and the machines who lived there were called mainframes. Then came minicomputers and Wal-Mart and some level of distribution. Along came PCs to increase distribution’s reach, and that begat Amazon. And soon we were in the land and ubiquity of mobile phones, heralding the dawn of Facebook. Now, that people are talking about another 10x, the internet of things, who’s going to be the facebook of that generation? What particular Noah Business will they be in? What disruptive vision will they build the infrastructure for?

You can see where you thought I was going. But I’m not going there. That post is for some other day.

Here’s where I am going.

We all appear to be very relaxed about machines talking to machines in their biliions, yet remarkably un-relaxed when it comes to people talking to people. As Doc Searls said in The Cluetrain Manifesto, markets are conversations.

Doc reminded us of the market in the context of the Middle Eastern souk, where relationships come first, then conversations, then transactions.

Let’s look at Facebook in that context.

The Friend Graph is all about relationships.

The Timeline is all about conversations.

Yup, you know where they’re headed. And they should. Relationship before conversation before transaction.

We’ve lived in a transaction-focused world for too long. Transactions are outcomes of relationships and discovered via conversations. That’s why markets are conversations.

I keep quoting Drucker, but who cares? He said people make shoes, not money. Money, like a transaction, is an outcome of something else done well. Not a goal in itself.

The broadcast-model centralised advertising-is-God style of business that dominated the postWar world should have been strangled at birth. But it wasn’t, which is why Messrs Locke, Levine, Weinberger and Searls had to write Cluetrain in the first place. To remind us of what we were losing.

Relationships.

And conversations.

The Facebook Timeline is about persisting conversation in a new way. Making conversation mobile, multimedia, multipartite. Yes, it’s an audit trail and that can make you feel creeped-out. But then your mailbox was an audit trail as well. And your call detail records. And your analog mail.

Over time, it’s become easier to persist the audit trail of conversations. This persistence comes with benefits and with risks.

The risks are to do with our erstwhile concepts of privacy and confidentiality and data protection; the concepts will themselves change, along with the social mores and values they underpin; as the concepts change, as society transforms their meaning and purpose, the law will catch up. Sometime.

But in the meantime there are many benefits to be had as well, as we share more and we understand more about what, when and how we share. As we interact with what we share, individually and in community.

It was only yesterday that I received an email from Pandora suggesting that I “listen to holiday music by Jim Croce”. Why? Probably because I’d tweeted about listening to him, or perhaps even because I’d tweeted my intention to have dinner at Croce’s in San Diego in early February.

One way or the other, they’d identified that I was interested in Jim Croce. They’d managed to identify an email address that went with my twitter handle (assuming their actions were related to my tweeting). But despite all this they hadn’t managed to identify that it’s not easy for me to use Pandora, given they adhere to the barbaric notions of licensing music according to national borders.

In all probability, you’ve been at the receiving end of targeted advertising gone not-quite-right, and sometimes wondered what you’d shown in your profile to get that reaction. That will improve and it will also change. Recommendations by social network are gaining in importance, and intention signalling is becoming more and more common. These developments will alter the advertising landscape in remarkable ways.

Marc Benioff’s Social Enterprise is about all this. It’s about getting the relationships right first, then enabling the conversations, so that the transactions that occur are not ends in themselves, but instead consequences of the relationships and discovered via the conversations.

In a way, when it comes to Professor Arthur’s statements, we may be talking about three economies rather than two: the first, the one we all know, the one that’s lying tattered and broken; the second, the invisible root system between machines; and the third, the now-becoming-more-visible conversations between people.

Markets are conversations. Conversations are social, and take place between people usually around social objects. Social objects come in many shapes and guises.

The Facebook Timeline is about making the discovery of those conversations easier in space, time and context.

I said yes.

And he said:

I’ll put it on your Wall, Dad

Like others in his generation, he uses email, but sparingly and reluctantly. For him, posting something on someone else’s Wall is the natural thing to do; it is the way he shares information and social objects with his friends.

His younger sister doesn’t do e-mail at all. Some months ago, I heard her tell a friend:

He’s lost his phone, so you’ll have to inbox him on Facebook

She doesn’t even use the word “email”, that’s how far removed she is from the mail culture. [Ironically, she uses a BlackBerry nevertheless, as do many of her friends. They're big on BBM.]

Her elder sister, my firstborn, was my third friend on Facebook. [Dave Morin was my first; his wife Brit Morin, then Bohnet, was my second.] She too engages with her friends mainly via Facebook Walls.

As of tonight, I understand the Wall’s coming down, to be replaced by the Timeline.

I think this is a big deal. And to explain why I think that way, I’d like to take you on a trip back through my own Timeline. Down Memory Lane, as they say.

The story begins with Wal-Mart and then continues with Amazon.com before coming to today and Facebook. [It also explains why I'm fascinated by Marc Benioff's vision for the Social Enterprise, something I will touch upon later. It's one of the reasons why I'm so enjoying my time at Salesforce.com].

Each of these companies is what I term a “Noah business”. Like Noah in the Bible, they saw something that others did not see, a great storm coming. And, like Noah’s ark, they built infrastructures to execute on their vision.

Wal-Mart decided that they could put stores in places where others wouldn’t, because they saw the store as part of a network. A town didn’t have to have 100,000 people before they opened a superstore there. They built distributed infrastructure to connect stores up, located distribution hubs to serve networks of stores more efficiently, built up a nervous system with the store at the edge. Competitors had to follow suit or die. K-Mart anyone? If you’re interested in the story, this HBR article by Pankaj Ghemawat in September 1986 is a good place to start.

Over a decade later, Amazon did something similar. They decided they could ship books to places where others wouldn’t, they saw the customer as part of a network. They built the infrastructure to deliver as little as one book to a customer’s home address, and the connected customers, using their own computers, reviewed and recommended Amazon products and services to each other. Amazon invested in making sure they could serve networks of customers more efficiently, and built up a nervous system with the customer at the edge. And again, competitors had to follow suit or die. Borders anyone? If you’re interested in the story, this HBR article by the late CK Prahalad and MS Krishnan is a good place to start.

And now we have Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg’s genius is often quoted as being around the “friend graph”: Facebook saw the relationship as part of a network. They built infrastructure to deliver relationship glue to everyone, and focused heavily on helping people share social objects. They invested in making sure that they could serve networks of relationships more efficiently, and built up a nervous system with the social object at the edge. And yes, again, competitors will have to follow suit. Or die. If you’re interested in the story, reading David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect is probably the best place to start.

[Of course, to do that, you should go to Wal-Mart and buy an Amazon Kindle, then download the e-book,  to complete the circle of my story elegantly].

Relationships thrive around social objects: by sharing experiences around what you have in common, you build the wherewithal to withstand the differences that will come. Jyri Engestrom and Hugh MacLeod are well worth reading in this context, it was through them that I really understood the importance of social objects.

Today, when I look at Timeline, what I see is an efficient engine for sharing, commenting on, “liking”, or otherwise engaging with, social objects. The original Wall was an early attempt to do this, but it was limited in its ability to help us understand the relationship networks in the context of the social objects. Timeline allows us to view the community of interest around an object more vividly, more easily. Time and location data are also easier to comprehend.

One way of looking at the Wal-Mart-Amazon-Facebook sequence is to compare it with the mainframe moving to midrange, PC and mobile. When I first heard Marc Benioff speak about the Social Enterprise, he made this point about how excited he was to be in an industry that’s evolved that way (from mainframe to midrange to PC to mobile); for some time now, he’s been reminding people that when he founded the company (along with Parker Harris) the question they were asking themselves was “why isn’t all enterprise software like amazon?”…. and, not surprisingly, some years later, the question they asked was “why isn’t all enterprise software like facebook?”

To my way of thinking, the Social Enterprise is the natural evolution of all this. Some companies need help in the Wal-Mart phase, connecting up their stores and employees. Some companies need help in the Amazon phase, connecting up their customers. Some companies need help in the Facebook phase, connecting up their relationships and their ability to share.

And some companies need help in connecting their Wal-Marts and their Amazons and their Facebooks into one open ecosystem.

The Facebook Timeline, by making it easier for us to visualise activity around the social objects we share, will help us understand more about us, our interactions, our relationships. Location and time will become more easily discernible. The text and still photo and link that dominated the Wall will evolve into a richer environment with audio and video, persisted when required (even if it was streamed earlier). It will help us understand our sharing habits more precisely: active and passive sharing will evolve further, as will the use of Like and Share. Communities will form around the conversations that the comment streams represent.

And Facebook will continue to evolve. And adapt. And learn. And share that learning with us.

Do I think Facebook has done everything right every time? Of course not.

Do I think there are significant learnings to take place, about privacy, about confidentiality, about the right to be forgotten, about educating people on good practice and prudent usage, about preventing stalking and cyberbullying and and and? Of course.

Do I think that walled gardens are a bad idea, and that open ecosystems are the way to go? Of course.

There are lots of things wrong with facebook. There are lots of things wrong with lots of things. One of the things I like about facebook is that people listen to views and complaints and then proceed to make changes in response. Not many organisations do that as effectively.

So, while I see a lot of comments aired about Timeline, I’m for it. I think it’s part of the evolutionary process we’re all in. And I look forward to learning more….. I guess this post is going to get some serious flaming, praising facebook is not the way to become popular :-)

—Former United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, as quoted in Wikipedia

The first time I was exposed to the idea of things we know we know, things we know we don’t know, and things we don’t know we don’t know, I’d never heard of Donald Rumsfeld. I believe I read it in some papers by Michael Polanyi, and anyway it was in the early 1980s, long before Rumsfeld had his moments of quotation glory.

Maybe it doesn’t matter who said it first, maybe it does. But that’s not the point of this post.

The point of this post is simple. Don’t write things off just because you don’t understand how value is to be derived from them.

Take Photoshop. A tool to touch photographs up, to amend and alter them. Useful but perhaps not seen as world-changing. Apparently most useful to narcissists and to those bent on airbrushing their way to amending history, usually the preserve of politicians.

Take social networks. A tool to connect people and allow them to share social objects and comment on them, to support and augment relationships, to communicate. Apparently most useful to people who want to poke people, throw things at others, run farms. All virtually and for the most past virtuously.

Take cognitive surplus. Apparently a luxury, available only to the out-of-work and the ne’er-do-well, people who have nothing better to do than fight over the treatment of subjects in wikipedia.

Photoshop. Social networks. Cognitive surplus. Three things that still have a number of doubters, that still have a number of people questioning whether these things have any redeeming value, people who believe life would carry on perfectly fine if these things hadn’t been invented.

And then…..

And then you have something truly tragic like the earthquake in Japan.

Tragic for the loss of life and limb. Tragic for the loss of lifestyle and livelihood.

And tragic for the loss of precious memories, the loss of thousands of photographs damaged by earthquake and flood.

Except….

Except suddenly, there is an ability to take these three apparently useless things and bring them together. Project Tohoku Photo Rescue http://hands.org/2011/08/19/project-tohoku-photo-program/

People painstakingly giving of their time and their skill, using photoshopping techniques to restore water-damaged photographs.

People painstakingly giving of their time and their skill to help restore memories.

Memories. Try calling them useless. Try convincing yourself that what they’re doing is a waste of time.

And once you’ve failed to convince yourself, go vote for the project on the link provided. They deserve your vote at the very least, if not your admiration and your support.

This is curation at its best in a social context, the application of human passion to a digital tool-rich environment.

And this is what the social enterprise has in wait for us. When the power of connected people is unleashed into environments we can’t see to solve problems we can’t foresee using tools that are emergent.

Sound too futuristic for you? Remember the William Gibson adage about the future. It’s here, just unevenly distributed.

Google, Amazon and Salesforce were building businesses on the cloud while most companies were still debating service-oriented architectures and WAP.

The social enterprise is here; yet we have this weird situation where companies have Facebook strategies to market their products and services, perhaps even try their hand at actually engaging with customers in social networks, while continuing to ban access to social networks from the workplace.

The social enterprise is a radical departure from the past, and we are only in the early stages of discovering the immense value that is being generated by this phenomenon.

As with most radical departures from the past, there’s a continuum when it comes to adoption. Some early adopters. Some fast followers. Some late adopters. And some defunct companies.

The social enterprise is a true game changer. Which means the number of defunct companies will probably be surprisingly high. Which is why Clayton Christenson’s Innovator’s Dilemma will probably need reprinting. [and which, incidentally, is the reason I'm so happy to have joined Salesforce, formally measured as the world's #1 company when it comes to innovation, by Forbes recently].

As the Tohoku Photo Rescue program shows, human ingenuity knows no bounds. Give people the right tools to work together, they can change the world. And given the choice, people tend to concentrate on things that matter. Which is why the social enterprise is such a powerful proposition.

[note: Part 5 will concentrate on tools, something I'd intended to do in part 4. Patience. Please.]

Connected versus channelled

Some of you may have noticed that, in previous posts,  I appear to make a big thing of wanting to place filters at the point of receipt rather than at the point of dissemination, at the “subscriber” level rather than at the “publisher” level. This is no random thought, it represents something I have believed in ever since I took up blogging: you will find it a recurrent theme in the kernel for this blog. There are a number of reasons for it, and I’m going to try and articulate them as succintly as I dare.

Michael Polanyi, in helping us understand what he meant by “tacit knowledge”, is reputed to have said something along the lines of “there are things we know we know, things we know we don’t know, things we don’t know we know and things we don’t know we don’t know”. That fourth bit, the things we don’t know we don’t know, has always intrigued me. As a result, I used to walk around telling myself: “filter on the way out, not on the way in. Let everything come in, you don’t know what you don’t know.” What I was trying to do was to minimise the building of anchors and frames that would constrain or corrupt what was allowed to enter my head, what Einstein called “common sense: the collection of prejudices collected by age eighteen“.

When I see words like “connected” and “channelled” they conjure up different meanings, heavily laden with my own prejudices, despite all my efforts to avoid such prejudices. “Channelled” suggests a one-way street, a broadcast model, a structure where I am a recipient of a signal with all the choices made by the sender of the signal. “Connected”, on the other hand, has a sense of being two-way, interactive, with some sort of parity or equality between the things that are connected.

There’s also something else, something darker, harder to put my finger on, evoking a deep sense of distrust. And it’s rooted in some modern variant of Say’s Law: Supply creates its own demand. What do I mean? Well, let’s take terrorism laws. Come, perform an experiment with me. Open a separate tab or window in your browser, bring up Google and enter the term “UK terror laws used to snoop”. Just look at what you get. Here’s a sample list of the things that local councils have used terror laws for checking whether:

• nurseries were selling plants unlawfully
• a child lived in a school catchment area
• fishermen were gathering shellfish illegally
• alcohol was being sold to under aged
• benefit claims were fraudulent
• people’s dog’s were fouling
• people were littering
• cows were meandering
• calls were made to 900 number phone lines

It’s a much much longer list, with over 470 councils invoking the laws over 10,000 times in a nine year period. Why do they do this? Because they can.

Coming from a family of journalists, and having lived as an adult through the “Emergency” years in India, and having been on the receiving end of some of the power that such states wield, I’ve felt more strongly about such misuse than most.

With all this in mind, I want to remain connected, not channelled. I want to be able to choose what I can know about, learn about, be told about. I don’t want to block out what I don’t know. I don’t want the technology to have tools for censorship built in, which in effect is what happens when filters are designed into publishers. It is too easy to game the publisher end of the market, far harder to game the subscriber end.

So I try and avoid filtering at source. I have no problem with tags, with providing people the metadata that simplifies filtering at subscriber level. But the mechanisms for tagging at source should be designed in a way that they can’t become choke points used by the unprincipled.

Avoiding echo chambers, groupthink and herd behaviour

When social networks are used to share information upon which decisions may be made, you will always hear someone bring up the echo-chamber risk. After all, if you put a bunch of like-minded people together, you will get repeated assertions of the same thing. Or so the theory goes.

Wrong. Now this is not deep research, but anecdotally the results have been positive enough for me to want to assert this. Social networks bring together people who have a few common interests, rather than people who hold common views about those interests, or who replicate those interests. My twitter followers are not clones of me. Very few of them are into chillies and capsaicin in a big way; very few have the same “retarded hippie” tastes in music I do; very few are as crazy about cooking (and eating) as I am; very few are Indian and 53; very few go to church every Sunday. Some do. But not all.

Social networks create value because people in the networks come together, drawn by what they have in common, but creating value because of what they don’t have in common.

There have been a number of discussions recently about the “dangers” of direct democracy: how could we possibly run anything, manage anything, lead anything,  based on the statistically expressed will of the Great Unwashed?

Surely what will happen is that people will keep on asking for faster horses.

Perhaps.

Maybe.

But who are we to decide that everyone else is wrong?

The tools we have today allow for greater dissemination of information than we’ve ever had before. Attempts to control, suppress or subvert the free passage of information are becoming harder and harder to pull off, there’s a Wikileaks waiting to happen in every command-and-control centralised hierarchical set-up. These tools are becoming ubiquitous, affordable, effective, and the empowerment of the edge continues apace. Snap polls are no longer about random sampling, not when there’s a Facebook around. [Incidentally, don't underestimate the value of having good polling mechanisms in systems like Twitter and Chatter].

Democratisation does not yield dummification. Except perhaps in the eyes of elitist experts.

Signals, not trails: improving our work lives

Some of the comments I’ve received, some of the references I’ve been pointed towards, have a tendency to veer towards a trail-like analogy for lifestreaming and workstreaming. This is possibly due to my use of the pheromone analogy. If that has happened I am sorry, that was not my intention. If anything, my use of the wikipedia article in the first post was an attempt to avoid just that, by showing that the pheromone classification went way beyond the concept of trail.

Since then, on a the-physics-is-different basis, I’ve tried to bring in the time dimension as well. The signals we share as we workstream are separable by time, and each “layer” of time does not in any way corrupt other layers, contiguous or not. And I feel the very existence of these signal histories helps us improve our work lives dramatically.

How?

In four ways.

Firstly, they give us institutional memory as to what happened, what was done. This allows us to break away from blame cultures, move towards an environment of “We have not failed, we have found ten thousand ways that do not work”…. but with a difference. By being able to record the conditions under which something did not work, we learn something about the conditions under which something will work. And we can form the equivalent of seed-banks under the icecaps of organisations, storing the seeds we need for conditions that do not exist today, but could exist at a future date.

Secondly, they give us the ability to trend behaviours and forecast with somewhat more accuracy than has been the case in the past, based on data rather than political connections. It used to be said that history will always be written from the perspective of the hunter until lions learn to speak. Well, lions can speak. Now. Histories are less likely to be corrupt if they are constructed by bringing together squadrons of disparate tweetstreams. This sort of crowdsourcing of information has been happening for some time now; I could not hide my glee when I learnt that 18th century ships’ captain’s logs were being used to conduct climate change research. [And thank you, everyone involved in the project, for making sure the output was not behind a paywall, that it was searchable and retrievable. How wonderful.

Thirdly (and this may be my most controversial point) I think they make our work more interesting. Humour me on this. One of the most depressing things about the Industrial Revolution, assembly-line thinking and division of labour was the way human beings were somewhat dehumanised as a result, becoming narrow specialists good at doing mind-numbingly boring things well. Five or six years ago, I had the pleasure of listening to John Seely Brown and John Hagel at a Supernova conference (thank you Kevin Werbach) talking about motorcycle factories in China and how collaboration took place because people weren't working sequentially. And it got me thinking.

It got me thinking about the new generation, and how they seemed comfortable multi-tasking, how they were being accused of being ADHD as if ADHD was an epidemic [if you have not watched Sir Ken Robinson's talk on changing education paradigms, stop everything you're doing and watch this 11 minute video. Then watch the whole thing, the hour long version, link provided below the summary. Thank you RSA!]

It got me thinking about knowledge workers and the lumpiness of knowledge work, the implications for the generation of cognitive surplus in the enterprise.

And it got me to a point where I saw the possibility that division of labour was a thing of the past. That for the millenial knowledge worker in a social network with workstreaming, switching costs were tending to zero.

More to chew on. I’ll be back. Comment away.

This post is a follow-up to one I wrote a few days ago; based on the twitter and mail feedback, and on the comments I’ve received via blog and facebook, it seemed worthwhile to continue discussions on this train of thought.

Summary of previous post

Let me first summarise where I was trying to go with the previous post:

• It’s normal and natural for human beings to “publish” signals that can be shared
• Signals can be of many types: alerts and alarms, territorial markers, calls for action, pure unadulterated information
• Signals can be shared in small groups or made available to all
• As the tools for sharing improve, and as they become accessible by more and more people, the sharing of signals will grow
• Twitter and Chatter are the leading examples of consumer and enterprise tools for sharing signals
• All this could have significant benefits for us, at home, at work and at play (that’s if we know the difference any more), particularly as we grasp the value of knowledge worker cognitive surplus

The role of technology in all this

At the outset I want to make sure people understand that technology is nothing more than an enabler to all this. People must want to share, to make productive use of their cognitive surplus. It may sound altruistic, it may sound Utopian, all this emphasis on sharing; we all have to get it into our heads that man is a social animal; we all have to get it into our heads that sharing creates value, both at home and at work; short-sighted, ill-thought-out and sometimes downright nefarious approaches to “intellectual property rights” over the last fifty years or so have blinkered people from seeing this fundamental point.

Sharing is a very people-centric concept, part of our culture, part of our values. In a sense these posts are not about Twitter or Chatter, but about the existence of toolsets that make sharing easier, more accessible, more affordable. If we start believing that it’s all about the technology, we will start convincing ourselves that events in Tunisia and Egypt and Libya were about the technology rather than the will of the people. So hey, let’s be careful out there.

When I was young, I was taught that there were three “waves” to technology adoption. In wave 1, there was a substitution effect: people used the new technology to do something they used to do with something else: substituting the horse for the car. In wave 2, there was an “increased use” effect: A horse would take you maybe 40 miles in a day at best, a car could take you 400 miles in that same day. So people could travel further. And in wave 3, we had “embedded use”, where the technology was an intrinsic part of a new product or service, unseen before: smartcards are an example.

The Nineties and the dot.com boom led to a newish taxonomy for markets and products and services, as startups and venture capitalists desperately tried to put labels on things: there was a flowering of “categories” and “category-busters”. Maybe I’ve read too much Kevin Kelly (though I don’t really think that is possible): I would strongly recommend every one of his books, right up to his latest “What Technology Wants”. Over the years it became clear I was beginning get hung up on seeing various aspects of techn0logy strictly from an evolutionary standpoint

This came to a head recently when I was reading Tim Flannery’s Here On Earth, another wonderful book. Go out and buy it now. Stop reading this post. Come back later. You won’t regret it. Anyway, let me tell you about the a-ha moment I had while reading that book.

Technology speeds up evolution

In Here On Earth, Flannery spends some time talking about technology as a means of radically speeding up evolution; the way I interpreted what he was saying, he was comparing the time taken for species to grow armour or fangs or claws with the time taken for humans to make suits of armour and spears.

This resonated a lot with me, because for the past two years I’ve been writing a book about information seen from the perspective of food: information ingredients, preparation of information, nutrients in information, toxic information, how information is processed, the concept of information waste, all around the fulcrum of an information diet. Part of the stimulus for writing that book was gaining a deeper understanding of cooking as an “external stomach”.

Implications for the pheromone concept as applied to Twitter and Chatter

With all this in mind, it is not enough for us to visualise tweets as pheromones, copying nature; we should look further, see what we can do that we could not have done before, extending what nature shows us. I’ve tried to build a small list to help people think this through:

• Pheromones aren’t archivable, indexable, searchable, retrievable
• Pheromones can’t be analysed for historical trends
• Pheromones can’t be mashed
• Segmenting pheromones isn’t easy
• So what we do with digital pheromones should do all this, overcome the constraints of natural pheromones

An aside: Whenever I try and learn something, I start with understanding similarities with other things I know, then I concentrate on the differences. In a way that’s what I’m doing with this post; the previous post concentrated on similarities between tweeting and pheromones, this one will concentrate on differences and why they’re valuable.

Histories, trending and analytics

Unlike pheromones, tweets are digital and can easily be archived, stored, tagged and classified, searched for, retrieved at will. So the signals are more easily accessible to a larger group of people. In this context, we have to think of the signalling aspect of tweets, from an economics viewpoint, as “extreme nonrival goods”….. one person’s use of the signal does not impact the ability of others to use the same signal. Obviously there are constraints to do with scarcities and abundances: an ant can follow a trail to a store of food only to find that the store has been used up; physical things tend to obey laws of scarcity, while digital things tend to obey laws of abundance. [Don't get me started on the abominations taking place in the Digital Economy Act space; that's for another post, another time.]

There are no time series for pheromone tracks, nor an easy way to find out “what’s trending now”. These are very powerful capabilities in the twittersphere, as long as the data is there, accessible and exportable. The implications for what used to be called “knowledge management” are radical and extreme. Visualisation tools become more and more important, in terms of tag clouds and heat maps and radar diagrams and the like.

Understanding the location implications of the signals is also very valuable. Some years ago I was told that every desktop in Google had its latitude and longitude embedded in the desktop ID; this became very valuable for doing analysis of things like prediction markets, when you want to see the impact of physical adjacency on the results.

But that was in another country, and besides the wench is dead. Today, we live in times when workspaces no longer need to have desks, so the concept of the desktop becomes more and more questionable. Location becomes something dynamic, which is why the GPS or equivalent in smartphones and tablets is coming to the fore.

The physics is different

Many years ago, when I was first venturing into virtual worlds, I remember reading an article which really struck me at the time. What it said was that in virtual worlds, “the physics is different”. With no gravity, no heat, no light, no cold, there was no reason you couldn’t fly or starve or walk around naked for that matter.

There’s a bit of the-physics-is-different about tweets. The pheromone concept tends to deal with signals given by a single author, then amplified (or allowed to decay) by other authors either overlaying the signal or avoiding it. Which means in effect that the signals are aggregated in the same physical area and in the same period of time. Tweets don’t face that constraint. As a result, we can daisy-chain tweets by a single person over a period of time, “geographically dispersed” in space or by logical context. Or we can aggregate all tweets sharing some characteristic or the other. Or, for that matter, blocking out all tweets that share specific characteristics.

This ability to tune in or tune out at such a level of granularity is of critical value, particularly when it comes to filtering.

The need for good filtering

If everyone tweeted and everything tweeted, soon all would be noise and no signal. As Clay Shirky said, there is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.  In other words, information overload is not a production problem but one of consumption.

This is important. Too often, whenever there is a sense of overload, people start trying to filter at the production point. In a publish-subscribe environment, this translates to asking the publisher to take action to solve the problem. My instinct goes completely against this. I think we should always allow publishing to carry on unfettered, unhampered, and that all filtering should take place at the edge, at the subscriber level. There’s something very freedom-of-expression and freedom-of-speech about it. But it goes further: the more we try and concentrate on building filters at publisher level, the more we build systems open to bullying and misuse by creating central bottlenecks. Choke points are dangerous in such environments.

It is far better to build filters at subscriber level. Take my twitter feed, @jobsworth. Most of my tweets are about four things: my thoughts about information, often related to blog posts; the food I’m cooking and eating; the music I’m listening to; and my summaries and reports on conferences and workshops and seminars. [I tend not to tweet at sports events because of the spoiler risk].

So while there is a fairly low underlying tweet level, my twitter activity is bursty, lumpy.  At weekends it goes up as I play music at blip.fm/jobsworth; when I’m at conferences it can go up to 50 tweets an hour; and, also usually at weekends, when I’m cooking, the tweet frequency goes up. This lumpiness is uncomfortable for some people, they find that every now and then I dominate their tweetspace.

As a result, over the years, a number of people have asked me whether I can suppress one or the other, e.g. by cutting the link between twitter and facebook, blip.fm and twitter, et cetera, or, more often, asking me to fragment my twitter ID, have one for food and one for music and so on and so forth.

Letting the subscriber do the filtering

This is not a radical idea. The whole point of personalisation is that it takes place at the edge and not at the core. So, to solve the lumpiness problem, we need better subscriber tools. With such tools, you should be able to say, I want to follow @jobsworth’s conference tweets and his food tweets but not his music tweets, while someone else says the precise opposite. And all I will have to do is to ensure that the 21st century equivalent of hashtags is used to segment and categorise and classify my tweets. Implementing filters at publisher level is a broadcast concept, and, furthermore, runs the risk of misuse: every time you build a choke point, someone will come along and try to exert undue influence over that choke point. We shouldn’t have governments and quasi-governments telling publishers and ISPs what to publish and what not to publish, not in lands where words like “free” have any meaning.

Lifestreaming implications for workstreaming

I’ve used tweets as a generic term, not bothering to differentiate between Twitter and Chatter. The same things hold true for both Twitter as well as Chatter, in most cases. But there are a few strategic differences.

Firstly, unlike Twitter, Chatter tends to operate in a space between systems of engagement and systems of record (see my post on this distinction here); in enterprises, identity is subject to strict verification, making this simpler to do. Secondly, a Chatter world is likely to have many inanimate publishers, and the “asymmetric follow” ( a term I first saw used by James Governor of RedMonk) becomes important. [Think about it for a minute. You get spam in your email? Boo-hoo. How much of your email spam is actually formal and internal to your company, rather than as a result of malign external forces?]

The ability to have strong verification of identity in a corporate context has many benefits, since it is then possible to have formal attributes, values and characteristics associated with an individual. This is where “gamification” and “badges” start having real tangible value in the enterprise, with different classes of badges, some personally asserted, some bestowed by a third party, some “earned” as a result of completing an activity or activities successfully.

And on to Part 3

Again, I shall wait for feedback, and if people continue to be interested, I shall take this further. This time I intend to concentrate on the lumpiness of knowledge work; why workstreaming, in combination with a couple of other techniques, can make sensible use of the cognitive surplus; how this will allow enterprises of all sizes to move away from traditional politically charged blame-cultures to genuine value-builders.

And most importantly, I want to discuss why lifestreaming and workstreaming actually make us smarter human beings, in comparison with the dumbing-down that took place during the Industrial Age with its assembly line, division of labour, broadcast mindset, built on economics of scarcity, hierarchical to the extreme. Assembly line. Division of labour. Broadcast mindset.  Scarcity-focused. Hierarchical in nature. Five constructs that have destroyed education, healthcare and government, and will soon destroy all industry. If we let them.

Given the depth and nature of conversations on this subject, I think I’d better let this one run for a while. Many of you have commented in different ways, by writing in, by talking to me, by commenting on this blog, or on Facebook or Twitter, or even by writing blog posts and pointing me towards them. Thank you everyone, I really appreciate it. It helps me learn, it is one of the reasons I write here.

[For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, this is now the third post in an emergent series on Social Objects In The Enterprise. The first two can be found here and here.]

Foundations

Amongst the links, tweets and comments there were some posts and documents worth sharing with all.

For example, Todd Barnard pointed me towards the original post by Jyri Engestrom on Social Objects; I realised that while I referred to him repeatedly, I didn’t actually share the link, an absolute must-read. So thank you Todd. Similarly, while the terms “systems of engagement” and “systems of record” may be quite common now, Geoff Moore wrote extensively about them a month or so ago, in a paper entitled Systems Of Engagement and the Future of Enterprise IT. My thanks to John Mancini of AIIM for alerting me to this.

There are many influences for the rest of this post, key amongst them being Esther Dyson (who’s often mentored me without always knowing she’s doing it), Hugh Macleod (who introduced me to the work of Jyri Engestrom), John Seely Brown (for making me think about how information flows and how organisations really learn), Steven Johnson (for bringing “emergence” into my understanding), Howard Rheingold, Stewart Brand and Amy Jo Kim (for helping me gain some perspective on virtual communities), John Hagel (who, with JSB and with Lang Davison, continues to influence me about flow, non-linearity and patterns) and Clay Shirky (who keeps making sure I think hard about what’s happening in the firm, and in the world at large, by foisting “rules” upon me that give me a fresh and worthwhile insight. I am still working through the implications of cognitive surplus in the enterprise).

The ideas I’ve inherited as a result of spending time with many of the people named above, and by reading what they’ve written, have all tended to be absorbed in a framework whose foundation was laid by The Cluetrain Four: Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Chris Locke and Rick Levine. Tom Malone’s The Future of Work and Ricardo Semler’s Maverick were early influences as well; Sean Park, an erstwhile colleague at Dresdner Kleinwort, helped me enormously as well, particularly with the discussions we’ve had over the years about Carlota Perez’s work.

Why am I sharing all this and making this post sound a bit like an introduction to a book? Because I think people learn by “getting inside other people’s heads”. Because I think that in future, quite a lot of organisational learning will take place this way, as the cost of discovering roots and catalysts and influences, of sharing them and of being able to augment them, reduces sharply.

Some more links

This is almost a bibliography in reverse; what I’m doing here is linking to a few earlier posts of mine you may find useful in making sense of the rest of this post:

• Building society for the 21st century
• About this blog
• Twitter: A submarine in the ocean of the web
• Facebook: the new new telco
• The Maker Generation in the enterprise
• The Facebookisation of the Enterprise
• Of Push and Pull
• Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 5: Knowledge Management
• Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 1
• Why we share: A sideways look

Some of them date back over five years; none of them is essential reading for you to absorb the rest of this post; but for those of you who’re interested, I believe it will help you.

The role of social objects in the enterprise

(a) Assumptions

There are some core assumptions underlying my writing all this, I think it’s worth laying them out. First, that what passes for work in most enterprises is knowledge work. Second, that there is a war for talent when it comes to hiring knowledge workers. Third, that enterprises are changing from being hierarchies of customers and products to networks of relationships and capabilities, that human and social capital are gaining in prominence. Fourth, that the way we work is also changing, from stocks to flows, from the static to the dynamic, from the linear to the non-linear. Fifth, that there’s a new generation in the workplace, with newer still to come, born after the internet, trained in the web, equipped with always-on ubiquitous tools that can read and write text and sound and image and film.

And finally, we’re in a global social, political and economic environment that we’ve never really experienced before, where the pace of change is vast, and where knowing what to do isn’t a simple thing. An environment where the spectrum and continuum of enterprise is undergoing radical change, with some heading towards the hyperglobal low-touch model, some towards the hyperlocal high-touch variant, and where the in-betweeners, the “nationals”, don’t know what to do: they’re stuck in the same place countries and governments are, seeking to figure out their role in the new global structures.

(b) Rationale

Against the backdrop of those assumptions, it is not difficult to put forward an argument about the need to move from process-based thinking to to pattern-based thinking, with greater reliance on immediate information, with more emphasis on data-driven and event-driven activity.

In this context, it’s worth taking a look at this post by Thierry de Baillon on Moving Beyond Work as Usual in A Complex World, along with a post he refers to, Venessa Miemis’s Essential Skills for 21st Century Survival: Part 1: Pattern Recognition. [My thanks to John Hagel for bringing the de Baillon post to my attention, and for reminding me of the Pattern Recognition post by Venessa Miemis].

We have to start thinking about social objects in the enterprise as having two primary purposes: to collect patterns, via the metadata generated around the social object; and to collect pattern recognisers, via the communities built around the social object.

Chris Locke, when I first met him over a decade ago, spent time explaining to me the importance of “organic gardening”, a catchall for the role played by interests other than work in building community amongst the people at work. What he said resonated with me, particularly with what I’d learnt from phenomena like the WELL.

People who congregate electronically around digital social objects form relationships with each other as a result of that congregation; there are birds-of-a-feather-like effects, the bringing together of people with similar interests, though not necessarily similar views on those interests.

These people who are brought together tend to avoid the herd-instinct problem primarily because of this, the tendency to congregate around interests rather than views on the interests. Politics rather than the red-or-blue of party politics. Football rather than the red-or-blue of Manchester or Liverpool. Religion rather than the red-or-blue of Catholic or Protestant. Technology rather than the red-or-blue of Google or Microsoft.

Because they come together with a commonality of interest but a diversity of views, the likelihood of Linus’s Law increases: Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. So when such people collaborate, the quality of collaboration tends to be high.

Then, when you bring in the Clay Shirky concept of “cognitive surplus”, the potential for radical change in the enterprise emerges. People working together to correct the raw data and information bases that underpin the technical infrastructure of the firm, the extended enterprise, the market, the economy.

Social objects will also themselves become repositories of metadata related to relationships and information flows and collaborative activity, increasing the amount of information available about the actors and activities, and thereby reducing the likelihood of friction and tension between collaborators a la Gregory Benford’s Law :  passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.

My next post will be about examples of social objects in the enterprise. In the meantime, please keep the comments coming.

A quick recap of what I said yesterday.

Businesses are morphing from customer-product hierarchies to relationship-capability networks. This is placing intense pressure on enterprise systems bases, which have traditionally kept the Fort Knox-like “systems of record” distinct and separate from the somewhat more promiscuous “systems of engagement”.

Systems of record often dealt with private objects, hard to access, secure, confidential: unpublished trading figures from an accounting system, for example. Systems of engagement, on the other hand, often dealt with public objects, usually accessed via the web: a link to a blog post recommended by someone in your network, for example.

Systems of record were perceived to be secure and confidential in comparison to systems of engagement; however, as extracts from systems of record were usually embedded in documents, spreadsheets and presentations, and then sent as e-mail attachments, the true level of security is questionable. Witness what Bradley Manning did.

Systems of engagement are perceived to be open and “insecure”; yet, learning from the facebook model, it can be argued that the granular nature of the security of access is actually of a far higher order than that afforded to the systems-of-engagement-information-accessed-via-email-attachments.

So that was yesterday, in a tenth of the space. Today I thought I’d spend more time actually thinking about the social objects themselves rather than the systems environment inhabited by them. First, some principles:

• An object becomes social only when it is shared; it is the sharing that makes the object social, not the object per se.
• A social object creates value not for itself but for the community in which it is shared.
• The process by which value is created is by the community interacting with the object, leaving comments, classifications, tags, notes, notations, corrections, observations, links, questions and even answers.
• If a social object falls in a forest and there’s no one to record and comment on its passage, it doesn’t make a sound.
• Social objects get cocooned in metadata, the who-what-when-how-much that describes frequency of access, the population doing the accessing, number of edits, when and how carried out and by whom, relative popularity, links, tags and so on.
• By inspecting the metadata we learn about ourselves and about the organisation(s)

While we’ve spoken about collaboration and teamwork for decades, the truth is that most corporate cultures are still not really about sharing. Which makes the very concept of an enterprise social object had to imagine. This is exacerbated by the continuing existence of blame cultures, which contribute to the fear of transparency and the pushback against sharing. It goes against human nature to help arm those who would attack you.

The tools we’ve had in the past have also militated against sharing; if e-mail, attachments and repositories are all we could come up with, we should all pack up and go home.

One of the benefits of consumerisation is that the enterprise can watch and learn from the actions, behaviours and tools of the consumer prior to implementing equivalent systems in the enterprise.

Which is why we should keep looking at facebook, at twitter, at the iPhone, at iTunes, at YouTube, at Flickr, every time we want to learn about what to do in the enterprise.

If we do that, we will learn more about the nature of social objects in the enterprise than we would any other way.

Next post, I shall look at social object metadata, information flows and a little more closely at the objects themselves, all in an enterprise context.

In the meantime, please keep the comments coming; I hope you find what I write useful in return.

Nearly four years ago, Jyri Engestrom introduced us to the concept of social objects, and Hugh Macleod built on that theme, and what they said really resonated with me. As a result, I’ve been writing about social objects for a while, as you can see here from three years ago here, or more recently here and, only three months ago, here.

During that time, there’d been something gnawing away at me, driven largely by my gaining an increasing understanding of what consumerisation really means and implies. And what’s been gnawing away at me is this: are there social objects in the enterprise? If so is there a difference between the behaviour and characteristics of social objects in the enterprise and in the world at large? And does any of this matter anyway?

It seemed to make sense that the answer to these questions would be found in a better understanding of the systems used to create, publish, enrich, comment on and even exchange the digital social objects, so that was what I did. I engaged as passionately as possible with each wave, played with them for a while, sought to define analogies for them within the enterprise, and then refined them further by publishing my views on this blog and learning from the comments. This was what I did with blogs and wikis to begin with, then with facebook, and then with twitter. More recently, since joining Salesforce, I’ve been able to look more deeply into some of these aspects, particularly as I immersed myself in Chatter.

Systems of Record

The first layer of learning was about the differences between the enterprise world and the consumer world when it came to some of these systems. The thinking goes something like this:

• For centuries firms were viewed as hierarchies of customers and products. Naturally, this view permeated into the way firms accounted for what they did; everything in a firm was recorded as relating to customers or products, under the broad headings of costs, revenues and overheads. More recently this perspective of the firm has changed: as Boston professor N. Venkatraman has been telling us for a decade, firms are now networks of relationships and capabilities. Human and social capital are therefore rising in prominence; the conventions and systems to recognise and value and account for them are, however, somewhat lacking.
• The first “systems” to be computerised, comprising the processes, records and conventions underpinning what people actually did, these systems related to the ledgers and books of record that were being automated. So what we did was to enshrine the centuries-old way of looking at firms as hierarchies of products and customers. The way cost and profit centres were set up, the codes used, the way things were aggregated, “rolled up”, everything we did was redolent of the original thesis: firms were hierarchies of products and customers.
• These first systems, over time, became the backbone of the firm, the “books and records” that were inspectable, auditable, audited and reported. As the years went by, people started calling them enterprise resource management or ERP systems.
• The 1980s and 1990s provided firms with two shocks. The first shock was a real hard one. They discovered they had “customers”. Life did not actually begin and end within the walls of the organisation they worked for and often revered. So firms began to think of customers as something more than account numbers, and tried not to show their irritation when these “customers” actually wanted some help or advice or attention. Retail outlets actually began to think of the space they used for administration, in contrast to the space they reserved for “customers”. Utility service providers such as banks and water companies and transportation providers and telcos began their painful paths towards recognising the very existence of the customer, a path they continue to be on.
• The second shock was not quite as hard, but it was a shock nevertheless. Firms discovered that they had “supply chains”, that vertical integration was no longer guaranteed, that they needed to partner with others, source from others, in order just to survive. [At this stage I shall resist the temptation to speak of the tremendous damage done to industry in general as everything in sight was "re-engineered", an age of some truly appalling waste in the context of misguided and suboptimal reorganisations and outsourcing.]
• So during the decade between 1990 and 2000, the world of ERP had been joined by at least two more TLAs, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM). [While I saw all three terms active in the mid-to-late 1980s, they were slow to come out of the gates from a computing perspective].
• This ERP-SCM-CRM world was just beginning to toodle along as the Web emerged and grew, and as a result a fourth classification emerged, that of e-commerce or e-biz or sometimes just “fulfilment”. And this whole shebang begat a slew of forks and joins and renames as they evolved, and billing, payments, complaints, enquiries and so on all took their place somewhere within that pantheon. Some went the way of CRM, others disappeared into the ERP camp, yet others wormed their way into e-commerce.
• And so the stage was set. These were the transactions of old, the full-grown equivalents of what started off as TP systems, laying out the books and records of the firm in all their glory. The Systems of Record were present, ready and accounted for.

Systems of Engagement

The second layer of learning dealt with the systems I’d become more familiar with over the past decade or so, in my post-Cluetrain state. [Note: I love The Cluetrain Manifesto, I think everyone who enjoys reading this blog should read that book at least once; I'm privileged to call the four authors my friends, and honoured to have been asked to submit a chapter to their 10th anniversary edition, now available in paperback as well.]

Cluetrain taught me many things, but three things stand out as the most important for me: one, that firms make money because their customers like what they stand for and what they do; two, that good firms have real, active relationships with their customers, they are in constant conversation with them, that the conversation is the way that values and needs and wants and aspirations and intentions are discovered and shared; and three, that for some reason firms keep forgetting this and morphing into command-and-control fortresses that “lock in” customers, “target” them and various other forms of corporate waterboarding.

Right now my thinking is somewhere along these lines:

• Systems of engagement make it easier for people to communicate with each other; the original telcos and post offices provided systems of engagement; as we added ways to communicate, these agencies had to change; Microsoft was the leading “system of engagement” provider for most of the last twenty-five years; facebook has now usurped their place.
• Initially, systems of engagement start very open and informal for a given communication medium: post, telegraph, telephone, email, IM, SMS, twitter, video calling. Then, as critical mass forms, many things change, search costs increase and the need for directories emerges. Classification systems enter the fray. Better search tools evolve.
• Each medium of communication comes with its own jargon, its short cuts, its conventions. Some of these fade away as a greater level of formality is afforded, others become a part of the furniture. [A friend and erstwhile colleague, Stu Berwick, used to remind me "It's polite to be silent" when talking about chat. What I've learnt since is that this is true for most new communications techniques. When I began using email, you didn't have to reply to every one. The same was true for chat, for SMS, for twitter. But now....]
• In a digital world, as the “system of engagement” matures, something else happens. The process of communication gets embedded with objects. Attachments to emails: documents, presentations, spreadsheets to begin with, all kinds of files later. Attachments to SMS: just pictures and sounds to begin with, soon video. Attachments to twitter: links to begin with, then photographs and sounds, now all of the above, usually presented as a shortened link.
• The internet changes the way systems of engagement work. All communication becomes at least two-way. Attachments disappear, to be replaced by everyone “looking” at the same object. The ability to comment on, enrich, amend, annotate is a powerful change agent, transforming the value of the embedded object. As a result, the tools change: digital social objects are editable, amendable, commentable, taggable. Archivable, searchable, findable. But in a new form, with a plethora of comments and other actions wrapped around the object.

The emerging role of social objects in the enterprise

We’re only just learning about these two layers, the systems of engagement and the systems of record. But one thing we know already, they’re fundamentally different. Systems of record tend to get built like Fort Knox: robust, imposing, unfriendly, hard to enter, hard to exit carrying anything at all, a place known and loved by very few, yet relied upon by many. Systems of engagement, on the other hand, are diametrically different: entry is available to all and sundry, there’s a level of openness in all interaction, the core behavioural style looks positively promiscuous in comparison to systems of record.

This fundamental difference, open versus closed, appears to permeate throughout what passes for social objects in each layer.

So when you look at “social” objects in the “systems of engagement” layer, at first sight they appear very anti-social indeed. Reports and enquiries generated by the systems of record are made available and accessible using the same rules as the systems of record themselves, Fort Knoxian security.

Appearances are deceptive. Because the way the reports and enquiries manifest themselves in systems of engagement is usually through e-mail and, more accurately, through e-mail attachments. Which are about as secure as …. well you all know the story of Cablegate.

As against this, the social objects that tend to manifest themselves in the systems of engagement are fundamentally social in character. Web urls are the most common, often shortened for convenience. The social objects pointed to are usually public in origin and availability. Most multimedia “attachments” are essentially uploads to public sites rather than mail-like attachments.

The problem space

These are very interesting times. The two layers of systems, the systems of record and the systems of convenience, are coming closer together, tectonic plates sliding gently across each other. No one has a problem with the anti-social objects that remain closed and private and confidential within the confines of the systems of record. No one has a problem with the social objects that remain open and web-based and public within the “unconfines” of the systems of engagement.

The problem is really to do with the export of private objects from the systems of record into the public space of the systems of engagement.

The first time we tried to do this, we exported the private objects either partially or completely into documents, presentations or spreadsheets, then proceeded to make them uncontrollably public by attaching them to e-mail. And look where that got us.

This time around, with tools like Chatter, the binding and orchestration between systems of record and systems of engagement is granular and controlled, down to individual data elements. Access security is much simpler to implement. And there is no confusion between what forms a social object and what doesn’t.

Outlook for social objects in the enterprise

Objects per se aren’t social; it’s the community around the object that makes it social. As long as enterprises are about communities, we will have social objects in the enterprise. As we  continue to morph from product-customer hierarchies to relationship-capability networks, as we continue to bring human and social capital to the fore, as we continue to engage with our customers and supply chain, the enterprise will be more and more about communities.

And communities need social objects. Real social objects, not inadvertently publicised private objects.

More later.

At the same time, unrelated to the original C-word, they’ve managed to obscure and obfuscate a number of other C-words. Not a good thing.

This post is about those other C-words.

Let’s start with “convergence”. Ever since I first saw the 1972 Steven King video, Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing, and absorbed it in the context of an earlier, 1968, Doug Engelbart video, often referred to as The Mother of All Demos, I’ve believed in the convergence of computing and telecommunications. Yet, forty years after those events, and at least 20 years since I was being told convergence is happening, we still live in a world where behaviour suggests otherwise. People still try to analyse and regulate this converged world as if computing and communications were distinct and separate. At least that’s the impression I get when I see misguided, often impractical, attempts to regulate aspects of the internet and the web. When are we going to see convergence take place more holistically?

Then let’s move on to “collaboration”. Ever since I left university and started work, the idea that teamwork and collaboration are important have been drilled into me, even drummed into me. Yet, thirty years later, it is still rare for me to see objectives, processes, systems and incentive schemes that reflect this. Yes I’ve seen team objectives and scorecards, but team behaviours remain singularly singular and attempts at team bonuses and reward structures are usually greeted with sniggers and derision. Ricardo Semler wrote Maverick in 1993, chronicling events that took place in 1981, nearly 30 years ago. Yet collaboration, openness and transparency are largely buzzwords in most enterprises, and a culture of secrecy, behind-the-scenes lobbying, whispering campaigns and “briefings” tend to be the norm. Much of what we’ve seen in the wake of Wikileaks suggests that cultural acceptance of collaboration and sharing is low amongst the powers-that-be. So how long before collaboration stops being a concept and moves towards becoming reality.

Which brings me on to “community”. Something that goes back a tad more than the thirty or forty years I refer to in earlier points. Somewhere along the line, many of the concepts of community: shared ownership, collective empowerment, joint accountability, these have somehow become attached to concepts like communism or at least anti-capitalism, and as a result there are regular outbreaks of pseudo-McCarthy-like behaviour, as if belonging to a community should have you investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. You only have to look at the tirades that were launched against opensource; you only have to witness the behaviours exhibited against sharing-related tools like Napster or BitTorrent; you only have to gape at the porcine beings wearing the lipstick of “intellectual property rights”. At which point did individual rights become so much more important than community rights? What will it take to reverse that process?

Let me move on before I get too much on that particular high horse. Next word. “Consumerisation“. Something that’s been around for at least a decade. But not if we are to look at how our corporations behave. With the advent of the millenial generation, consumerisation is no longer theory. It has happened. Yet we still try and convince ourselves that consumers are different from businesses, that staff are different from partners, that partners are different from customers. These distinctions are just not tenable any more, it’s like saying “IT” and “business” are distinct and separate, that “living” and “breathing” can be treated as isolated things. When will we realise that people are people, that putting labels on people doesn’t change that fact?

I could go on and on, but won’t. The point is, things are changing all the time, and the pace of change is itself accelerating. The edges of many things we held as distinct and separate are blurring: the borders between countries, the lines between market segments, the boundaries of firms, the separation of consumption and production in a world of service, the distinctions between staff member, partner and customer. The devices we use are blurring. The professions we follow are blurring. The definitive differences between political parties are also blurring.

Everything is blurring, and at a rate of knots. This is not a new thing: over fifteen years ago, Kenichi Ohmae referred to aspects of this in The Borderless World, five years later Chris Meyer and Stan Davis kept with the theme in Blur, and more recently, John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison took it yet further in The Power of Pull.

People don’t know what a country is any more. People don’t know what a political party stands for any more. People don’t know where a company starts and where it ends.

There is some confusion out there. Because the rules for so many things are changing.

But some things are not changing, some things are resolutely refusing to change. The way we account for things. The way we try and manage things. The way we report on things. Stuff like that.

Predictable, in a way. Because we cannot solve the problems of new paradigms using the tools of the old. And we haven’t yet built the tools of the new. Because so many of the things that are changing attack the very basis of power of so many people in incumbency.

So they try to hold on. Not by paving over the cowpaths, which would be inefficient and wasteful, but by trying to make cows out of cars.

A very confused state. One full of opportunity, and of pitfalls, as a result.

Which is why we get valuations like we get for Facebook. The truth is, no one knows what the real valuation of Facebook, or of any post-Web firm for that matter, should really be.

At times like these, there’s a tendency to go back to first principles. Where the behaviour of markets are based on momentum, confidence, fear and greed.

Exciting times.

Much of the debate is about the valuation, with talk of Bubble 2.0 (and even 3.0, I lose count nowadays).
The valuation doesn’t surprise me, however dark the art of valuation may have become. Why? Because Facebook is the new new telco.

What do I mean? Let’s start with the original telco, which comprised of the following components:

• A population of subscribers, aggregated into a directory, with relevant personal contact information (addresses, telephone numbers)
• Reduced search costs within those directories as a result of classifications and groupings: alphabetical (A-D, E-H and so on) geographical (London, Birmingham and so on) and functional (white, yellow and so on)
• Multiple modalities of communication between the subscribers (post, telegraph, telephone)
• A record of changes, published regularly as errata and addenda

Original telcos provided services via fixed devices and spent vast amounts of money on infrastructure. They sought to justify monopoly positions by pointing to the infrastructural expenditure required.

For over a hundred years, all we had was original telcos.

Then, just over two decades ago, came the new telco. The best-known member of this class is Microsoft.  And the new telco extended the componentry:

• Personal contact information now included e-mail and IM addresses
• Directories became online, searchable and downloadable (personal and public address books)
• Modalities of communication now included email and IM
• Changes were now applied continuously to the directories, but were not published.
• And some new components were added: it became possible for subscribers to schedule meetings between each other, and to use general-purpose devices like computers and smartphones to do all this.

New telcos provided services via fixed and mobile devices, delivered principally to corporates, and everyone spent vast amounts of money on infrastructure, much of it on-premise. Personal customers were nibbled at via email and IM, but the thrust of the new telco was at the corporate.

For a few decades now, all we had was original telcos and new telcos.

Then, six years ago, Facebook arrived, the leader in a new class of telco, the new new telco. Again, the componentry was extended:

• Personal contact information became enriched to form profiles, user-editable
• Classifications and groupings of people within directories were enriched as well, user-creatable networks and groups emerged
• Modalities of communication now included, or will soon include synchronous and asynchronous audio and video
• Scheduling of meetings now became more pub-sub in structure, via the use of open and closed events
• Changes weren’t just applied continuously, they were published continuously. This record of changes was called a News Feed.
• All this was done on a user-creatable, user-editable, personalised-access-and-view basis
• And the whole shebang was then carefully bundled and exposed as a platform upon which other people could build services, viral, social, mobile

New new telcos provided multimedia services across multiple types of device using multiple modalities of communication. And they did everything “over the top”. No infrastructure costs. No on-premise software.

And to top it all new new telcos had new new assets, information about relationships and flows. What Facebook call the Friend Graph.

So let me see. Facebook has more customers than most original telcos put together, more customers than most new telcos put together. It offers more modalities of communication with lower transaction costs, higher end-user empowerment, personalisation and customisation. It does not have to invest in communications infrastructure, in customer premises equipment, in devices, in on-premise software.

600 million active users. A “subscriber base” larger than any country bar China or India. Revenues growing from $777m to $1.2bn between 2009 and 2010, with net income up from $200m to $355m.

The new new telco. Now think of the valuations of old telcos and new telcos, then look at the difference in costs, in scalability and globalness, in revenue and profit opportunity.

Let’s put this into context.

I have a lot of time for a Boston professor I’ve known since the nineties, N. Venkatraman, Venkat to his friends. Around a decade ago, across a number of conversations, Venkat convinced me of a critical change that was taking place in business as a whole:

He said that businesses used to be hierarchies of business units whose assets were called customers and products; that they are changing into networks of business units whose assets were called relationships and capabilities.

New new assets. Relationships and capabilities. Social capital. Human capital. Assets we have carefully avoided learning how to value. Assets we have refused to value, however much we speak of the importance of talent and knowledge and collaboration.

That’s where the new new value is.

New new telcos are not just for consumers, there is immense value to be created by and for businesses as well, from the sole trader through to the megalith. And with the continuing growth of consumerisation, the distinction is blurring more and more anyway, there’s a singularity approaching in this context.

Facebook is concentrating on the pure consumer play, and that’s fine. They can afford to experiment with their market and learn from their experiments: the profile, the news feed, Beacon, the privacy settings, there’s been a powerful suck-it-and-see mentality, coupled with an excellent responsiveness and adaptiveness to feedback.

Businesses are social as well. Markets are Conversations. As Doc Searls immortalised in The Cluetrain Manifesto (Disclosure: I count all four authors as my friends, and contributed a chapter to the 10th Anniversary Edition of the book).

So companies need better ways of evolving, enhancing and exposing their capabilities and relationships, making it easier for their customers to do business with them.

The Rolodex was the tool of the trade in the times of the original telco.

The on-premise customer information system was the tool of the trade in the times of the new telco.

What I could see was the potential for Chatter to be CRM on steroids, cloud-based, community-driven, multimedia, both synchronous as well as asynchronous, extending beyond the enterprise and supply chain to the customer.

What’s happening is that the stuff we called CRM is blending subtly with the stuff we called knowledge management, accelerated by the publish-subscribe mechanism of collaboration tools like Chatter, enriched further by the multimedia mobile, social, viral aspects of all this and delivered at speeds and price points made possible by cloud technologies.

All just in time for a generation who cannot remember a time before the web, a time before the mobile phone.
All just in time for a generation for whom “rent” means more than “buy”, for whom “share” means more than “own”.

All just in time for a generation who have rediscovered community.

That’s why the Facebook valuation does not surprise me.
That’s why I jumped at the chance when Marc Benioff asked me to join Salesforce.

New new times.

Exciting times.

[Incidentally, some of my posts are now cross-posted into The Cloud Blog, where I write alongside my colleagues at Salesforce. Here's a link to the first post I wrote there.]