Recently, media critic Jay Rosen mocked this post as dumbest newspaper column about Twitter ever. In the column, a game critic blogger at the New Orleans paper attempted to parody Twitter by writing his review of an xbox game in 140 character increments. The reason the reviewer's approach is silly is that the columnist misses the complementary relationship between Twitter and blogging. If you are writing an article, you don't write the article itself on Twitter. You write a normal essay, and then share the link on Twitter with a catchy phrase.

Is Twitter really killing blogging? There is a common meme Twitter is killing blogging, since bloggers are now spending their time and sharing their ideas on Twitter. As Robin Hamman observed last fall in this Headshift post, Twitter (and Facebook) are siphoning off a lot of the energy from personal diary blogging - the proverbial post about what I ate for lunch - or blogging for simple link sharing. Anecdotally, some bloggers observe that they post less frequently because they tweet ideas more often.

While Twitter may be siphoning blog energy from very short posts, Twitter also increases interest in more substantive blog posts and discussion around blog ideas. An increasing amount of blog traffic is driven by status updates from Facebook and Twitter. Through link posting and "retweets" - the social custom of forwarding a link or quote to one's Twitter followers, , the social network is used to share and spread interesting posts and call attention to good bloggers. Essentially, Twitter is the new headline.

Professionals use social messaging to develop ideas. On the public internet, reactions and conversation about blog post ideas are taking place in Twitter, in comments on Facebook status updates, and on FriendFeed, a site that aggregates and enables discussion about links and updates from many social media sites together. A number of online journalists are developing rich processes for developing ideas using these social media. Journalism professor Jay Rosen uses phased process, using Twitter for mindcasting short thoughts and links, Friendfeed for assembling links and ideas together with discussion, and his blog to publish long-form essays based on the ideas. Scientist and science blogger Bora Zivkovic writes about a similar social journalistic workflow, carrying the process from ideas shared in Twitter through composing articles and books. Yahoo social design expert and blogger Christian Crumlish has used the workflow starting with Twitter and extending through writing a book, using a wiki as a tool for book editing and feedback for O'Reilly's Designing Social Interfaces. Using these workflows, these professional journalists and bloggers are developing higher quality ideas and documents through turbo-charged idea sharing and peer review.

Value in the Workplace The relationship between social messaging and blogging can be particularly valuable in the workplace, where social messaging is used to call attention to timely and relevant work-related posts and updates. Sharing blog posts, links and wiki updates using Socialtext Signals enables timely discussion without interrupting people's work day.

Making it easy to share and discuss motivates people to write useful posts, and update information on wiki pages, because they know they know the content will be shared, discussed and used with colleagues - they are not just contributing content into a black hole. Socialtext Signals is designed to facilitate this sort of sharing - when adding new content, writers are prompted to share a summary of the update on Signals. And we're sensitive to business confidentiality - only people who have permission to see the content can see the Signal about the new content.

In summary, social messaging and blogs are highly complementary. The role of Twitter and Socialtext Signals isn't to limit thoughts to what can can be expressed in 140 characters or less, it's to call attention to longer-form writing, and to improve those ideas within the social network. Using the techniques of turbo-charged peer review being developed by professional bloggers and journalists, organizations can use social tools to be smarter and more responsive.

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Josh Porter predicts at his Bokardo blog that Facebook will go asymmetric. Until now, Facebook has had a "symmetrical" model of social network, where in order to establish a relationship, both sides need to have each other as connections. When you send a "friend request", the recipient must friend you back so you can see their profile and activity. By contrast, Twitter has an "asymmetric" network. People can follow you, and you don't need to follow them back for them to see your updates.

Porter calls out two key reasons why Facebook may go asymmetric. Asymmetric networks are a a good fit for anyone with a level of community fame, not just organizations, consumer brands and popular bands. Facebook is making it's "Pages" feature more robust - these are pages that a brand or organization can set up. People can choose to be "fans" of that organization, and the organization does not need a mutual connection. In addition to helping popular organizations and people, asymmetric networks help people manage their attention. If you are even modestly popular, with over 100-200 followers, the number of updates from followers can be deafening. In an asymmetric network, you don't need to pay attention to every update from everyone following you.

There are a couple of other key reasons why asymmetric networks scale better, in addition to helping the popular. In Twitter there are a number of ways where asymmetry in a public network provides good returns to scale, as I noted in a post on my personal blog on premature predictions of peak Twitter

• In Twitter, it is common to "Retweet" an interesting link or quote, to share it with your followers. Retweets disseminate information across social networks
• Twitter searches makes it easy to find information outside of one's personal network
• Visible "mentions" - the feature that shows that shows when someone mentions you even if you're not following them, allow you to hail and engage people in conversation, and have others start conversations with you, even if you're not following them.

These features mean that the more people who join the network, the more interesting information will be amplified through it, and the more potentially interesting people you may discover. The level of context is fairly high - you can see what someone else has been Twittering, and see if they are interesting and relevant to you. And the level of obligation is low (you can follow someone without giving them the burden of accepting or rejecting you). In Facebook, I can see when someone that I don't know has commented on the update of someone I do know, but then I need to "friend" a stranger in order to learn more about them. Facebook's mostly-symmetrical, mostly closed network makes it hard to learn new things and meet new people outside your existing network.

So, the reasons for asymmetry aren't just about supporting fame, but enabling discovery with low social expense.

This is an edited version of a post that first appeared here.

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Who are the effective people you know? They're not just smart and good at what they do. They know how to get things done. In an organization, they know how the system works in ways that aren't written down. They know who really knows what (and that may not be the person with the title). They may not know everything, but they know who knows what. They don't have all the skills and contacts themselves, but they know how to find the key people. In an organization, functional relationships and functional skills are only a part of what makes people successful.

Being successful takes network skills. The org chart is not the network.

This principle is bolstered by classic studies of social networks. Healthy social networks are characterized by "strong ties" in the core of groups, and a set of "weaker ties" to individuals in other groups. The strong ties enable groups to get things done with social cohesion and skill. The weaker ties enable the organization to be responsive to new information and changes to processes. See: weak ties and diversity in social networks and weak ties for social problem solving in enterprise 2.0

Traditional enterprise software is about making the org chart more efficient, by automating the functions and processes within org chart. Sales automation, support automation, marketing automation, finance automation. Access control is a primary concept - the pattern is to restrict information to the smallest number of people of have permission to see the information. These patterns are important and continue to be important. Strong processes are critical for organizations to work effectively and cost-effectively. There are legitimate needs for confidentiality in HR, finance, and other areas.

A good part of the magic of enterprise social software is that it's a network overlay on top of the org chart.

What does this mean?

• it means that you can see people in your org chart group and outside
• it means that you can make connections to people in other groups and see their activity
• it means that you can work collaboratively in org chart groups and cross-functional groups
• it means that you can build "strong ties" with people in your group and "weak ties" with people in other groups

People who design and configure enterprise social software need to be aware of the org chart and the network.

• you want to enable information sharing by the org chart, but not constrain it to the org chart
• you want to enable the creation of groups by the org chart, but not constrain it to the org chart
• you want cross-functional contribution, without confusion and chaos

Successful design and implementation of enterprise social software requires taking into account the benefits of the org chart and the benefits of the network, and design a system that takes the best advantage of both.

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Twitter has taken off on the public web, and there are a variety of vendors who are offering "Twitter for the Enterprise." As with social networking, it's not enough to simply clone Twitter and deploy it for business users. Here are some of the key ways that enterprise microblogging is different. This is part two of a series on what's different about enterprise software. Part 1 is crossposted here and here.

Links to real identities and work activity

With public Twitter, people use nicknames. Many people add a profile link that identifies who they are in the real world. Many do not, and tweet pseudonymously. In a business setting, the signal is tied to the user's real-world identity, derived from their company directory entry and business activities. You can navigate from a signal to a profile, and discover a lot about the person in their work context. A significant part of the value the people get from enterprise social software is finding the smart and plugged-in people in their organization. Microblogging helps discover the interesting people, and the links to rich work-context profiles reveal more about what the person does and what they know.

Sharing links in the intranet

With public twitter, one of the common usage patterns is to share links. Well-informed, insightful people scan the news, and share interesting tidbits with their followers. This valuable pattern on the public net gains power inside an organization. People can share links and commentary about to documents they are working on, for example, a marketing plan or a budget. And they can share private commentary about public links. For example, there can be a company-private discussion about a move by a competitor. Enterprise microblogging allows users to share links to private content, and to share private discussion about public content.

Confidentiality

The main difference between Twitter and enterprise microblogging is confidentiality. You're not sharing information with the big wide world, only with your colleagues. As in personal life, confidentiality frees people to share more openly about nonpublic topics. Of course, people need to be still cognizant about what they share, as they do in meeting rooms or around water coolers. Inside an enterprise, microblogging has a different balance of transparency and privacy than email. With email, your message is visible only to the people you choose to send it to. With enterprise microblogging, the recipient chooses who to follow, and whose messages to see. This provides useful "ambient transparency" in an organization, for example spreading useful knowledge about products in development and customer relationships. Enterprise microblogging is more private than public Twitter, and more transparent than email.

The Art of Enterprise Social Software

As you can see, it's not enough to take an existing piece of social software and run it behind the firewall. Adapting social software to the enterprise requires consideration about how business and social environments are different, and how social software can be used to provide business value.

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When people talk about "enterprise social software", they envision "Facebook for the enterprise" or "Twitter for the enterprise. But creating enterprise social software is a matter of adapting patterns from the public web, not copying identically.

What is "Enterprise Social Networking"

In the public web, social networking software has become embedded in people's lives, as a way to stay in touch and to coordinate. Similar patterns will bolster collegial connections, expertise discovery, and collaboration. However, there are some significant differences between a social network on the web and a network behind the enterprise firewall.

What is Friending?

In a public web social network, the primary gesture is identifying others as "friends". The graph of friends delineates the boundaries in which each individual shares information. Contact information is assumed to be private unless shared with a friend. But in a business social network, the lines of visibility are defined differently. In a plain-vanilla corporate directory, the assumption is that every employee has the right to see contact information for everyone else. You don't need to mark "Dale" in marketing as a friend in order to see his phone number. More than that, what on earth is a "friend"? Will people simply go around "friending" high-ranking executives? Should I need to have to specifically mark my colleagues in the product group as "friends"? What does it mean if someone is not my "friend." The gesture of explicit friending doesn't have much value, and has plenty of potential annoyance and harm. In Socialtext, we use the "following" gesture common to Twitter and Friendfeed, and don't support "friending."

Where does Profile data come from?

In public web social software, people type in their contact information, alma mater, significant others, pets. In an organization, there is often already a repository of basic contact information in the corporate directory. HR and IT departments share responsiblity for keeping that information up to date. Therefore, a business social network needs to draw on corporate systems of record for basic contact information. Admins need to decide what information comes from the corporate directory, and what information users should add themselves.

What are the Activities in an Activity Feed

One of the features that's most compelling about Facebook is the ability for people to see updates on their friends activities. Talia is dating / no longer dating / once again dating Jeremy. Bob just watched xyz movie. Scott is reading xyz book. This activity stream is compelling inside the firewall, for a different set of activities. People will be interested in updates on what their colleagues are working on, what documents they have edited, what key events have happened in enterprise systems. For example, "Shawn closed the support escalation ticket for Major Customer Q." It would be nice, and foster adoption, to have some "small talk" applications that enable people to stay in touch regarding ordinary life. It can be highly valuable for the business to be able to be notified of important work-related updates. In social networks, the context of the activity feed is one's social life. In an enterprise social network, the content is one's work activities in enterprise systems, documents, and processes.

What does an admin do?

In private label social public social networks, administrators do things like configure the available features and the fields in a profile. In business social networks, administrators integrate the social network with existing directories and applications. They play a greater role in defining communities and creating social boundaries. In a consumer social network, the individual assumes that she has control over privacy and disclosure and there is controversy if those assumptions are violated by service providers. In a business social network, the administrator has more control. In some cases, this level of control is good and appropriate. Competing customers shouldn't see each others information, and the activities of the M&A groups should be secret. An appropriate level of business confidentiality, like an appropriate level of personal confidentiality, increases sharing and honesty. In some cases, admins are familiar with applications deployed on a "need to know" basis, and want use these familiar practices to set up applications designed to gain value by increased sharing. There are gray areas that will need to be worked out in software design, effective practice, and cultural evolution. Next in the series: What's different about enterprise Twitter

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Ross Mayfield, Tracy Ruggles and I presented at the Silicon Valley Product Management Association. Ross gave a high level picture of some core social software principles of connected collaboration. Tracy and I talked about how we live those principles every day, using Socialtext tools to do distributed agile product development with Socialtext tools.

Social scientist Valdis Krebs has observed that a healthy social network has a strongly connected core, and a more weakly connected periphery. The densely connected core reflects a well-functioning collaborative process; while the weaker ties to the periphery enable the organization to respond to the the environment and learn.

In the clip, I describe how we use Socialtext's wiki for tight, fast, iterative collaboration with product management, design, development and QA. The transparency and participative contribution fostered by the Socialtext toolset enables a broader network of weaker ties with customers and customer-facing folk in sales, marketing, support and professional services. The broader network of weaker ties helps Socialtext understand our customer's needs, and the short development cycle lets the leadership team flexibly prioritize what's needed for the business. A key principle of agile is adapting your process to the your current processes and needs, and a key principle of Socialtext is a set of tools that let you adapt your processes to be responsive to change.

In a presentation, the most interesting thing is often the questions, which aren't in the video.

• One product manager asked about having "stories" in development be visible to the whole company, and customer feedback be gathered in view of the whole company. Doesn't that cause a problem with "too many cooks"? The answer is leadership and signoff. It's PM's job to turn the gas cloud of input and goals into a set of stories and roadmap, and ultimately the CEO's job to make sure we're going in the right direction.

• One product manager asked a really telling question - how would Socialtext technology help me make the QA people on the team to read the pages in my PM documents? The answer is, that's the wrong question. At Socialtext, QA folk pro-actively read stories, add corner case tests, and sign off, because they co-own the process. We sometimes have passionate disagreements, but not indifference. Tools can help with collaboration, but the culture needs to create it.

The video and slides are here. The distributed agile process that I talk about is a collaborative creation of the whole Socialtext product development team.

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Data sharing and privacy are seen as black and white opposites in conventional wisdom. Everything is locked down, private, non portable. Or everything is open, public, and free-flowing.  But data sharing and privacy are not black and white. In real life, people share and present information based on social context. There are gradations of privacy and information sharing.

At the recent Data Portability Summit, there was some excellent discussion about data sharing, privacy and context.

Truly Private information

There are times when it is right to share data in a way that preserves privacy. Family members use different photo services, and want to share photos with each other but not the rest of the world. A group working on mergers and acquisitions absolutely needs to keep information confidential. In these cases one give permission to family, friends, or business associates based on membership in a group.

Signal to noise, social context

There are many circumstances where information isn't truly private. But people choose to share with smaller groups. Someone doesn't want to bore all of their friends with information about knitting or rock climbing, when that information is relevant only to a few. Information about one's political or religious affiliation isn't a secret, but it may not be the information one chooses to share when meeting new people at a professional conference. In these cases, it would be useful to have the ability to create tags for the relevant groups, and share by tag. The tags can capture the nuances of subgroups: knitting hats vs. knitting sweaters, say.

Progressive disclosure

There are circumstances when people want to start by sharing with a smaller group, and invite more people. Or start by sharing a little bit of information about common interest, and later share more sensitive information.

Stream filter

The signal to noise and progressive disclosure patterns are about the person sharing information. Stream filtering is for the recipient. Sometimes one wants to "people watch" a diverse stream of information. And sometimes one wants to focus on the current work project, or upcoming social events. Stream filtering is used by individuals who want to apply a context to the information they receive.

Persona

People use identifiers -- dress or email address -- to represent more than one persona. The same person wears different clothes, with co-workers, at a customer meeting vs. a barbecue.

Personal vs. organizational control

In organizations, there are some things that an individual may want to control, and some things that admins want to control. A person might want to share soccer pictures with the soccer league. An admin may want to ensure that people aren't sharing the sports illustrated calendar widget.

These ideas emerged from the session, co-moderated by Kevin Marks plus pre- and post-conversations with Joseph Smarr and Thomas Vander Wal

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Over the New Years holiday, the Socialtext hosted service upgraded its search engine, providing even better professional-quality search. The new search engine includes support for:

* stemming - a search for the word "link" also finds "linked" and "linking"
* finding alphanumeric strings, version numbers, part numbers, and symbols
* reliable search for UTF-8 character sets such as Chinese and Japanese.
* faster searching and faster indexing

Existing advanced search features, including title and tag search, continue to work as before.

For people who are interested in the details, we're now using Kinosearch, which is a different and better implementation of the previous search technology that we were using. KinoSearch is a Perl and C search engine similar to Lucene, a mature and respected Java-based open source search engine.

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"It looks much cleaner and less cluttered"

"This will help adoption by new users in my organization."

When we started hearing remarks like these from users trying out our new user interface, we knew we were on the right track.

We wanted to take Socialtext usability to the next level, and it wasn't just about making things pretty. Socialtext's goal is to help people use wikis to turbocharge organizational collaboration. This means helping people get started using wikis; helping novices climb the learning curve to become power users; and helping wiki mentors grow wiki use in their organizations.

Three years of customer feedback had taught us what users wanted at their fingertips, and where they get stuck. The biggest hurdle to overcome is pushing that edit button. People are used to seeing a website as formally published content, not something you dive in and improve. "Edit" needs to be the first thing you see on a page, and the most attractive thing to do.

The motivation to edit, add files, and tag information comes from the desire to share information with colleagues. Wikis have a built-in design pattern that shows flow of the team's work. The "recent changes" view is a shared inbox for a group. Frequent wiki users become "recent changes" addicts. But we found over time that many new wiki users never find the recent changes view. So they miss the social, living nature of a wiki.

The inability to find "recent changes" is a piece of a larger problem -- how to help people find their way around. The heart of a wiki is hypertext links. You're not locked into a fixed hierarchy modeled after physical file cabinets, you can build and evolve your own information architecture. But without a predetermined hierarchy, how to do you find your way around?

To solve these problems, we added a set of tools to help people navigate and organize. These tools gradually accreted around the reading and writing interface, making pages look cluttered and overwhelming to new people, and making the navigation features harder to see.

The answer to both of these problems was to separate the navigation experience from the reading and writing experience. A personal "dashboard" helps orient a new person. "What's new" is easy to see. The shared "bulletin board" (formerly Workspace Navigation) continues to provide a way for team leaders to create signposts for the team. The dashboard also helps power users, by giving them an overview of activity in a busy wiki. And, putting "watch list" next to "what's new" helps newer users figure out what the watch list does.

The dashboard just offers a taste of what's going on in the wiki, and invites the user to dig deeper. When you do dive into the "what's new" or "watch list" view, you can see other ways of browsing information, by tag, file, and other ways. The list view enables users to learn various ways of scanning information in the wiki.

When we started the project, we knew that there were places that users got stuck -- they didn't know to edit a page, they couldn't find recent changes, it was hard to upload a file.

We're not done yet. There are more improvements planned, that will improve the reading and writing experience, that will help people get around and explore; that will help people develop wiki expert practices of wiki gardening and mentorship. I look forward to continuing to serve Socialtext users, to help more people learn wiki skills, make that first edit, and become experts over time.

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