Perhaps these have been the same people who’ve declared Google+ a failure over and over again. Even the fastest growing social network is not enough in a world that has Facebook. And even if there would be tens of millions of registered users for the service already after a few months, at least they weren’t using this “ghost town” of a network (see the discussion around #aavekaupunki in Finnish). Yeah, it can only be a failed attempt from the Mountain View engineers to build a Facebook clone, since that is the gold standard of social networking that every other contender must be evaluated against.

To all those people surprised about the launch of Google “Search Plus Your World” with integration to Google+ profiles, circles and posts, I’d like to present the following question: did you think for a moment that Google was not going to leverage it’s core competence (search) in the social network it was building? Vice versa, was it not blatantly obvious right from the start that the company would utilize this new social data source it has unlimited access to (G+) for improving the relevancy of search results?

Ok, enough of the “my network is better than your network” wars. For the end user there’s precious little significance in which US based company is luring in the biggest number of status updates per second. What we ultimately want is for the creation, sharing, discovery and consumption of relevant information to be as convenient as possible, so the question is: what can I get out of a social search engine that wasn’t possible before?

Yesterday I came across a brilliant presentation from Jeff Atwood (behind Coding Horror and more notably Stack Overflow), which contained this quote from Clay Shirky:

Work is when your boss tells you to do something, you do it, and you get paid.

work is motivated by inherent interest and generally unpaid.

It was late Sunday evening and I had happily spent a good number of hours reading work related articles on my free time and loving every moment of it. The though of the looming Monday morning and returning back to mundane Work tasks made the concept strike a nerve and I decided I wanted to post it on a social network, as people generally do nowadays in such situations. I went googling for the source of the quote, to get a link that would be shareable (yes, it is a word). This is what I received:

It turns out I had actually already posted an article referencing the very same speech 11 months ago, only I didn’t have any recollection of it. It was on my Posterous “blog” that I’ve used mainly as a public noteboard of interesting articles I come across regarding knowledge work. Due to the ultimate simplicity of Posterous, it’s very quick to compose an email with quotes, images & links, send it to the Posterous email address  and see it turn into a blog post, which is why you don’t need to spend much time thinking about the topic itself. A noteboard is only useful if you know to go and read its content, which is what I didn’t know. But Google did.

Ok, the result in the example is most likely taken from a tweet rather than a Google+ post, since that didn’t exist last February yet. The point is not really about Google+ itself, rather it serves as yet another reminder that the web knows you better than you do. Instead of being frightened of the privacy implications, what I would recommend everyone to do is to make the most of it – exploit the intelligence of the machine that we’ve all helped to build.

Related artists. Who to follow. Recommendations based on your browsing history. The Web has to be working for us, not the other way around.

— Jukka Niiranen (@jukkan) January 5, 2012

For example: in a world of personalized search, is there any longer a need for social bookmarking á la Delicious? Why should I bother saving links into my own list on a separate point solution like Delicious, when I might as well share the link to my followers/circles/friends/whatever and trust that the system will bring it up if I ever need it again? Trying to come up with descriptive tags for links all on my own seems like a futile attempt compared to the power that the networked online society can have on building relevancy for the shared content.

To continue on the thoughts expressed by Shirky, sharing is work, but not Work, as it feels inherently like the right thing to do and requires effort, yet you don’t get paid for it. “Big Work drives the economy, little work drives the Internet.” It took around 100 million hours to create all of the content on Wikipedia, but thanks to the evolutionary nature of social technology and the network effect, the next Wikipedia will most likely take only a fraction of those hours. It has to, and we really shouldn’t settle for anything less. It is therefore imperative that the tools being built by companies operating in the realm of IT, be it the Google Goliaths or the start-up Davids, strive to make the most of what the collective little work of the online population has already built, because that is the best way to foster motivation of workers (with a lowercase w). This motivation, in turn, will be more and more in demand as the human civilization is facing problems that its capitalist system is not very good at solving. The little work can go a long way.

As what comes to the search engine business that built Google / Google built (any which way you want to look at it), we’ve already seen signs that indexed search has peaked. The way we used to search for content is on the decline, and if Google would be sticking to what they do best now, fighting against the next big thing, they would be standing on the deck of a sinking ship. You could well blame them of being hopelessly late to the game of social, but based on what I’ve seen from them during the past year, I wouldn’t count them out just yet. The reason is, I believe we don’t yet have nearly enough tools for social technology to make us as smart as we could be.

Right now we have the infrastructure  in place for networking with people and sharing content. That’s a good start and it’s been a big enough revolution on its own to fuel the stellar rise of services like Facebook and Twitter. However, if we’d just continue on the same path of ever increasing tweet counts, would we end up becoming increasingly smart or rather end up in the lunatic asylum? If we look at the content search functionality offered by Twitter (basic keyword search on less than a week’s worth of data) or Facebook (absolutely none!), it’s easy to see that the game has only just begun on developing content relevance and discovery algorithms that deliver real added value over simply consuming an ever growing feed of data. While social media has brought us new strategies to overcome information overload through relying on recommendations and content sharing  by people we know/trust, this won’t scale indefinitely, and it is in fact quickly contributing to the very problem it once promised to solve.

In order for us to keep getting smarter through social networks, the filters available to us will need to get smarter first. The question is: can Google produce the missing UI needed for harnessing the true power of social networks? And if not Google, then who?

Yes – in the sense that we will finally see the chord being cut on iOS device activation and operating system updates. Over The Air (OTA) updates will finally arrive, three years after the feature was available on Android. Well, at least they’re on the right track, making the 5th generation iPhone purchase experience more in line with the overall UX that Apple traditionally excels in. Wi-Fi sync of iTunes library content to iOS devices will certainly be helpful for people who are actually managing content with iTunes.

No – because the biggest announcement from WWDC was aimed at solving the wrong problem: synchronizing files between devices. I’m of course talking about the seemingly wonderful service that iCloud will provide to millions of Apple customers living in the content management hell brought to them by previous Apple innovations. When acquiring digital content from iTunes store is made so convenient, you can easily end up in possession of a lot more digital content than you had before. Now, to make sure you continue to purchase content from iTunes store, it’s only natural that the store keeper will feel the need to make managing this content easier. Enter Apple iCloud, priced at $25 per year, which promises to remove the burden of moving files back and forth between different storage locations. iCloud will match your iTunes library content and make it downloadable (notice: not streamable) to any device registered to your Apple ID. Hurrah, problem solved! Or is it?

Here’s the thing: we don’t need a better way to synchronize music files, we need a way to remove files altogether. I don’t want to own bits if I don’t have to. Ever since I signed up for a Spotify subscription, the real need for me to manage digital music files locally on my gadgets has in practice already been removed. That’s because Spotify is not a store like iTunes, it’s a service. Anyone familiar with the cloud computing concept will probably know the term SaaS, software as a service. What this means is that you no longer purchase a copy of the installation media or bits for a software application, rather you subscribe to a service that delivers the application to you (most often through a browser). Subscription based services for music delivery, such as Rdio and Spotify, have already brought the SaaS revolution into our PC’s, smartphones and iPods. Why purchase music as bits if you can get them as a service?

In the business IT lingo people are talking about public cloud, hybrid cloud and private cloud. Basically the first one is a “real” cloud service like Gmail or a private business application built on a publicly available cloud platform like Windows Azure. The last one is used when trying to operate with many of the principles of the cloud, while still remaining in possession of your own servers and application instances, perhaps located in an external data center. Hybrid… well, let’s not go there. A label that some people have cast on the private cloud option is “false cloud“. I think this also fits with what Apple has introduced to the world as their version of the cloud. It initially looks like a cloud service for music (“all your music available anywhere!”), but in reality it’s a cloud service for files (“…just the music you already had somewhere”). Blah.

iCloud will no doubt become a success. Knowing Apple’s track record in delivering excellent usability, it may well turn out to be a killer product for cloud adoption among consumers. I can imagine it becoming “Dropbox^2″ in its ability to solve day-to-day file synchronization problems, which is surely great news. What the iCloud will not do is make the iTunes paradigm relevant again, for those customers who’ve already left their bits behind. In my eyes, Apple has become a victim of its past success in selling both the hardware for media consumption as well as the content. Evolution over revolution is a safe bet to make when you’re riding on the top of the evolution wave. iCloud could have been Apple’s revolution, but now it looks like the revolution may take place elsewhere.

Nowhere else is mobility more central than when travelling abroad, away from your familiar services and surroundings. It would therefore be perfectly natural to assume that the traveller segment would be the one that mobile service providers would be actively looking to cater for. Yet the reality is completely the opposite: mobile operators are making sure that no sane person uses mobile data while travelling abroad, thanks to the ridiculous prices of data roaming.

Going on the road? Let’s burn the books & switch off

Last week I was travelling in Macedonia, a potential candidate for becoming an EU member. An exotic location to some extent, as I hadn’t been to any of the former Yugoslavia countries, but at the same time not too distant from the average central European culture. Skopje, their capital city, is not exactly on the top 20 list of cities for tourists to visit, so there wasn’t any paper guidebooks available to take with me. I did download the Skopje In Your Pocket guidebook into my Kindle, but the painful rendering of PDF magazines on the small black & white ePaper screen meant I hardly opened the document. Instead I decided to try and rely on content that I could use on my HTC Desire HD.

The price for mobile data use in Macedonia was according to my Finnish operator’s (DNA) pages a bit over 10 euros per megabyte. Ok, so the first thing to do before boarding the plane was to disable all APN information to make sure that zero bytes would be transferred over the mobile operators’ networks. Hey, what else is new?

A key criteria in selecting our hotel in Skopje had been the availability and visitor ratings on free WiFi connectivity. Even if there was to be no hotspots discovered while out on the town, at least the hotel would serve as a home base for downloading information on sights to see and pubs to visit. In preparation for the times without a network, I had installed the Maps(-) app from Androind Market and downloaded offline Google maps data of the city.

Fortunately it was not too difficult to discover open, free WiFi networks while walking in the center of Skopje. Cafes and shopping centers tended to frequently have a network of decent quality. Outdoor signs of a free T-Mobile hotspot being available to the customers made selecting the restaurants quite a bit easier.

(Non-)Economics of data roaming

During the 3 day visit I ranked up in total 300 MB of data transfer over WiFi. While I did frequently perform Google searches, check into Foursquare (and of course Untappd while going round the pubs!), browse FB/Twitter streams etc., none of the use was particularly data intensive. No video or audio transmitter, just your everyday transactions with applications that have become a part of my daily routine.

How much would have all this mobile data connectivity cost if I had stayed APN enabled and used the 3G network provided by the local telecom operator? Over 3000 euros. Wow. That’s ten times more than what I paid for the flights and hotel altogether. I could have travelled around the world with that money.

How much did I end up paying for the mobile data connectivity while travelling in Macedonia? Zero euros. That’s right, the local economy received more of my money through bubblegum purchases than through offering me telecommunications services.

How much value did I receive from having a mobile device with Internet connection available to me during my travels? Quite a lot, and I expect that value only to increase in the future when the apps and databases available become even more useful. Would I have been willing to pay something for the convenience of not having to hunt for hotspots and just rely on an always-on 3G data connection. Of course I would have!

So, what was your business again?

Call it what you want and reason it how ever which way you like, but in my eyes the continuing state of data roaming pricing in Europe (and of course globally in most places) deserves to be labeled as pure insanity. Insanity particularly therefore that the operators are continuing to do the same thing (preserving an ancient “per MB” pricing model) and expect different results (more revenue from mobile application users).

When debating over the right price point for mobile data plans, the operators all around the world are nowadays trying to claim they can’t offer “all you can eat” pricing anymore due to the increase of smartphones and the lack of 3G/4G network capacity. While there may be a hint of truth in that, it’s important to remember this doesn’t in any way justify the exorbitant pricing of data roaming. Foreign users are at any given time and location going to represent only a fraction of the total user volume for an operator. All the investments needed are in the billing systems and agreements between operators.

The real leasson from this sad situation is that in order to make money through service innovations you don’t necessarily need any new technology. The technology for providing effortless mobile Internet connectivity to tourists has already been built and paid for. Nothing is missing, except offering the service in the form of a feasible product. At the same time, the Internet (as a conscious entity, in the vain of Skynet, Google et al) is working its way around this lack of operator products by making it increasingly easy for local entrepreneurs to punch holes into this firewall by setting up open WiFi hotspots. These holes provide connections to the backbone network of mostly the very same operators and allow the tasty app juice of our post-PC era cloud applications to flow into the mobile devices of vigilant vistors.

Everywhere you go, the cloud follows

Ok, so you may not always have high quality connection to the web, meaning you can’t rely on it to be always there to answer your questions, but the same goes for 3G connections as well. GPRS is in many ways equal to “no connection”, at least when you consume on average 100 MB of data per day. Once you do have a working connection, the big clouds are all there for you to reach into, with their unlimited and ever evolving means of communication and information discovery.

It’s good to note that not even the ancient technology of SMS was reliable enough to be transmitted between Finland and Macedonia, as many messages were delayed or remained missing. At the same time, whenever I had access to Gmail or Facebook I was able to utilize their full feature set as if I had been sitting at home, typing on my laptop. In short, there wasn’t anything that I wanted to do but was unable to do when equipped with my Android smartphone instead of lugging around a mini-PC.

Feel free to disagree, but to me that is a sure sign of the coming post-PC era where both the traditional telecom operator services such as phone calls & text messages as well as traditional keyboard + mouse + monitor + CD-ROM computing paradigms are in danger of slowly becoming extinct. I won’t be living without a “PC” or leave home without a “phone”, but I’ll care less and less about services built specifically around those old conceptual silos. I will just replace them with “everything”, which means anyone can provide services for them.

Waisting more of our time while connected

As a final note, during the trip I was once again reminded of the fact that Google couldn’t make social applications if its life depended on it (and pretty soon it does). Mr. Scobleizer wrote a great post on the topic of how the best applications are the ones that enable us to waste our time more efficiently. That’s exactly the kinds of mobile apps that you need while travelling in a foreign country.

Google Places turned out to be in practice almost useless, while Foursquare actually provided quite satisfactory results most of the time. Particularly the new Explore tab in their mobile application provided a convenient stream of relevant information to a visitor in a foreign country. If only the Macedonian people would have submitted their comments in English, since the local cyrillic alphabet makes it impossible to even make guesses about what the text might mean…

Anyway, I though I’d highlight a few examples of a more recent trend that’s becoming visible in the world of social web. It’s always been about telling the apps what you are doing, thinking or liking, where about and how. Now, after feeding the networks with data about yourself, they are gradually becoming smart enough to tell you what you are like.

Where Do You Go?

Foursquare is not new, but here ‘s a very quick recap: you pull out your mobile phone, launch the app and see what venues are close to you (based on mobile network location data, or GPS for the hifi geeks). You click to check-in to the place you are currently. The end.

Ok, so of course you can also view where your friends have been checking in to. That is, if any of them would be similar gadget geeks like you. I’m pretty sure eventually the location information will become a natural part of the social fabric (waiting for FB Places to arrive here in Finland), but as of now, in reality it isn’t for everyone yet.

What can you get from the location data then? For example, this heatmap of where I’ve been checking in around the city of Helsinki. Sure, I don’t spend all my time with a finger on the check-in button, nor do the public venues available on the service give an accurate view of where I spend my time. Still, it would be foolish to say that the heatmap doesn’t give me insight on the locations that are a part of my ‘graph in the geographic sense. With enough data and the right presentation method, casual transactions can start to accumulate a whole new value added.

Take a trip down Memolane

Pretty much every social app has a timeline view of some kind, similar to the FB wall. It’s sort of a divider between generations of applications, as many of the oldskool software and business applicatios are perfectly happy with asking you the user to punch in more and more data without trying to present it back to the users in any aggregated “what’s been happening lately” view. Another common dilemma is that it’s hard if not impossible to automatically combine data from different applications. That’s how bad life used to be only a few years ago.

Integration in the cloud is as easy as OAuth (open authorization), so in a matter of a few clicks you can be connecting the various dots fragmented around your networks into a single stream of information about yourself. Now all there’s left to do is to put a nice timeline UI on top of the data and you’ve got Memolane. Your tweets, check-ins, FB posts, Last.fm scrobbles and everything else in a chronological order that allows you to travel back in time and reminisce about what you did last summer. Yes, again the web knows what you’ve long since forgotten in your selective human brain.

Get Glue’d to the media around you

Apps on top of apps – that’s the future we’re already living in. Why keep on re-inventing the wheel when you could be focusing on designing the rest of the vehicle instead?

Back when Last.fm launched their audioscrobbler app in 2003 the concept of sharing playlist data right from your WinAmp in real time to a web-based service was very novel. Keep in mind, this was waaaay before social networks made sharing and liking and retweeting something that’s considered an everyday activity. I kept on accumulating information their database on a regular basis, then stopped using them, then returned back to an active user thanks to their integration with Spotify.

The concept of scrobbling remains cool, but in this day & age there are people out there who cannot be satisfied by merely sharing what track they are listening to. Enter GetGlue. What they’ve built is an almost universal system for checking in to things. Books, movies,TV shows, games, gadgets, restaurants etc. By installing an add-on for your browser and browsing one of hundreds of supported sites that GetGlue recognizes as having content items that their database tracks, you’ll see a toolbar at the bottom of the window. The toolbar not only allow you to like/unlike/favorite/saveforlater or share to FB/Twitter, but it also shows who else has been liking the content in question + recommendations of what else you might like, based on the user data similarity.

Sitting home alone on your sofa and watching Dexter doesn’t have to be unsocial time anymore. Reach for your smartphone, launch the GetGlue app and do a check-in. You’ll see who else has checked into the same show, so you can go and spy their profile to see where their remote has taken them next. While at it, why not do a check-in to that bottle of wine you’ve been sipping? Come on, you’ll get badges as a reward as well!

OMG, where’s my privacy?!?

The first reaction from a casual web surfer on all of the new ways in which you can expose yourself to the world will surely be a cry for privacy. Isn’t this the kind of a surveilance society that George Orwell warned us about by writing the 1984? Only it’s worse, since the innocent web surfers have been brainwashed to report back to big brother seemingly on their own free will, just by giving them pictures of digital badges! Someone please stop this insanity!

I’m going to let you in on a little secret that explains why the situation is not quite that grim at all:

The web knows you because we are the web.

Back in the 90′s, the world wide web was born as a network of documents. Today it is a network of people. Small but profound difference. While it is still perfectly possible for anyone to choose to use the web as a big document management system and just passively consume content that is published there by large organizations and media entities, there is an increasing amount of benefits to be gained by being an active participant instead. Once you cross that line, you start to exist in the web. It may be behind a number of aliases and alter egos, or it may be with your real name and identity (probably both). You may exist in different forms and footprints to anonymous surfers, identified users and verified friends or co-workers. Nevertheless, your actions become a small but integrated part of the fabric of web. Just like you’re a tiny little piece of society, still making an impact all the same.

The web knows you’ve clicked. Google knows you’ve searched. Your ISP knows you’ve downloaded, so don’t waste too much energy on worrying about leaving a trail of what you do when using a networked system like the web. A more interesting question to focus on is how much more can you know about yourself with the help of the web and what value could be derived from the data that you and other fellow citizens of the web are capable of feeding into it. As long as the publishing of data is done through a conscious decision and you pay attention to where the line of privacy is set, it’s hardly any more reckless behaviour than using the web in the old document oriented way. Same old channel, just a very different application.

Becoming digital

I bought my first mobile phone in 1997 (see the full timeline here). Prior to this I had absolutely no digital contact data assets whatsoever: just a rolodex, a few paper lists of addresses and the good ol’ memory. Sure, the world was a much smaller place back then, and as a high school  student living in the offline era there wasn’t that many people who you didn’t either meet at school or after school on a weekly basis. It was the villager way of life and I think we were all quite happy with it back then.

Mobile phones brought us the concept of electronic phone books, with SIM cards as the media used for transferring these from one device to another. Email client applications like Eudora and Outlook Express gave us the option to store email addresses as contacts in their own address books. Pretty soon the phones began to connect with your PC through a cable and handy software like Nokia PC Suite (don’t get me started on that one…). This meant you now had the problem of several mismatching address books on your computer, so the whole contact management concept started to become painful not just for corporations but private persons as well.

During the past few years we’ve seen some improvement on the situation, thanks to the wide availability of mobile data connections and push email services in the corporate world. If you keep your personal contacts and business contacts in the same address book, updating the records in MS Outlook and synchronizing data through MS Exchange (replace with your favorite non-Redmond software) has made phone number and email address management almost a non-issue.

What’s the problem?

Well, while we now have fairly decent solutions for address book sync and some established formats to make interoperability across platforms less painful, these are essentially solutions for the wrong problem. You see, not only have the address books become digital but so has life. Here’s my personal evidence of this:

• Everybody and their dog is on Facebook. With hundreds of millions of registered profiles, we’re far beyond the point where you’d need to make guesses about whether social networks will really catch on or not. They came, they saw, they conquered. Sure, you might be on VK or Renren instead of FB. That makes no difference, social networks are now as universal as SMS.
• I have “contacts” who don’t know me, nor do I know them IRL. The may be bloggers or twitterers who I follow regularly, which means they’re relevant people to me on a much higher frequency than old acquaintances in the address book who I may not interact with even once per year.
• A job is no longer for life. Knowing where someone worked 3 years ago, what his title was and how to reach him through land line or snail mail is of decreasing relevance to anyone. I’m more interested in knowing where you’re working today and with whom you’ve worked with, which is what LinkedIn was invented for (7 years ago already).
• The number of phone calls I make is dropping every year. I’ve reached the point where calls are the least preferred method of communication in my mobile “phone”. No matter how much the mobile revolution initially increased the amount of phone calls, it will only decline from here onwards. Meeting in person is effective for establishing shared understanding, exchanging textual information asynchronously is great for managing details, reacting to synchronous voice communication requests (a.k.a. phone calls) is, well… a distraction I like to minimize. The phone call is dead.
• Christmas is pretty much the only reason for me to use postal services nowadays. Be it cards or gifts, I’d prefer to replace them both with bits and services. Similarly, if you’re arranging a party, you’ll probably send an FB invite with the relevant information. Recording you home address is therefore not so relevant for me, whereas knowing your current/recent location through Foursquare might be much more interesting.

When I think about these facts, then glance at my Outlook address book, I see two worlds collide. Yes, may both be about people and communication, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end.

How can we manage?

What’s different in this brave new digital life when compared to the old offline world is that the number of channels and players is significantly higher and it will just keep on increasing. The possibilities become ever greater and so will our pains with the traditional address books. Tim O’Reilly has been writing about the missing Web 2.0 Address Book in 2007, others have speculated about the data management concepts it requires in 2010. If we’re lucky, at this rate the solution will arrive maybe a few years after HTML5 has become mainstream. In short, we’ve got to stop waiting for a new solution and find a way to live with the contacts we have for now.

For my task at hand, I chose Gist as the web application to take care of my immediate contact data management needs. Like any contact manager, it promises the same old “one place for all contacts” Holy Grail. What the service does is it asks you for your Facebook, Twitter and Gmail account authorization, then pulls in the contacts from each service and tries its best to merge them. LinkedIn contacts can be imported through a file, as can naturally Outlook data. In addition, there’s also a ranking algorithm that tries to identify the importance of each contact based on communication history, and by also allowing you to adjust the score, so the most frequent interactive connections float to the top.

Is it the new address book then? Who knows, I’m sure there’s also many other valid contenders besides Gist out there. The main point is that this approach of utilizing networks and integrating online channels blows the Outlook contact list right out of the water, no doubt about it. This is what’s relevant to me in 2010. Not the daunting task of recording phone numbers and street addresses completely separately from the interactions and channels. The information and the interactions are out there, just bring the data to me and let me enrich it as new connections get established and new channels emerge. Give me an app I can install on my Android phone and a plug-in I can use when viewing Gmail. Allow me to discover more about my contacts through suggestions of in which networks they are present in.

I started with the assumption that I wanted to update and keep my address books in order. It turns out this wasn’t at all what I wanted to do. What I really wanted was a way to keep in touch.

A healthy dose of reality

When going through some of the ancient entries originating from my SIM cards, I realized something which can be all too easy to forget while sitting in front of your PC: not everybody is online. I’d like to say “not yet”, but that would be perhaps too optimistic. Considering how young the trend of being present in the web with your real name and real thoughts still is, even in the short history of the mainstream internet, the current divide between who “are” in the web and who’re just consuming the content is quite understandable. Blogging requires effort, LinkedIn may not fit every kind of profession and Twitter is something most people can’t get their head around yet. The FB boom is covering up the fact that most people are not yet ready to adopt the digital lifestyle. Fair enough, I’ll keep you as an offline entry in my contact list, waiting for the day when you will be ready.

This blog post was written on Storify. Be sure to check out their service and sign up for an invite. Making sense of random thoughts you’ve tweeted or retweeted has never been this much fun.

In case you can’t view the content that their Javascript is supposed to render on this site (feed?), please read it here: http://storify.com/jukkan/cloudy-weather-for-enterprise-software

Then came Twitter and all the TweetDeck style clients, which claimed the “real-time” and “dashboard” titles respectively. Suddenly the old RSS reader applications started to feel like a graveyard of old and irrelevant news, when all the big stories and best articles seemed to flow from your tweeps via URL shorteners within hours or minutes from publishing. All this meant that browsing through your RSS feeds became more of a chore that you had to do every now and then, a bit like keeping your inbox clean. At the same time I had also abandoned Netvibes due to its continuous technical glitches and moved over to the simple choice, i.e. Google Reader. We all know Google is great at productivity apps for information management utility services, so this further played down the status of RSS feeds for me.

I started to feel increasingly unbalanced in this situation where my online media diet had transformed from an á la carte meal to a series of fast food pick ups. Sure, I was getting absolutely great links through Twitter, but my ability to focus on following any single topic was rapidly eroding as the gap between RSS feeds and real-time feeds was growing. One night when sitting on a train without any headphones or books with me, I spent a couple of hours on gReader for Android and went through the unread items in by Google Reader queue. When I reached my destination, I had started to better understand what the world of information around me looked like and how I should change my reading habits.

First, the concept of “unread items” is a relic from working with email clients, therefore we should get rid of in the world of feeds and tweets. Trying to use this metaphor there is like saying “you have 6,000,000 unread sites in the internet”. Only messages from a person to a person should carry the assumption that you have the duty to read through the item. This is why spam in your inbox makes you so angry, whereas a banner on a site can just be gracefully ignored, even if they both would spend exactly the same amount of time in your line of sight.

Second, you shouldn’t read all RSS’s with a single application. Yes, technically you could have just one great tool for managing all the bits that are distributed through the RSS format, but you don’t do both work and personal email through the same inbox either, do you? (At least I hope you don’t?) There are two main types of content that I have on my list of RSS subscriptions: posts and news. What I call posts is the traditional blogging kind of content that is written and published by people who don’t write this content for a living (they may get paid for it, but it’s not their main task). Then we have the news content, which is the traditional newspaper style articles that get published by either old or new media houses, be it WSJ or TechCrunch. Treating these two separately is what I believe to be the key to resolving my RSS anxiety.

Any feed that regularly publishes more than 2 items per day should be categorized as news. No matter how remarkable the content might be, it should be consumed differently. Just like you don’t read through each and every article in the morning newspaper (if you still subscribe to a physical paper, that is), the news feeds are meant to be glanced at from a high level and then read selectively. Whereas if you follow a blog that consistently delivers good analysis or entertaining stories, reading through each and every post at least with some level of attention may well be justified. Getting caught in reading “the whole newspaper” is all too easy if the delivery channel and presentation of the content is identical to posts. Instead of searching for a tool that can separate and categorize the content just the way you want it, do the easy thing: split the feeds into two totally separate RSS readers.

After an autumn clean-up, my toolbox for the digital media diet is now as follows:

• TweetDeck for Twitter feed/lists/hashtags, Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare updates
• Google Reader for blog post RSS feeds
• Netvibes for news RSS feeds

I went through my old Netvibes dashboards one by one, moving subscriptions to either Google Reader, a brand new dashboard in Netvibes or just deleting them (wish I had even more courage with the last category). Similarly, anything that was filling up my Google Reader in a newsfeed style got moved to Netvibes. When it came to reviewing some of the older blogs that had become less active, I also checked to see if the writer was nowadays in Twitter and if they were posting any content of interest over there. The same kind of quantity metrics apply to tweets as well, but that’s a whole different post I need to write later.

So far I must say I feel considerably more at ease with the feeds and other information sources around me. Let’s see if the system works on a longer term, or until new channels come along. If there’s a lesson to be learned from this, I guess it’s all about not searching for the one ultimate hammer but rather selecting the right tool for each job.

Google Wave was an island

There was no easy nor logical way to incorporate Wave into your ordinary workflow. If you weren’t opening wave.google.com on your browser, you were not “on the wave”. The most critical thing was that even though it looked almost exactly like a webmail client, and your user account had the form of username@googlewave.com, there was no email integration whatsoever. It’s bad enough that you couldn’t subscribe to any Wave updates to your inbox (later this feature was added without much fanfare), but the fact that a company hosting one of the largest email services in the world goes and assigns users pseudo email addresses you can’t send messages to is something that still boggles my mind. Ok, I understand that Google Wave was supposed to be something beyond email, but even emails could be printed on paper. How about some backward compatibility, eh?

Google Wave did not solve a specific problem

Most people just couldn’t quite figure out what exactly they were supposed to use Wave for. Pretty much everybody saw the potential of it for something useful, but were they able to picture themselves as a user in a specific use case where Wave was a natural fit? Let’s face it: there’s no point in releasing a technology demo and expect people to start using it straight away. What in fact was missing was the real product. Wave gave us the tools, but it would have probably taken an ecosystem around it to turn these tools into products that people could utilise for solving a specific problem (which Google did try to encourage through it’s API and federation protocol offering). Yes, collaboration challenges tend to be universal, but that doesn’t mean you could simply throw technology at them and expect people to take it from there.

Google Wave was not social

Given that the beta program with its invitation only approach initially stirred up quite a lot of interest towards the service, with invitations sold on eBay for $70, the approach quickly turned on its head. Let’s say that there were several groups of people in your company that were experimenting with Wave. How could you identify these particular people that were potential co-wavers and collaborators? Not through the service you wouldn’t. It happened on the corridors and water coolers, or in long email threads (sigh) circulating around the office. Come to think of it, for a company revolving around the concept of search, Google’s products can be incredibly hard to find. Just compare the findability of users and information on Twitter vs. Google Buzz.

Google Wave was developed by… Google

Huh? Why is that a bad thing? Well, let me explain. Google knows us all, but we still have no effective way of knowing each other through Google. This lack of the social dimension is perhaps the most significant barrier currently limiting Google’s growth beyond “just” indexing all the world’s data. 10 years ago that must have seemed like the ultimate goal you could have within the scope of Internet. Ever since the ‘net has evolved from a collection of documents to a platform for human interaction, that goal no longer sounds like the Holy Grail. Wave, just like Buzz or Orkut, relies on tapping into the social behaviour between people, not just a lone swordsman searching for a piece of information in the sea of data. Designing services to this new breed of customers requires a new way of thinking, which Google is only in the process of learning. Read this excellent post for further analysis on why Google cannot build social applications.

Just because the “surf’s up” for Wave, doesn’t mean the game’s over for Google’s initiative to change how people collaborate on information online. On the contrary: because they keep on trying, they can eventually succeed. Obviously there’s no other path for the corporation that’s built its product success on the concept of perpetual beta. I’ll hold up my board and wait for the next big wave.

Having said that, hosting your own WordPress site does require you to perform regular maintenance. For many of us this is not exactly the most rewarding part of runnign a website, but if you want to go beyond what hosted services offer you, then it’s just the price to be paid. I had been skipping payments for a while, so now when I finally had some well deserved time off in my hands, I knew the time had come for a summer cleaning effort.

WordPress 3.0 upgrade

With any application’s major version release, you may not want to be the very first user to install it. I certainly took a while to jump on version three and actually waited until 3.0.1 was out. The main reason was not the fear of native WP bugs as such but rather the plugin compatibility.

Before working on any plugin upgrades and installation, the natural first step is of course to patch up the core WordPress installation to the latest version. Before the upgrades, we are always instructed to take full backups of our precious data and other files, but let’s face it: how many of us really go through the trouble? Well, this time I thought I’d download a new full snapshot of my domain (0.5 GB of data), just to be on the safe side. I do have scheduled backup jobs running on the server, but there’s nothing quite like having the bits sitting on a local drive right next to you.

Luckily everything worked like a charm and WordPress 3.0.1 installed itself without any hick-ups. Had I actually needed to roll back to a previous version, things might have gotten interesting, since I’ve not once performed such an operation. I bet the 90-9-1 principle could be applied here: 90% never bother with backups, 9% take them and 1% know what to do with them.

Sharing links

Next in line was doing something visible for the sites. It has become pretty obvious that our methods of consuming web content have been transformed by the social media revolution, which in turn has an effect on how people reach your site. Search engines are still cool and SEO does matter, but referrals are what’s truly worth gold in the new social online economy. Therefore, you certainly want to make sharing content from your sites as simple as possible.

I’ve noticed myself being far more likely to retweet or share links if there was a convenient button available right there on the website to do so. This is one of those cases where your initial reaction from a developer perspective (“who needs these annoying external scripts and pop-ups, when copy-pasting text is trivial”) is quite different from your behaviour when acting as a user (“can I quickly get this link out there so I can move on to the next site I already have in mind? Hmm, can’t see a button, so I’ll rather skip it”). At the end of the day, it’s a usability improvement that’s difficult to argue against.

Looking at what WP content sharing plugins there were available, AddToAny seemed to be the most up to date offering. However, it turned out to have someundesireable tracking features built in. After trying out some smaller, less commercial options like Sociable, I came to the conclusion that it’s just better to bite the bullet. AddThis ended up being my weapon of choice, as it seemed to provide a good selection of services and customizability(not too fond of the header.php modification for Twitter message configuration, though) with an acceptable level of privacy breach (for example, flash cookies). Pre-selecting what sharing services to support would be a futile attempt, so it’s much better to outsource this burden to a development team rather than worrying about service links and icons myself.

How about the Facebook like button then? Well, let’s  just say that I haven’t yet fully figured out how what specific problem the Likes on FB are solving. Therefore I’ll rather stick to well known sharing methods and reduce the amount of clutter on my sites. Enabling it through AddThis can be done quickly if I change my mind.

Caching

One thing the information overload is definitely doing to our brains is shortening the attention span for any single piece of content. At worst, our attention may already be diverted elsewhere before we even get to the content, if the delivery channel is not responding fast enough. Also Google knows this, which is why the page load times are now a factor used in determining PageRank.

I know, the web traffic to my sites will surely never have such peaks that I’d need to be worried about them. What I am concerned about is the basic ability of my web hosting providerto serve the dynamic content from the WordPress application fast enough. With a site that has only a limited amount of visitors per week, chances are there’s not going to be much data cached anywhere, resulting in expensive PHP calls made to compile all the details you see here on this page.

This is where WP Super Cachesteps in. It creates static HTML versions of the otherwise dynamic pages, which are then served to all users who are not logged in (meaning almost everyone). The benefits are obvious and caveats fairly limited. However, there are plenty of settings needed to configure the cache, so you’ll want to spend a few moments making sure the caching really works before forgetting about the plugin.

Keep in mind that content caching is not the only setting that affects page loading times, so when choosing to include functionality on your site that calls external Javascripts (such as the social link sharing services), it’s important to keep an eye on what their performance impact will be.

Mobile version

I used to think that there were only selected few sites in the world with a real need for providing a mobile optimized version. Useful everyday sites like news portals, TV listings, public transport timetables etc. would certainly have a market for on the road browsing, but who in their right mind would try to access a blog site through their mobile device?

Enter social networks and Twitter apps in your smartphone – suddenly the scenario of a visit from a mobile device becomes much more likely. If you’ve gone through the trouble of making your content easy to share across different networks, chances are that the links may spread to people who are consuming the network content through their mobile phone. Such a big share of tweets consist of short links to web content that running a site which is not accessible on a modern smartphone really doesn’t make much sense. Short attention span + ubiquitous social apps = content must adapt.

The nice thing about hosted WordPress.com is that you get the mobile themes by default, but in your own installation you’ll need to take care of the theme configuration yourself. There are naturally plugins readily available for handling the task of identifying how the user is accessing the content and providing an alternative mobile optimized theme for those who need it. My choice was WordPress Mobile Pack, which offers an attractive set of features for mobile-enabling your blog. Removing Flash, shrinking images, limiting page size and specifying mobile widgets can all be achieved from plugin settings, while the package contains a set of mobile themes courtesy of Forum Nokia.

You’ll want to ensure that also the caching solution is compatible with your mobile site (see settings for WP Super Cache). This was one thing I struggled with while testing the sites on my mobile devices. Speaking of which, content testing in the mobile environment can be a much bigger pain than your usual multi-browser setup on a PC. Proper emulators tend to be either parts of an SDK or then commercial solutions aimed at professional developers. You can try out a few sites like the Opera Mini simulator, or face the really inconvenient truth and have mobiReadyshow you how bad the site will look like on a Motorola Razr, how long it will take to load on a GPRS connection and what the end user data cost will approximately be. All I can say is: yuck! Thank god those kind of handsets are gradually becoming a part of our mobile history.

With the explosion of sites and services where many of us register with our real name and create a real profile, the number of potential hits to be found is growing. This makes it all more interesting to see how Google ranks different sites that publish your name, because they are very likely to be not something you would have expected. Anyway, that’s just a side track of the topic I’m trying to get at, so let’s see what the results for a search on Jukka Niiranen looked like today on Google.com:

The first hit goes to a namesake of mine. Nothing unexpected there, as there’s plenty of us. My personal domain niiranen.eu comes in on places 3 and 4, after that we move to the usual LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. But wait: what the —- is Bantam Live, and why does Google think it’s the second most likely page that a person would be looking for when searching my name?

Ok, here’s the story. Bantam Live is a hosted CRM service, which is nothing like the traditional Enterprise Software that CRM used to be like in the 90′s and early 00′s. It’s in fact more like the social network services that people like you and me are actively using when not in the office. I tried the service, loved the concept and decided to show some respect by writing a tweet about it.

So what, there’s a million tweets every minute, right? Well, it just so happens that smart companies nowadays are listening to the conversation that takes place in Twitter. So was John Rourke, the CEO of Bantam Networks. Not only did he retweet it, but the company decided to quote the tweet on their own site’s front page. Nothing much I can or should do about that, since it’s a piece of text I have intentionally broadcasted to the world to see.

The end result is that now Google thinks I have something to do with the service. But is that actually such a big mistake at all? Isn’t it rather a lucky shot that the search engine has managed to surface such a connection, instead of blindly following hyperlinks and counting words? Sure, there’s absolutely nothing dynamic about the tweet text ending up on the page in this case, but it gives a glimpse of what could be possible with the data that’s already out there in the social network sites. Without having to build a proper semantic web to replace the web we have right now, the mere association of Twitter identities to people and companies could already have a huge impact on how the search engines might begin to understand the online content in a whole new way.

The real revolution of course is already taking place. Whether you call it Social CRM or something else, the fact that the customers now have a voice to speak with is creating a big demand for solutions and strategies that allow the companies to listen to the conversation that is taking place out there, and most importantly to be able to react to it. It might be a topic that I should rather write about in my CRM blog, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to draw the line between fun web apps and serious business platforms. Which is exactly the whole point of the revolution.