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?

Don’t get me wrong, these are all wonderful toys and I love having shiny gadgets as much as the next geek. However, as their capabilities increase, so does they time I spend maintaining the gadgets and their applications. Configuring settings, hard resets, custom ROMs, googling for answers to problems that also other users have. Back in the days of hardware centric consumer electronics it used to be possible fix problems with spare parts, but when the value of the electronics is increasingly built out of bits, there’s often precious little that a repair shop could do to fix that bit for you.

With more joy comes more pain. You gain new ways to be connected with people, yet you loose something that you used to take for granted, such as phone calls and text messaging reliability. The devices get cheaper every day, which means there’s more features for the buck, like it or not. Very quickly even the entry level mobiles will have the features that a top of the line iPhone introduced a couple of years ago. The feature list will extend infinitely, but the user experience can degrade just as fast. Our future handheld devices will do a million things, cost next to zero euros, yet they may still leave the user less satisfied.

Life used to be so good

Never thought I’d say this out loud, but I’ve actually started to consider if I should grab a Symbian phone while Nokia is still manufacturing those. You know, in a “one more for the road”, “here’s to the good times” kind of way. Then again, we all know what Symbian has become, so if I really would want to have a simple, working mobile phone for oldskool communication like phone calls and SMS (even the occasional MMS, heaven forbid), I’d need to aim for an S40 feature phone instead. Something that hasn’t been destroyed by Nokia’s futile attempts to catch the iPhone wave. The wave, which, you could say, is one reason behing the troubles that more and more people are facing with their “devices previously known as mobile phones”.

And that’s where the troubles begin. I’ve lost my ability to be a feature phone user. Here’s a few reasons that come to my mind:

Input method. I haven’t used a non-QWERTY keypad for typing messages since 2005. Looking back at my handset history, using the numeric keypad was a period of roughly 9 years, and it’s now been 6 years since the end of it. I’m not getting any younger, so I’m assuming I have already lost the capability of typing with the traditional feature phone keypad. I also never adopted T9 for real, so it would be just as ackward for me.

Contacts. All my contact information on friends, co-workers, customers and online acquaintances lives in the cloud. When I install a new device, the data flows from Gmail, Facebook, Exchange Online, Twitter etc. The days of moving data around on a SIM card have truly passed. A feature phone without a cloud connection would be a silo that simply couldn’t be maintained. No way do I plan to install any more crapware like PC/Ovi Suite, Kies or something like that for data synchronization. No cables, please, these are wirelessly networked devices.

Operators. I’ve got in total 4 SIM cards at my disposal that each have unlimited mobile data plans. 2 from my employer, 2 of my own. If I would transfer my primary phone number to a feature phone, I’d be effectively closing down one 3G data pipe that is being paid for.

The legacy of the GSM revolution

The fact that certain communication methods we still use in our modern society are tied into physical SIM cards is in a way one root cause for these dilemmas. If you try to call me and one of my devices just happens to be unavailable at that time (battery is out, network is down, device is rebooting, forgot it in the other room etc.), why couldn’t I pick up the call from some other device? If you send an SMS to me and pay a few eurocents for the privilege, why am I more limited in the choice of how and where I can receive the message and reply back to you? Emails, tweets or even FB messages are available to me anywhere I am 24/7, and their cost per transaction is zero cents. Which leads me to ask the question: is the problem really the lack of GSM like reliability with today’s mobile devices, or are we again trying to solve a problem that we should no longer have?

Nostalgia can be a fun pastime and it also serves as a tool to give us human beings perspective on where we’ve come from and where we are right now. When used in the right way, it also enables us to analyse where we will be in the future. Use it the wrong way and you’ll just end up living in the past, hoping and waiting for the train to turn on its tracks, all the while it’s getting further and further away from you. Instead of just sitting at the train station, cursing the way how the world is these days, maybe I’ll need to focus on picturing in my mind where the train is heading right now.

You see, there will become a day when you can’t reach me from a phone number any longer. In fact, the technology surrounding me today is already doing its fair share to make sure the day is getting closer and closer, even if I’m not personally asking for it to do that. It presents me a compelling, alternative method of communication and asks me with its calm voice “would you like to try this instead, or should we go back to the old way and forget about these new possibilities? It’s you’re choice, I’m here to serve you either way.” And of course we won’t stick to the old, because our curiosity will always eventually trump our resistance to change. It was a tough call for many folks to give up their land line telephones, but still it was only a matter of time. I expect we’ll see similar phenomena also in the future.

We’ll move on from “connecting people” to “connected people”. In the “connecting people” era, it used to be the technology between two people that allowed them to reach out their hands and establish the connection and communicate with one another. In the world of “connected people”, the technology has already drawn people to gather around its virtual bonfire, which is where all the communication takes place. You don’t have to be online all the time, but the connection doesn’t disappear even when someone steps offline – the flame keeps on burning. Our devices enable us to be present at the bonfire whenever we want, at different levels of intensity (active speaker, casual attendee, passive consumer) that suit our current status in the physical world. Whereas the GSM technology included text based communication only as a side product (almost an accidental invention), the “connected people” will use text as the primary and persistent for of communication, supplemented by voice and video when appropriate. Finally, the transformation will not take place as a result of the new communication services and products that the major telecom industry players have been trying to design and sell to big corporations for use in their operative business. Just like with GSM, it will ultimately be the consumer adoption of new social networks and communication tools that makes the transition from old to new a reality.

So, I’m sorry to break this to you, but there is no way back to the golden days of GSM. Having said that, I still wouldn’t mind if the product engineers and FOSS fighters working on smartphone platforms would still reserve a decent fraction of their time on providing reliable applications for supporting legacy protocols such as telephone calls and SMS. As we can learn from the story of Microsoft Windows (1.0 to 7), there’s still a tangible business value in being able to support your own legacy. And most importantly: it can be done.

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.

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.

I could have flown home earlier, but I had previously reserved a ticket to Microsoft Convergence 2010 conference in Atlanta, US (you can read more about it in my CRM blog, part1 and part2) that was scheduled to start on April 24th. Since it began to look obvious quite soon that the flights in Europe would be affected for several days, I decided to re-route myself directly from Malaysia to US, without visiting home base. So, as a result, I performed my first ever around the world trip in quite a spontaneous manner.

Me and my colleague were of course lucky to be stuck in such a nice location as Kuala Lumpur. Furthermore, we were able to easily extend our stay in the same Sunway Pyramid Tower Hotel, thus removing the need to spend our time searching for alternative accommodation. On the night of our planned return date, Friday 16th, Malaysia Airlines still insisted on the web at 20:00 that their 23:55 flight to Amsterdam would depart as scheduled. Having viewed all the news online and putting 2 + 2 together, we decided to keep our heads cool and our luggage unpacked, since going to KL International Airport would have not served any purpose. At midnight the flight was cancelled and the world slowly started to come into terms with the true level of impact to the European air traffic from the looming volcanic ash high up in the clouds.

Even though Malaysia Airlines only has a few flights to Europe, their customer service phone number was totally unreachable on the next morning. Therefore we decided to take a taxi from Petaling Jaya to the MAS office in KL Sentral and visit a physical service desk, where we were given new tickets for the same flight on Sunday. Still, we didn’t really get our hopes high, because it was quite clear that in a situation such as this no one could truly know what was going to happen, not the airlines nor the passengers. It was a true force majeure if I’ve ever seen one.

If the same event had occurred in 1995, I have no doubt that we would have been royally screwed, totally at the mercy of travel agency service representatives acting based on the official but false information given to them by someone higher up in the chain. Luckily we lived in the year 2010 and in a world full of online information sources and social media channels. I quickly became virtual best friends with @eurocontrol, the Twitter account of the European organisation for the safety of air navigation. They provided real time links to press conference events and materials through their tweets, thus giving the most cutting edge information available to any media, as Eurocontrol effectively made the decisions who could fly and where.

What I was doing for the four extra days while being stuck in KL was effectively running a virtual situation room on my laptop screen, collecting pieces of information like airport departure/arrival data, news bulletins from officials, weather forecasts, interviews etc. in order to formulate a best guess scenario of what was going to happen within the next hours and days. It was a true case of the wisdom of crowds in action, similar to the phenomenon we’ve seen during many of the natural disasters in the 21st century, where the best and most reliable information does not come from any single media giant but rather from leveraging all the small content streams out there. When it came to extending our hotel room reservations, at one point I realized that I didn’t really need to necessarily even have a room for me and my stuff for the day, but what I could not survive without was a reliable internet connection. Although €14 per 24h was a steep connection rate compared to the €80 per night for a four star hotel room, it was a price I was more than happy to pay (and charge to my employer later on of course).

On Sunday afternoon it had become quite clear that if I wanted to make it to the US in six days, flying through Europe was out of the question. I started to look for alternative connections which would take me there through the other side of the globe. I found a route that would fly me from KL to Atlanta through Tokyo in 32 hours and decided that it was the best deal I was going to find in the current situation. Thanks to the magical power of the internet, booking the flights, hotels and rental cars on the fly was not too difficult. Figuring out exactly what kind of data the US immigration officials wanted to have of my trip in how many systems and by what date was actually a much bigger task. Not surprisingly, our corporate travel agency Kaleva Travel was swamped with 1000 times more service requests than usual. Combining that with the fact that it was the weekend, self service was the only way to go. At the end, the only thing I really needed the agency for was to push the button on writing the final ticket for my US-FIN return flight reservation, as I didn’t want to board the plane without a printed return ticket. Printing documents (such as boarding passes) while on the road – yeah, that’s another one of those small but pesky hurdles of travel, still in the year 2010.

On Tuesday night at 22:00 I started my journey from KLIA to Narita airport in Tokyo, where I landed 07:00 local time. It was a whopping 8 hours stop before the next departure, which would have given me plenty of time to visit downtown Tokyo. However, I was wearing just a short sleeve shirt and the weather outside was +12C and raining, so I decided to stay at Narita and instead took a day room for a couple of hours to catch some sleep. Besides, I had done a one day tour around Tokyo last year, so “been there, done that” I thought. Boarding the Delta jumbo at 15:00 in Tokyo and stepping out of it at 15:00 in Atlanta on the same exact day was quite a strange feeling, but at that point I was already detached from all of the time zones in the world. I barely managed to climb into my rental Chevy HHR and navigate my way along Interstate 75 (a whopping 15 lanes at the biggest interchange!) to my final destination, Residence Inn in Kennesaw. From the moment of waking up in the hotel bed in Kuala Lumpur and falling asleep at the next one in Georgia, US, the 50+ hours in between definitely felt like one of the longest days in my whole life.

The stay around the Atlanta metropolitan area was a pleasant one. Not that I had much free time on my schedule, between moving from our Kennesaw office to downtown Atlanta for the conference and then back again. The weather was surprisingly cold and did not really fit well with my wardrobe geared for a stay in Malaysia. Even the rain in Atlanta was much harder than what they have in Southeast Asia, thanks to a tornado that passed through Georgia during the weekend I was staying there. I tried to avoid eating too many supersize meals, but I have to say the burgers they have on offer in the States make it a difficult task. Cruising around the suburb area in my Ford Mustang, grabbing a McMuffin to go and shopping at Walmart gave at least some taste of the local lifestyle. My return flight to Finland was through New York, and with 5 hours to spend at JFK, I decided to also make a very quick trip to Manhattan: train to Penn station, a walk around Madison Square Garden, burger meal on 9th Avenue, a couple of photos of the Empire State Building and then back to Helsinki to celebrate 1st of May. Finally!

All in all, I’m glad to have made the trip around the world, but I’m just hoping that next time I will have the chance to focus a bit more on enjoying the trip itself and not so much on the arrangements of it.

Anyway, I decided to install WordPress 2.8 instead. Here we are now.