Liz Lawley has been working at Microsoft Research this year, on a sabbatical from RIT, and I haven't been tracking her activities as closely as I might. She has tipped her hand as to what she's been working on, which seems to be an enterprise 2.0 social bookmarking solution, called PULP:
[from mamamusings: what i've been working on]It's called PULP...for "personal ubiquitous library project." (It was originally just "personal library project," but I added the "ubiquitous" so it would have an easy to remember name.) And it's the result of mashing up features from social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us and CiteULike and LibraryThing, personal library tools like Delicious Library and MediaMan, and mobile scanning and annotation tools like Aura.
So, why does the world need another social bookmarking/library tool? I'm not sure it does. But this one is intended to address some problems I've had with the tools listed above.
First, it's going to be an enterprise-based tool, that will be installed and managed on your own server. That's because centrally-owned and managed social bookmarking tools present a problem for people working on non-public projects. I was made aware of how much of a public trail I can leave in my bookmarks when one of my students knew about my plans to come to Seattle before my department chair did--all because he'd noticed what I was bookmarking and how I was tagging it. When I started working here at Microsoft on competitive projects, I cut way back on my use of del.icio.us, because I was concerned that I might give away too much of what I was working on to competitors.
Second, it's going the leverage the extreme coolness of Marc Smith's AURA project to enable SmartPhone and PocketPC-based data entry. I love that Delicious Library and MediaMan let me use a webcam to scan barcodes. But that's not useful when I'm walking through a bookstore, or visiting a friend's house. I want to be able to scan in the barcode of a book with my mobile device and add it to my collection.
Third, it will distinguish between items that I have (or have access to), and items that I'd like to have but don't. I love the idea of being able to browse a colleague's virtual bookshelf...but it's much more helpful to me if I know that these are items that s/he actually has and that I can therefore look at or borrow. That's even more helpful when I'm in a bookstore, since I'll be able to find out immediately if the book I'm considering purchasing is one that someone I work with already has a copy of.
That's all planned for the first version of the system, which I'm hoping we'll be able to deploy at RIT and MSR this fall so that we can do some research into how people use the system.
In the second version, I have a more ambitious plan. I want to develop a rich desktop client for the data that will incorporate p2p sharing, much like iTunes does for music. That way, even if my server is at RIT, and yours is at, say Yahoo, we can meet up at a conference and share items with each other. I can browse the stuff that people near me have marked as public, and I can share out items tagged for a talk I've given or a topic I'm studying. (I was delighted today when I came across this post describing how someone essentially turned iTunes into a paper-sharing tool.)
More and more, I see that core Web 2.0 social software concepts are becoming targetted at behind-the-firewall issues, like those Liz is trying to solve with PULP. Web 2.0 is about than just consumers, and the second wave of the revolution is going to sweep through the enterprise just like the original Internet did, and rearrange all the furniture.
Devil's advocate: I'm not so sure. Social software requires a society. Most businesses are too small and the motivations and personal dynamics are too different. The intranets transform business? Somewhat, I'm sure, but the public has done far more. At the companies I've worked for behind-the-firewall was for health insurance forms and sexual abuse policies.
I think true social software is likely to have less effect still. Take LibraryThing. People add books to LibraryThing out of passion, organizational compulsion, narcissism and exhibitionism. These don't work the same in business. Organizing my bookshelves is fun. Being required to list my work stuff is *work*. Ms. Lawson expects, if I add a book to my behind-the-firewall business library, I'd be expected to lend it on occasion. Not everyone would like that. Or if, as Ms. Lawley suggests, employees should distinguish between what they've read and what not, adding books would put everyone in "quiz" peril. "Yeah, I read it, but I don't really remember it well" isn't a good answer. Book cataloging moves from fun to a chore. Blech.
It might be worthwhile to go through social software and think about how each works or doesn't work behind the firewall (eg., wikis YES, YouTube not so much).
Posted by: Tim | August 23, 2006 at 08:21 AM
It's not restricted to the big guys like Microsoft and IBM, Stowe. ConnectBeam and Cogenz are just two of the companies offering betas of similar tools.
Posted by: Niall Cook | August 23, 2006 at 01:45 PM