stoweboyd and the /messengers

Social applications are likely to be the major theme in software this year. IBM has been pushing hard in recent years, building on the huge installed base and share-of-mind in the enterprise software world, and now has launched a new product family called IBM Connections, as reported by Steve Hamm in BusinessWeek:

[from IBM's Social Networking Push]

The IBM package includes five applications: profiles, where employees post information about their expertise and interests; communities, which are formed and managed by people with common interests; activities, which are used to manage group projects; bookmarks, where people share documents and Web sites with others; and blogs, where people post ongoing commentaries. "The business market is showing a lot of interest in using social networking tools to improve productivity. It's about helping people find experts and the information they need to get their jobs done," says Steve Mills, the general manager of the software group at IBM (IBM). The commercial version of the package is to be delivered in the second quarter.

Other Collaborative Products

Up until now, companies experimenting with social networking software picked among a wide variety of individual programs, most of which were created with the consumer—rather than the corporate user—in mind. "IBM's is the first and only suite that brings together all these capabilities in a single package," says analyst Mark Levitt of IDC. In addition, Lotus Connections offers security, access control, and review features that are important to corporations.

The Lotus Connections introduction is part of a renewed push by IBM in collaboration software. At IBM's annual Lotusphere user conference on Jan. 22, the company announced several products, including the public beta test version of its next update for its Notes e-mail and collaboration software, which will go on sale in the first half of the year; and a new package, called Lotus Quickr, which provides software connectors to link popular desktop applications including Microsoft Office to blogs, wikis, and other social networking programs.

The announcements come at a time when IBM's $18 billion software group is on a tear. Software revenues increased 14% to $5.6 billion in the fourth quarter, and revenues in the Lotus division, where IBM's collaboration software is produced, grew by more than 30%—powered in part by a new release of the company's Lotus Sametime instant-messaging package.

I love the webbish name Quickr, but I think the efforts by IBM (and Microsoft, too) will be seen, ultimately, to be Slowr. Why?

The basic model of 90's era collaboration, a la Lotus Notes, is all about the group. Information was managed in group-based repositories, then passed around for review, or published to intranet portals via customized apps. Information era workflows where people are first and foremost occupiers of roles, not individuals, and the materials being created are more closely aligned with groups than individuals.

Web 2.0 social tools -- largely -- work around a different model. Social networks -- explicit ones like MySpace and Facebook, or implicit ones in social media -- are really organized around individuals and their networked self-expression. I am writing this blog post, and publishing it, personally. It is not the product of some workgroup. It is not an anonymous chunk of text on a corporate portal. My Facebook profile pulls traffic from my network of contacts, sources I find interesting, and the chance presence updates of my friends.

I don't need to participate in groups to exist or to share -- or to matter -- in this world.

On the other hand, Notes and Sharepoint, and even their webby second cousins, like Basecamp, are principally organized around groups. I have argued in the past about the work federation design flaw in Basecamp (see here: Basecamp and The Federation Of Work), but the basic problem is the wrong emphasis on belonging to groups instead of being connected to individuals.

[The federation of work problem in Basecamp means that I have a dozen or so different identities in the system: one for each organization I am working with that has their own Basecamp account. The thing that is missing is me: a single identity across all Basecamp accounts, so that I can login once and have access to every project, all at once.]

Consider a "me first" style Basecamp replacement.

• I would start with a profile of myself, since I am the center of my network. I would characterize my interests, history, job, whatever. This could include feeds, queries, and all manner of dynamic information, not just static text. I could tag myself, to make it easier for others to discover me.
• The buddylist is the center of the universe, so I would next start to link to those people and sources most important to me. Their traffic -- flow of insights, recommendations, and presence -- is the most important thing forming my world.
• And of course, I want to share my traffic with my network: links, recommendations, posts, presence. All my downstream buddies, those who want to read my traffic, can access it. But we don't need groups to do so.
• Instead of groups, we need groupings: tagging the elements of network traffic is sufficient. Sure, we still need access control, so that only those allowed to can see certain information, but I think that putting locks on the stuff flowing around is better than locking up the people in secure spaces.
• Of course, I am not just talking about the movies: people have to get work done, and to do so they collaborate, commmunicate, coordinate and so on. But the actual traffic that goes on to do so is really the same as everything else. I am working with specific individuals, and we talk, and push things around. We naturally think of ourselves in groups -- departments, task forces, project teams -- but the work is done by individuals communicating with each other.

This is a potent shift of emphasis. I hope someone builds a better Basecamp, based on the social dimensions most apparent in social networks and social media. [Anyone doing so, please contact me: we have a new Killer Whales program going on at Blue Whale Labs, where we help entrepreneurs make their dreams a reality, and this project is one worth doing.]

Perhaps that's what IBM has built with Connections. I hope to get a demo as soon as possible to find out. But my hunch is that it is not.

Although Basecamp uses Web 2.0 technologies like Ruby on Rails and Ajax, it misses the social bulls eye in several key ways. It is a group-oriented, non-federated solution, in a "me-first" world.

I will reserve judgment, especially since the description of Connections suggests it has all the right pieces: but I need to see the core integrating philosophy of the designers to know if it is a 90's style group collaboration solution built with Web 2.0 technologies and a few new design features, or if it is a real social application suite.

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