Open Social Communication And Workstreamer

Sam Lawrence is onto something in his recent post calling for a new way to manage communication:

[from Go Big Always - We need a social software inbox]

No, not an email inbox

Even the people who develop email software like Microsoft, Google and IBM know that the inbox sucks. We don’t need a new email inbox we need something completely new. The problem is that Social Software seems to headed into the same problems as email and we certainly don’t need another dump zone.

Pretty streams vs. nasty rapids

Lots of us nerds are enamored with the concept of streams. Streams feed us relevant activity, like RSS or Twitter’s human updates. Simply, streams flow activity to us. There are an increasing amount of clients to help us manage this, Twitter, Alerthingy, Particls, and the soon-to-be Workstreamr. Streams work great when it’s a narrow channel without rocks. Instant messaging is the fastest, friction-free stream. It’s just two people talking in real time. As you broaden your connections, asynchronously and synchronously, to more people and sources, your stream can move much faster.

I agree with Sam, deeply.

However, I think the answer is fragmentation, in a way. A variety of different streaming applications for different purposes. For example, geoloco applications like Brightkite or Dopplr to stream geolocational information, and a social work management application like Workstreamer (yes, we decided to put the second 'e' back in) to stream work-related information, like tasks, project updates, design notes, or meeting agendas.

I have found Twitter a tremendously interesting world of open social discourse, and that has some very interesting properties, many of which could be productively directed toward some things that email is used for today, and which it does pretty badly.

I think that an open model of communication could be applied in other contexts, ones that are significantly more constrained than the global model that Twitter and other open social applications have leveraged. Clearly defined groups -- like those explicitly working on a project together -- will share access to project-related streams of information, but less clearly defined 'groupings' -- all those Workstreamer users interested in Ajax or User Experience Design, for example -- will share streams of information made public by others in the community of Workstreamer users.

We are implementing this in Workstreamer, and it could prove a testbed for the ideas involved.

I have no doubt that Twitter and others will look to the enterprise as a market where the open discourse model can make inroads on the email inbox.

Comments

[Chris]

Twitter with groups, sounds like IRC.

Chris

[Moses Sena Kpetigo]

...I do agree the move away from emails but I also think if stream feeds had been in use earlier we human would be thinking of going the email and inbox model. This is an inherent feature of human who are always craving for new, another way, or different ways of doing things.... http://twurl.nl/k5v6mv