Rockin the world with Thounds

I actually had to make a new article category to capture the coolness of this great new web application. It pretty much gets a tick in the box for each of the criteria on the “Super Cool WebApp” checklist (which admittedly I am only just formally noting down now).

So what is Thounds? Well read on…

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Gist as a Social Navigation Device

Man, Gist is good. It’s basically the tool you have been waiting for to help you get on top of noise that is social media.

I would say that noise is pretty much deafening, not deafening in the way that makes you want to lock yourself in a room (well sometimes maybe) – maybe noise is not the right word. It is more like the deafening you experience when you go to a concert or gig and everything else just seems to disappear. When you are busy networking, other goals and objectives can simply cease to be…

So how does Gist help?

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Grasshopper – You must be different to be noticed

I just finished reading a great post on Mashable about a social media campaign run by Grasshopper. To me the campaign that grasshopper ran (read the mashable post for info) truly shows that innovation and a willingness to take a risk are what’s required to have some success in the noise of our current Web 2.x market.

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Inline and Contextual Comments

It’s been a couple of weeks now since we got our first looks at Google Wave, and the dust is starting to settle. In the process of the dust settling for me, I really started question why we aren’t already actively using a key component of Google Wave on the web. The component I am referring to is being able to comment inline (or contextually) on web content such as blog articles.

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Twitter – Costing Your Tweet

While there is currently no monetary cost for using Twitter (at the moment), I do believe there is a social cost consideration that should be made. Twitter in my opinion is very much what I consider a K² (Kudos and Karma) driven social platform, and as such actions an individual will take on this platform (combined with actions in the real world) will (or at least) should directly affect their success.

Largely, I am an observer of the twitter platform (the success and internal workings of the platform have me considerably more interested than individual tweets) so take what I say with a grain of salt – but I think I can share some points that will help to have success on this platform, and thusly ultimately assist in growing your concept.

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Twibes, Twitter and Viral Propagation

As I do each night (it’s not something I have access to during the day) I fire up Twitter, and today (thanks to @Yoshi123 of Intridea) I discovered Twibes.

Now Twibes is a good idea, nicely implemented and all that, but the real gem here is how much viral activity it creates in Twitter. I created two groups WebConcepts and ShinyThings which cover a couple of primary interest areas for me (WebConcepts being serious and useful web applications, and ShinyThings being gadgets and generally cool distracting techs). In creating those two groups, I probably sent out about 10 tweets which would have drawn followers back to Twibes to start their own groups. Now I have a limited follower base at the moment so the impact would be minimal, but for some Twitter users the reach for a new application is incredible by using this mechanism.

It really is very impressive. The application utilizes twitter as it’s communication layer to handle creating new groups and sending invites, which in turns creates viral traffic that will pull people to their application. Excellent use of both Twitter’s existing infrastructure and dedicated followers.

I was putting together a similar concept for trying to coordinate small events using Twitter (I’ll try to post about it soon) so was very excited to see an application doing this kind of thing very effectively already. If there are other web applications using twitter as a comms channel then feel free to comment here or join the WebConcepts Twibe and let me know.

VoteFlow – A Twitter Friendly Workflow Alternative

There are two things that are true at the moment (among all of the other truisms of the world):

1. Twitter is gaining mass appeal and is going mainstream.
2. Corporates are either looking to use or are already using twitter as a method of communicating with their customers

Which leaves me with a single question:
How are they managing the quality of their communication via this channel?

Why bother? Well to prevent blunders that have the potential to damage a reputation.

An Overview of Workflow
Traditionally, organisations are using workflows in systems to manage the quality of their communication. In general, most users involved with workflow in these systems admit the process is somewhat slow and cumbersome to manage. I remember once when speaking with James Robertson of StepTwo, he felt there was a general unstated acceptance in organisations that workflow doesn’t work (his post is well worth a read).

Whether workflow works or not for the current applications it is being used for is beyond the scope of this post, and not something I will go into. Will it work for the time sensitive “What are you doing now?” style applications like Twitter? I don’t think so. Applying a workflow process that has many eyes checking even 140 characters for correctness, alignment to brand, compliance, etc, will probably turn a “What are you doing now?” into “What I was doing 3 days ago”.

A Twitter Friendly Alternative
So what’s the solution? Well honestly, I don’t know – but I do have an idea or two. I believe workflow processes should only be used to handle information or data that has a relevant flow from A to B to C, and relevant quality checking can happen along the way. Information that needs to be dispersed to a wide audience such as an enterprise’s customer base should travel a different path. Certainly in the case of a tweet I believe using a different paradigm for quality checking is warranted.

One of the primary methods for speeding up the total time an item spends in workflow, is to use parallel workflows where possible. This enables multiple approvers to approve / reject the changes implemented. I believe this can be taken further, where a single parallel step with a wide number of participants can speed up the process even further. A single parallel workflow…. sounds just like a vote – and that’s what I’m thinking of. I will try and elaborate on the ins and outs of the process below.

The Vote Process
In the case of a tweet, let’s say I think my organisation’s (the ficticious Acme Widgets) customers should know that “Launch a new range of widgets, and the first 50 retweeters win one free”. I would then submit that to the twitter queue and the vote process would begin. My co-workers in the organisation would either vote-up my tweet to the point at which is was published, or vote it down so it wasn’t published.

In my mind I would see the voting process supporting two different publishing triggers:

1. Item published once x votes were received.
2. Item published automatically in x business minutes/hours, if 0 decline votes are received.

The reason the second publishing rule exists to keep people attentive to the process. With only the first process in place, I believe that individuals would be all too keen to defer their responsibility for voting something up to others rather than take on any risk themselves. With the second voting rule in place, it means people have to make an effort to monitor the content stream as all defined parties would have the chance to prevent a content blunder from occuring.

Defined Voting Groups and Weighted Voting
Obviously, nothing in this world is ever simple. I don’t for one second think this is as simple as pushing all corporate communications through a single voting engine with no ability to configure rules for content publishing and review. Different types of communications require different sets of eyes to review the content, and thus the system needs to support this. Additionally, I believe the voting process needs to make allowance for weighted votes (as this is relative to the way the real world works). For instance, if the CEO of Acme Widgets felt that the announcement was ok, then his/her vote would carry enough weight to mean it’s published as soon as the CEO ok vote is received.

Feedback
At this stage, what I have proposed here is a very raw concept. Does anyone else have ideas about alternative quality management solution that would suit a twitter style application?

Sharing Blog Posts through Social Media

Mashable has an excellent list which outlines effective ways to share blog posts through the various social networking channels that are currently available and popular on the web. Of particular interest to me was the fact that Facebook gets rated number 2 on the list. Now this isn’t suprising to me, given the amount of traffic that facebook gets every day – you only have to look at Alexa or QuarkBase to get a picture of how much.

What is interesting is that I don’t think a one size fits all approach, or a ranked list can be applied in a most effective from least effective sites for sharing blog posts can be constructed. In my opinion, you should hit social media sites that are used by your target visitor groups rather than just going through the checklist.

For example, my wife’s blog (SquiggleMum) is a blog targeted at Mum’s with toddlers running around beneath their feet, and so for her using facebook is an excellent mechanism to share posts with her Mum friends about the interesting antics our kids (2 – girl and a boy for those interested) have got up to.

As per another mashable post regarding facebook and online friendships for me, people I’m friends with in facebook are people I have definitely met face to face at least once. What interest would those friends have in my technology based articles? To be honest, a large portion of those friends would be pretty bored by it. So for me, using twitter, digg (although digging your own article always seems a little cheap) and LinkedIn are my preferred methods for drawing attention to new articles. Additionally, I’ll be investigating some of the other suggested mechanisms for sharing posts listed in that article – if you haven’t already head over to mashable and check it out.

Present.ly – Twitter for Corporates?

Whilst investigating platforms for managing Amazon’s EC2 platform, I came across a company that have a site / product called Scalr (which is interesting in itself), but once I delved into the company behind that product – Intridea I was even more impressed. These guys are really producing some quality stuff.

One piece of tech that is particularly interesting is their product called present.ly – which in their own words is “Twitter meets LinkedIn”. Now whilst I believe these guys have done a good job building the technology I have to wonder if the product will make the dent in the market I believe they would like it to.

So many questions in my head around this space…

Will corporates show interest in microblogging? I can just imagine the CEO of some large multinational just microblogging about some aggressive job cuts he is having to make given the financial environment.

If enterprise microblogging becomes something to investigate, will the new kids on the block get to play, or will twitter take that business?

Still, kudos for the build of the app – it feels and looks good; and good luck to the guys at Intridea with the project. From what I’ve seen on their site, they definitely are pulling some great stuff together, so I’m going to keep an eye out for more interesting projects from them – their labs area is a good place to start if you are interested.