Infovark

Hugh MacLeod, over at gapingvoid gives some great insight into “Social Objects”:

“The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else”

I really like the term. Social Objects are everywhere in modern web applications - Check out the discussion pages at wikipedia, or flickr. Every one of those crummy facebook applications that you accidentally join has, at it’s core, a social object.

As for the Enterprise, the social objects that are present in the workplace may not be as interesting as say, Vampires, but they are nonetheless important artifacts that people interact daily with. The latest copy of the employee manual is a social object. A previous forgotten version may also be a social object. The new team put together for the latest PR campaign is a social object. Other people who contribute decisions on that campaign are social objects. (isn’t inter-office gossip fun?) And all of these social objects co-exist in the workplace with a stream of social objects that people bring along with them.

Now, these social objects are a nice abstraction, but they don’t really offer us much utility - the real opportunity to improve the function of the enterprise lies in the conversations about these objects, and the actions taken as a result of those conversations. As Dean said in a previous post, Computers aren’t very good at conversations. But they are very good at remembering and tracking things.

Since we started infovark, social objects and people have been at the forefront of our thinking. (We’re working on the best way to manage these enterprise social objects for the people who work with them.)

Every time I see a post like Hugh’s that explains what we’re working on, it makes me feel a little less nervous about the whole startup thing…

Rock on, Hugh

Gordon discovered a tiny URL stuck to the bottom of our new rubber friend.

Clicking on it seemed to have no effect, so we decided to type http://www.ifoundtheaardvark.com into a web browser. It appears that our new mascot is a collective art project! The website has a few broken links, and the forum hasn’t been updated in a while, but the project claims to have “no end”. Maybe we’ll post our corporate logo to the art gallery.

Viral Marketing is an interesting thing. A small rubber aardvark from an art project sponsored by a community newspaper in Southeastern Massachusetts wound up in a startup software company in Northern Virginia by way of my aunt and uncle living in Eastern Georgia. And that’s just the motion of a physical object. Think how much further and faster word of mouth can travel. It’s encouraging to have evidence of how far an idea can spread.

What did happen to the Intranets? Beats me.

When I first started as an intern, Lotus Notes was all the rage in my department. People would create Lotus Notes databases on share drives for everything. Access controls were few, administrative access was plentiful, and the thing grew like you wouldn’t believe. The phenomenon, termed “Notes Sprawl”, meant that everyone had their own little mini-silos of information scattered around, trying to solve everything from financial reporting to whose turn it was to bring the cake to the next morning tea.

Of all these Notes databases, by far the most popular on my local Notes server was a forum that allowed all the people in my building to talk to each other. Everyone would log in every day to chat about various topics — some corporate, some personal. Occasional flame wars would erupt. Both meaningful and frivolous discussion flowed. It was probably the first functional online community I’d ever seen.

It didn’t last. When the IT team discovered its high rate of growth and restricted access to the forum, employees had nowhere to go. At about the same time, Internet access arrived on our corporate PCs. The once-healthy corporate community dispersed into fragmented Internet communities.

The social elements of our forum, which were the actual reason that people were using the corporate intranet, could be served just as well by the public Internet. Each individual ventured forth to pursue their own interests with other like-minded cake connoisseurs and amateur radio operators. But business concerns could not be aired on the open Internet in the same way as before. A valuable corporate communications channel disappeared. Employees retreated to their established chains of command for corporate information.

Sam Lawrence, over at Jive Software is absolutely correct when he points out that Facebook is a success because it’s people centric. Intranets, on the other hand, have been seen more as content repositories.

Here’s the thing: People don’t care about content as much as they do about people. The conversation you have about the content is equally, if not more, important than the content itself. And the conversation you have about the content depends on the people involved in the discussion. Getting the right people together is essential.

Yet the whole concept of “The Business Intranet” is hampered by very Web 1.0 thinking. It’s treated as a static place to get information, rather than an interactive place for people to connect. It’s an Employee Manual on a computer. (Nobody reads those either.)

If Enterprise 2.0 is going to deliver improved utility in the workplace, we have to stop thinking so much about the content. The content is an artifact of the conversation. We have to start thinking about the people and their human need to connect with others.

All of us ‘varkers received aardvarks for Christmas this year. We got plush ‘varks and squeak-toy ‘varks and picture-books with aardvarks in them. Here’s one of our stocking stuffers, perched atop networking gear.

We hope you got everything you wished for this Christmas. Happy Holidays!