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

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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.

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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.

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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!

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Prior to starting infovark, I read everything I could get my hands on regarding the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Even though I felt immersed in the trend already, I wanted to make sure I understood what other people were reading about it. I also wanted to make sure that I was hearing directly from the primary sources, rather than indirectly through blogs or reviews.

I recently loaned our principal investor several of those books. After putting together the reading list, it occurred to me that I ought to post it to our blog as well. I plan for this to be the first part of an irregular series. To start us off, we have two essential books: The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail.

Feeling a Bit Tipsy

The Tipping Point describes a contagious situation where a system rapidly changes to a new state. The tipping point can be a “didn’t see that coming” moment, when something finally achieves critical mass and explodes onto the scene. Whether it’s a sleeper movie that suddenly becomes the film of the year, or a previously obscure product that’s now a household name, the Tipping Point describes how that dynamic transition occurs. It’s the classic snowball effect: Each flake, on its own, adds an insignificant amount of mass to the rolling ball. Over time however, those changes can compound into an unstoppable avalanche.

Figure 1: The Tipping Point

The Tipping Point is relevant to Enterprise 2.0 in two ways. First, obviously, is that software companies like infovark want to create a tipping point situation in the adoption of our products. But Gladwell’s book is a description of the phenomenon, not an instruction manual.

The second, more important reason, is that systems that gather, store and search data often experience network effects. Most Enterprise 2.0 systems fit this category, and ours is no exception. Our products need to scale rapidly so that we can harness these effects to return meaningful, relevant results. The crucial trick for getting the adoption rates we want is our ability to employ statistical tricks (and a few smart guesses) to bring that tipping point moment — the moment when someone says, “Wow, this thing is reading my mind!” — as close as possible to the out-of-the-box experience.

…And Pussycats

The second graph-based book, the Long Tail, describes a major shift in the way retailers think about selling their goods. For the last 50 years, product manufacturers have focused on the hits — those few products that achieve mass-market success. In today’s Internet economy, the cost of sales and inventory are dramatically lower. Retailers don’t need to be as choosy about their stock, opening up a large space for niche products to flourish. Taken as a whole, there can be as much money in niche products — in the long tail — as in selling mass market goods. Companies that have figured this out can derived tremendous value from serving these previously under-served consumers.

Figure 2: The Long Tail

The catch is in the phrase “taken as a whole.” To get the benefits of The Long Tail, you have to have a meaningful and interesting way of aggregating the preferences of many, many niche markets. And in this case, the market for information is little different than the market for products. Wikipedia succeeds as an aggregator of information by trading authoritativeness (scholarly writing and professional editing) for an unmatched breadth of articles contributed by the general public. You won’t find many articles related to animated television series in a typical encyclopedia, but you can find details about Josie and the Pussycats on Wikipedia, including their signature lyric: “Long Tails… and Ears for Hats!”

The Long Tail also holds lessons for us. Creating enterprise portals, automated workflow systems, and other broad-brush systems is an Enterprise 1.0 approach. Enterprise 2.0 systems must recognize that organizations are composed of teams of specialists. Each team and each individual will have a different view of the organization, and each is responsible for making different contributions to the collective effort. An Enterprise 2.0 approach must tap the Long Tail of corporate knowledge and expertise and deliver custom-tailored results.

(P.S. Thanks to Brian Shaler, whose CrappyGraphs.com helped illustrate this review.)

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