Archive for the ‘Web 2.0’ Category
Open the doors and see all the people
Brynn Evans pointed me to an intriguing piece of future gazing from Chris Messina and Jyri Engeström – The Web at a New crossroads. In it, they describe the evolution of the internet from a document-centric content sharing mechanism, through to the way we see it today – with the emergence of people-centric media solutions like Facebook and Twitter increasingly taking a prominent role.
It’s a well thought out and innately resonant concept – we are currently at a stage in the web’s development where people are sufficiently acclimatized to the technology, and the technologists are realizing what personal elements are required to bring people into the web – offering elements that are innately social and vital to the way that humans behave. As Clay Shirky puts it, “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.” Hence the dawn of what Messina and Engeström are calling “The people-centric Web”.
Among my circle of friends, there are few who aren’t on Facebook. And those few who aren’t, are missing out on the conversations, the lame jokes, the cat pictures, and all the stuff that goes on in social circles– for whatever reason, they’re not at the party. If there’s one thing that people fear, it’s being left out – solitary confinement is the single worst kind of punishment dealt out by the human race. As the web becomes more and more socially interesting, it seems likely that the kinds of pressures that we impose on ourselves as a society – pressure to be seen, to contribute value, and to achieve will continue to manifest more and more as part of the social web.
So where does that leave the content?
Work is different from play. In recreational social circles, the social objects –the things we’re talking about – often take a back seat to the fact that people are talking about them. A Facebook conversation about, say, Keyboard Cat, provides a mechanism for the conversation participants to engage and jest – the content itself is not of particular importance. Social systems grow based on the actions of the contributors, not on the artifacts or information that catalyzes their existence.
In a work setting, the conversation happens exactly the same way – it is, after all, the only way people know how to interact, but the social object tends to have a lot more value. In fact, in days of old, content management systems placed all the value on the content – often not providing any way to allow social interaction or discussion about the important documents, plans and policies that are the artifacts produced by people in work environments. With the dawn of Enterprise 2.0 (the people-centric web for work), we realize that we need to bring more social approaches to the way people work, and to design workflows that mirror the ways people interact with their friends.
Say Messina and Engeström: “We want a web where people are as important to the architecture of the system as documents.”
While I applaud the sentiment, I think it’s more than just a case of bringing people up to the level of documents in terms of importance. They way we manage content has to change in order to allow these conversations to take place. There needs to be more accessibility, more transparency, and clear ownership of content. With the current web, people are clearly indicating to systems architects exactly how they want to work with social objects. We need to take the Content Management tools of old and ensure that they meet these social needs first.
“Ask not what you can do for your Content, but what your Content can do for you”
Aligning Interests
Gordon described our upside-down take on Information Management priorities in his last post. We came to this topsy-turvy perspective after spending years implementing traditional business software and growing increasingly frustrated with recurring configuration, training and deployment issues. Infovark was born out of desire to try something different.
We decided to build Infovark from the ground up to serve the information needs of a typical knowledge worker. We consider the individual first, then the team, on up to the business level.
This led us to all sorts of interesting technical choices. But the hardest decision has had nothing to do with software at all. It’s a business decision, and one we’d been avoiding.
If we really want to put our money where our mouth is, if we really believe in a bottom-up, emergent approach to sharing and collaboration, Infovark needs to be sold differently than other enterprise solutions. After all, the traditional top-down focus on security, compliance, and cost is no accident. It’s a result of catering to the needs of the people that write the checks. If we really want to commit to making valuable, useful software for typical business users, we need to sell it to business users.
Opera Understands the Small Cloud
I just caught the exciting announcement of Opera Unite on Read Write Web.
The Opera Unite vision video explains their take on the small cloud. Rather than our current two-tier system, with clients and servers occupying distinct roles, we can move to system that lets every computer fully participate in the web.
Clearly, Opera understands Small Cloud Theory.
Unite uses an architecture similar to the one we described in our series on Ending the Paper Shuffle last year. (See locating documents, versioning documents, and tracking documents for our thoughts on how to address common information handling problems in the enterprise.)
Coming soon: the future
Opera claims this approach “reinvents the web” but I think it simply delivers on the Internet’s original promise. The original HTTP drafts looked ahead to a more peer-centric approach to networking. You’ll rarely find the words “client” or “server” in W3C’s final recommendations; they prefer the terms “browser” and “host” — and implies that these roles are not exclusive.
Peer-to-peer technology is hardly new,although it’s been slow to shed its association with questionable file sharing practices. On the subject of P2P, Clay Shirky wrote in 2000:
The fusion of desktop and server… is turning the internet inside out.
The current network is built on a “content in the center” architecture.
However, the ability for a desktop machine to take on the work of a server increases annually.
…Add to these forces an increasing number of PCs in networked offices… and you have the outlines of a new “content at the edges” architecture … This is the future, and Microsoft knows it.
I’m not sure if Microsoft really “knew it” — although their efforts with acquiring Groove, and more recently LiveMesh might indicate that it’s possible that they did — but I do know this: The computer I’m writing this post on is about 22 times more powerful that the average web server in 1996. In addition, it has 285 times more available memory. And it’s not even a particularly fancy or fast computer — a mid-range Dell business laptop.
So although Shirky’s “Fusion” of the desktop and server isn’t quite here, 8 years later, Opera’s Unite might help bring it a step closer.
Go Where the Information Lives
I think it was roughly a year ago that Gordon and I realized we needed to integrate with Microsoft Outlook. We looked up from our laptops and stared each other in the face. We both shared the same terrible, sinking feeling.
It’s hard to describe to non-programmers, or even to non-Microsoft programmers, what integrating with Outlook is like. The best analogy I can think of is trying to read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in its original Middle English. The innards of Outlook are archaic. Much of the dos and don’ts of modern application design were learned — the hard way — by the Microsoft Outlook developers over the course of decades. And to my knowledge, Microsoft has never attempted a modern translation of the classic. They’ve put new covers on the old book — improved the look and feel, swapped the icons, etc. — but they’ve apparently left the core exactly as it was written, apart from bug and security fixes here and there.
A page from The Canterbury Tales
It’s a difficult job. The only other company I know of that’s doing something similar is Xobni, and they have a much larger programming team — Investors have poured several million dollars into their pockets. And that’s allowed Xobni to give away their Outlook integration for free.
What Gordon and I realized was that not only did we have to integrate with Outlook, we had to do it with a smaller team, on a tighter budget, against a competitor that had foolishly already set the price to zero.
Pure madness, then. But we had to do it anyway.
Email is Collaboration
For an entire generation of knowledge workers, email is collaboration. Regardless of its merits as a collaboration tool, it’s the one they’ve been using for decades now, and it mostly gets the job done at small scales.
So if you want to get these knowledge workers to try something different for collaboration, you’ve either got to get them to switch away from email or you’ve got to integrate with their desktop email client.
There are many, many folks trying to get people to abandon email. There are numerous instant messaging applications, wiki solutions, social media and networking sites, blogging and microblogging tools — on some level, Web 2.0 could be viewed as nothing more than alternatives to email. And thanks to services like Facebook and Twitter, home users are becoming more willing to move away from email as their primary means for communication and collaboration.
But email is the way things are done in the enterprise, and Microsoft owns the enterprise desktop, and Outlook is their email client.
If we want to help people work together, Infovark has to integrate with Outlook. Even if the engineering challenges are large, the competition has more resources, and nobody is likely to pay us a dime for our effort.
Welcome to the sad economics of software start-ups.
We Work with Outlook
If there’s a core architectural principle behind what we do at Infovark, it’s this: Go where the information lives.
At a time where web applications and cloud computing are all the rage, we’ve gone to the desktop instead. Why? Because that’s where the information is. And most of the information on the desktop is locked away in the email client, the largest information silo in modern business.
Infovark digs out email, contacts, tasks, appointments and meeting information from Outlook, relates these items to each other and to the files on your computer, and shares what it finds with you and your peers. Our primary means to do this is through our web interface, but we knew we had to show this information in Outlook as well.
Here’s some early screenshots of Infovark at work in Outlook. These are works in progress.
Image 1: Infovark in Outlook
We’ve also got a tool bar that will allow you to add or remove email from Infovark’s brain. You can also apply ratings to the email or share it with coworkers if you like. (The icons shown here are temporary.)
Image 2: The Infovark Command Bar
And finally, here’s a closeup of the Infovark task pane. You can add tags, search the items in your Infovark library, and view related email and attachments. Again, the icons are temporary.
Image 3: The Infovark Outlook Task Pane
Eventally, we hope to add and expand on what you can do within Outlook. We’d also like to extend these features to the rest of the Micorsoft Office suite. But our primary focus will remain on the Infovark web interface. We’ll be posting screenshots of that in upcoming posts. So stay tuned, and send us your comments!
