Long time readers of my ramblings here are aware that I drink the Google kool-aid. And they also know that I've been caught tweeting, on occasion. And, despite my disappointment in Google's last big thing (Wave), I am so appreciative of other work of theirs -- GMail, Android, Picasa -- that I couldn't pass up a go with their answer to Facebook and Twitter, Buzz.
Google, perhaps because their revenue model is based on giving people ad-displaying products, as opposed to selling applications, takes more design risks than their software-developingcompetitors. Freed of legacy design concepts like "the computer is a file cabinet" or "A phone needs a "start" menu", they often come up with superior information management and communication tools.
What is Buzz?
Buzz, like Twitter and Facebook, and very much like the lesser used Friendfeed, lets you tell people what you're up to; share links, photos and other content; and respond to other people's posts and comments. Like Facebook, Friendfeed and Twitter (if you use a third party service like Twitterfeed), you can import streams from other services, like Google Reader, Flicker, and Twitter itself, into your Buzz timeline.
Unlike Twitter, there is no character limit on your posts. And the comment threading works more like Facebook, so it's easy to keep track of conversations.
How is Buzz Different?
The big distinguishing factor is that Buzz is not an independent service, but an adjunct of GMail. You don't need a GMail account to use it, but, if you have one, Buzz shows up right below your inbox in the folder list, and, when a comment is posted on a Buzz that you either started or contributed to, the entire Buzz shows up in your inbox with the reply text box included, so that continuing the conversation is almost exactly like replying to an email.
The Gmail integration also feeds into your network on Buzz. Instead of actively seeking out people to follow, Buzz loads you up from day one with people who you communicate regularly with via GMail.
Privacy Concerns
Buzz's release on Tuesday spawned a Facebook-like privacy invasion meme the day that it was released -- valid concerns were raised about the list of these contacts showing up on Buzz-enabled Google Profile pages. A good "get rid of Buzz" tutorial is linked here. To Google's credit, they responded quickly, with security updates being rolled out two days later. I'm giving Google more of a pass on this than some of my associates, because, while it was a little sloppy, I don't think it compares to the Facebook "Beacon" scandal. Google didn't think through the consequences, or the likely reaction to what looked like a worse privacy violation than it actually was (contact lists were only public on your profiles if you had marked your profile "public", and there was a link to turn the lists off, it just wasn't prominently placed or obvious that it was necessary). Beacon, in comparison, started telling the world about every purchase you made (whether it was a surprise gift for your significant other or a naughty magazine) and there was no option for the user to turn it off. And it took Facebook two years to start saying "mea culpa", not two days.
Social Media Interactions for Grownups
Twitter's "gimmick" -- the 140 character limit -- defines its personality, and those of us who enjoy Twitter also enjoy the challenge of making that meaningful comment, with links, hashtags, and @ replies, in small, 140 character bursts. It's understood now that continuing a tweet is cheating.
Facebook doesn't have such stringent limits, but you wouldn't necessarily know that to glance at it. It hasn't shaken it's dorm room roots; it's still burdened by all of the childish quizzes and applications; and, maybe more to the point, cursed by a superficiality imposed by everyone having an audience composed of high school buds that they haven't seen for a decade or two, and who might now be on the other side of the political fence.
But Buzz can sustain a real conversation -- I've seen this in my day and a half of use. Partially because it doesn't have Twitters self-imposed limit or Facebooks playful distractions; and largely because you reply in your email, a milieu where actual conversation is the norm. This is significant for NPOs that want to know what's being said about them in public on the web. I noted from a Twitter post this week that the Tactical Philosophy blog had a few entries discussing the pros and cons of Idealists' handling of a funding crisis. But Twitter wasn't a good vehicle for a nuanced conversation on that, and I can't see that type of dialogue setting in on Facebook. Buzz would be ideal for it.
The Best is Yet to Come
This week, Google rolled out Buzz to GMail. Down the road, they'll add it to Google Apps for Domains. The day that happens, we'll see something even more powerful. Enterprise microblogging isn't a new idea -- apps like Yammer and Socialcast have had a lot of success with it. I'm actually a big fan of Socialcast, which has a lot in common with Buzz, but I was stumped as to how I could introduce a new application at my workplace that I believe would be insanely useful, but most of the staff can't envision a need for at all. What would have sold it, I have no doubt, is the level of email integration that Buzz sports. By making social conversations so seamlessly entwined with the direct communication, Google sells the concept. How many of you are trying hard to explain to your co-workers that Twitter isn't a meaningless fad, and that there's business value in casual communication? Buzz will put it in their faces, and, daunting as it might be at first, I think it will win them over.
...or you might. I find that, in a 25 year IT career that has always included a percentage of tech support, human nature is to use the features of an application that we know about, and only go looking for new features when a clearly defined need for one arises. In that scenario, some great functionality might be hiding in plain sight. Here are a few of my favorite "not very well-hidden" secrets. Share yours in the comments.
Google Search Filtering
Have you ever clicked the "Show Options" link on your results page? Do a search for whatever interests you and try it (it's located right under the Google logo). This will add a left navigation bar with some very useful filtering options. Of note, you can narrow to a trendy real-time search buy clicking on "Latest" under "Any Time"; choose a date range,filter out the pages that you've seen, or haven't seen yet - how useful is that for finding that page that you googled last week but didn't save? The funny thing is that Google has an "Advanced Search" screen, which, of course, can do many things that this bar can't (such as searching for public domain media).
Microsoft Outlook Shortcuts
If you use Outlook, you know how simple it is to find your mail and calendar. Other common folders are conveniently placed in your default view. But if you're the slightest bit of a power user, or you work in an environment where users share mailbox folders or use Exchange's Public Folders, than keeping track of all of those folders can get a bit tedious. That's what the Shortcut view is for. Buried below the Mail, Calendar and Task buttons, you can move it up to the visible button list by right-clicking on the bar area (in the lower-left hand corner of Outlook 2003 or 2007's screen) and choosing "Navigation Pane Options". Highlight "Shortcuts" and then click "Move up" enough times to get it in one of the first four positions. Click OK, then click on the "Shortcuts" bar. From here, you can add new shortcuts and, optionally, arrange them in shortcut groups. You can rename the shortcuts with more meaningful titles, so that, if, say, you're monitoring a norther user's inbox, you can give it their name instead of having two folders named "Inbox". One tip: to add shortcuts to a group, right-click on the group title and add from there.
Facebook Friend Lists
Nothing makes Facebook more manageable than Friends Lists, and, with the new security changes, this is more true than ever. If you're like me, your connections on Facebook span every facet of your life, from family to childhood friends to co-workers. Wouldn't it be useful to be able to send links and messages to all of your co-workers but not your friends, or vice-versa? Click on "Friends" from the Facebook menu, then all connections. If you've become a fan of a page or two, you'll see that Facebook has already created two lists for you: Friends and Pages. To make more, scroll through your connection list and click to "Add to List" option to the right. You can create new lists from there, and add friends to multiple lists.
When you share a link, note, video or whatever, you can choose which list to send it to by clicking on the lock icon next to the "Share" button and choosing "Customize".
There Are More
Did you know about these features? Are there other ones that you use that make your use of popular applications and web sites much more manageable? Leave a comment and let us know.
Social networks provide nonprofits with great opportunities to raise awareness, just as they offer individuals more opportunities to be diagnosed with information overload syndrome. To my mind, the value of tools like Twitter and Facebook are not only that they increase my ability to communicate with people, but also that they replace communication models that are less efficient. Prior to social networks, we had Email, phones, Fax and Instant Messaging (IM). Each of these were ideal for one to one communication, and suitable for group messaging, but poor at broadcasting. With Twitter and Facebook, we have broader recipient bases for our messaging. Accordingly, there's also an assumption that we are casual listeners. With so much information hitting those streams, it would be unrealistic to expect anyone to listen 24/7.
Twitter offers, in addition to the casual stream, a person-to-person option called direct messaging. This is handy when you want to share information with a twitter friend that you might not want to broadcast, such as your email address, or a link to a map to your house. You can only direct message someone who is following you -- otherwise, it would be far too easy to abuse. Direct messages have more more in common with old-fashioned IM and EMail than Twitter posts. You can't direct message multiple recipients, and most of us receive direct messages in our email inboxes and/or via SMS, to insure that we don't miss them.
So I took note when a friend on a popular forum posted that his organization was launching a big campaign, and he was looking for a tool that would let him send a direct messages to every one of his followers. This, to me, seems like a bad idea. While I follow a lot of people and organizations on Twitter, I subscribe by email to far fewer mailing lists, limiting that personal contact to the ones that I am most interested in and/or able to support. I follow about 250 organizations on Twitter; I have no care to receive all of their campaign emails. But i trust that, if they are doing something exciting or significant, I'll hear about it. My friends will post a link on Facebook. They'll also retweet it. The power of social media is -- or, at least, should be -- that the interesting and important information gets voted up, and highlighted, based on how it's valued by the recipients, not the sender.
Social networks differ primarily from email and fax in that they are socially-driven messaging. The priority of any particular message can be set by each persons community that they tune into. My friend thinks his campaign is the most important thing coming down the pike, and that he should be able to transcend the casual nature of Twitter conversation in order to let me know about it. And, of course, I think that every campaign that my org trumpets is more important than his. But I think that proper campaign etiquette and strategy is to blast information on the mediums that support that, where your constituents sign up to be individually alerted. If you want to spread the word on Twitter or Facebook, focus on the message, not the media, and let the community carry it for you, if they agree that it's worthy.
To break down that tweet a bit, @kanter is the well-known Beth Kanter of Beth's blog. @pearlbear is former Idealware blogger and current contributor Michelle Murrain, and Beth asked us, in the referenced blog post, to dive a bit into internet security and how it contrasts with internet privacy concerns. Michelle's response, offers excellent and concise definitions of security and privacy as they apply to the web, and then sums up with a key distinction: security is a set of tools for protecting systems and information. The sensitivity of that data (and need for privacy) is a matter of policy. So the next question is, once you have your security systems and policies in place, what happens when the the policies are breached?
Craft a Policy that Minimizes Violations
Social media is casual media. The Web 2.0 approach is to present a true face to the world, one that interacts with the public and allows for individuals, with individual tastes and opinions, to share organizational information online. So a strict rule book and mandated wording for your talking points are not going to work.
Your online constituents expect your staff to have a shared understanding of your organization's mission and objectives. But they also expect the CEO, the Marketing Assistant and the volunteer Receptionists to have real names (and real pictures on their profiles); their own online voices; and interests they share that go beyond the corporate script. It's not a matter of venturing too far out of the water -- in fact, that could be as much of a problem as staying too close to the prepared scripts. But the tone that works is the one of a human being sharing their commitment and excitement about the work that they (and you) do.
Expect that the message will reflect individual interpretations and biases. Manage the messaging to the key points, and make clear the areas that shouldn't be discussed in public. Monitor the discussion, and proactively mentor (as opposed to chastising) staff who stray in ways that violate the policy, or seem capable of doing so.
The Case for Transparency
Transparency assumes that multiple voices are being heard; that honest opinions are being shared, and that organizations aren't sweeping the negative issues under the virtual rug. Admittedly, it's a scary idea that your staff, your constituents, and your clients should all be free to represent you. The best practice of corporate communications, for many years, was to run all messaging through Marketing/Communications experts and tightly control what was said. I see two big reasons for doing otherwise:
We no longer have a controlled media.
Controlled messaging worked when opening your own TV or Radio Station was prohibitively expensive. Today, YouTube, Yelp and Video Blogs are TV Stations. Twitter and Facebook Status are radio stations. The investment cost to speak your mind to a public audience has just about vanished.
We make more mistakes by under-communicating than we do by over-communicating.
Is the importance of hiding something worth the cost of looking like you have something to hide? At the peak of the dot com boom, I hired someone onto my staff at about $10k more (annually) than current staff in similar roles were making. An HR clerk accidentally sent the offer letter to my entire staff. The fallout was that I had meaningful talks about compensation with each of my staff; made them aware that they were getting market (or better) in a rapidly changing market, and that we were keeping pace on anniversary dates. Prior to the breach, a few of my staff had been wrongly convinced that they were underpaid in their positions. The incident only strengthened the trust between us.
The Good, the Bad, and the Messenger
Your blog should allow comments, and -- short of spam, personal attacks and incivility -- shouldn't be censored. A few years ago, a former employee of my (former) org managed to register the .com extension of our domain name and put up a web site criticizing us. While the site didn't get a lot of hits, he did manage to find other departed staff with axes to grind, and his online forum was about a 50-50 mix of people trashing us and others defending. After about a month, he went in and deleted the 50% of forum messages that spoke up for our organization, leaving the now one-sided, negative conversation intact. And that was the end of his forum; nobody ever posted there again.
There were some interesting lessons here for us. He had a lot of inside knowledge that he shared, with no concern or allegiance to our policy. And he was motivated and well-resourced to use the web to attack us, But, in the end, we didn't see any negative impact on our organization. The truth was, it was easy to separate his bias from his "inside scoops", and hard to paint us in a very negative light, because the skeletons that he let out of our closet were a lot like anybody else's.
What this proves is that message delivery accounts for the messenger. Good and bad tweets and blog posts about your organization will be weighed by the position and credibility of the tweeter or blogger.
Transparency and Constituent Data Breaches
Two years ago, a number of nonprofits were faced with a difficult decision when a popular hosted eCRM service was compromised, and account information for donors was stolen by one or more hackers. Thankfully, this wasn't credit card information, but it included login details, and I'm sure that we all know people who use the same password for their online giving as they do for other web sites, such as, perhaps, their online banking. This was a serious breach, and there was a certain amount of disclosure from the nonprofits to their constituents that was mandated.
Strident voices in the community called for full disclosure, urging affected nonprofits to put a warning on the home page of their web sites. Many of the organizations settled for alerting every donor that was potentially compromised via phone and/or email, determining that their unaffected constituents might not be clear on how the breach happened or what the risks were, and would simply take the home page warning as a suggestion to not donate online.
To frame this as a black and white issue, demanding that it be treated with no discretion, is extreme. The seriousness and threat that resulted from this particular breach was not a simple thing to quantify or explain. So it boils down to a number of factors:
Scope: If all or most of your supporters are at risk, or the number at risk is in the six figure range, it's probably more responsible, in the name of protecting them, to broadcast the alert widely. If, as in the case above, those impacted are the ones donate online, then that's probably not close to the amount that would fully warrant broad disclosure, as even the strident voice pointed out.
Risk: Will your constituents understand that the notice is informational, and not an admission of guilt or irresponsibility in handling their sensitive data? Alternatively, if this becomes public knowledge, would your lack of transparency look like an admission of guilt? You should be comfortable with your decision, and able to explain it.
Consistency: Some nonprofits have more responsibility to model transparency than others. If the Sunlight Foundation was one of the organizations impacted, it's a no-brainer. Salvation Army? Transparency isn't referenced on their "Positions" page.
Courtesy: Some constituencies are more savvy about this type of thing than others. If the affected constituents have all been notified, and they represent a small portion of the donor base, it's questionable whether scaring your supporters in the name of openness is really warranted.
Since alternate exposure, in the press or community, is likely to occur, the priority is to have a consistent policy about how and when you broadcast information about security breaches. Denying that something has had happened in any public forum would be irresponsible and unethical, and most likely come right back at you. Not being able to explain why you chose not to publicize it on your website could also have damaging consequences. Erring on the side of alerting and protecting those impacted by security breaches is the better way to go, but the final choice has to weigh in all of the risks and factors.
Conclusion
All of my examples assume you're doing the right things. You have justifiable reasons for doing things that might be considered provocative. Your overall efforts are mission-focused. And the reasons for privacy regarding certain information are that it needs to be private (client medical records, for example); it supports your mission-based objectives by being private, and/or it respects the privacy of people close to the information.
No matter how well we protect our data, the walls are much thinner than they used to be. Any unfortunate tweet can "go viral". We can't put a lock on our information that will truly secure it. So it's important to manage communications with an understanding that information will be shared. Protect your overall reputation, and don't sweat the minor slips that reveal, mostly, that you're not a paragon of perfection, maybe, but a group of human beings, struggling to make a difference under the usual conditions.
Last week, I kicked off this series on setting up a basic web site with Drupal, the popular open source Content Management System. This week we're going to take a closer look at Modules, the Drupal add-ons that can extend your web site's functionality. One of the great things about Drupal is that it is a popular application with a large developer community working with and around it. So there are about a thousand modules that you can use to extend Drupal, covering everything from document management to payment processing. The good news: there's probably one that supports the functionality that you want to add to your web site. Bad news: needle in a haystack?
A potentially easier way to add extra functionality to Drupal is to download a customized version, such as CiviCRM or Open Atrium. We'll discuss those options later in the Drupal 101 series.
Core Modules
Drupal comes with a number of built-in modules that you can optionally enable. Some are obviously useful, others not so much. Here are some notes on the ones that you might not initially know that you need:
Primary content types like blog, forum and book offer different modules for user input. They can be combined, or you can pick one for a simple site. Since the differences between, say , a blog (individual journal that people can comment on) and a forum (topical posts that people can reply to) are less distinct than they are in other CMS's, you might want to pick one or two primary content types and then supplement them with more distinctive ones, such as polls or profiles.
Enabling contact allows your users to send private messages to each other on the site, as well as allowing you to set up site-wide contact forms.
OpenID allows your users more flexibility and control as to how they log into your site. I can't see a good reason not to enable this on a public site. Since more and more people have profiles on social networking sites and Google, tools like Facebook Connect or Google Friend Connect should be considered as well.
By default, Drupal asks new users for a name and email, but not much else. With the Profiles module, you can create custom fields and allow your users to share information much as they would on a social network.
Taxonomy is also recommended, and I'll talk more about that next week.
Throttle should be used on any high-traffic site to improve performance.
Use Trigger if you want to set up alerting and automation on your site.
More than some CMS's, Drupal is a content-centric system. It doesn't simply manage content, but the web interface is structured around the content it manages: content types, content metadata (taxonomies), content sources (RSS feeds). Out of the virtual box, Drupal has content types like blog entries, pages and stories. Each content type has a data entry form associated with it. So, if you create a number of stories, and you want to read them all, then you can browse to the page "story" and they'll all be listed there. CCK helps you create additional content types and use a fairly robust form-builder to customize the screens.
The Views module lets you customize the appearance and functionality of many of Drupal's standard screens, and to add your own. Unlike CCK, which is limited to the default layout of content types, Views lets you seriously customize the interface. One easy reason to install Views is in order to take advantage of the Calendar view, which gives you not only a full page, graphical calendar to add events to and display, but also sidebar calendar widgets and upcoming event lists.
Here's a tip: setting up the calendar view is reasonably tedious. The best write-up explaining it (for Drupal 6) is here: http://drupal.org/node/326061. Drupal's documentation is okay, but this is step-by-step. It does miss one step, though, which is to add the "Event Date - From date" and "Event Date - To date" to the Fields listing (with friendlier titles, like "From" and "To"). Otherwise, calendar items show on the day they were submitted instead of the day that they are occurring.
There's a good case to be made that these two modules should be folded into Drupal's base package, because, in addition to providing very powerful customization features to the core product, there are a whole slew of additional modules that require their presence. If you plan to install a number of modules and/or customize your site, these are pretty much pre-requisites, so just grab and install them.
What-You-See-Is-What-You Get, or Rich Text Format (RTE) editors transform Drupal's default data input boxes into flexible editors with Word-like toolbars. The WSYIWYG module lets you install the editor of your choice. I've done well with FCKEditor (recently rebranded CKEditor, thank you!). The WYSIWYG module lets you work with multiple RTE packages and strategically assign them to different fields and content types. Most RTE editors are very configurable, but note that, in addition to installing the modules, you need to install the editors themselves, so follow the instructions carefully.
If you're building a community site, with hopes of having lots of interactive, social features, Organic Groups gives you the flexibility to not only create all sorts of groups and affiliations on your own, but let your users create their own groups as well, much like Facebook does. For an interactive site, this is essential.
E-Commerce/Donations
Many modules are available for either integrating with Authorize.net or Paypal, or setting up your own e-commerce site. The aptly named e-Commerce module and Ubercart are among the better known and supported options.
Drupal fans: what modules do you recommend? Which do you install first? Leave your recommendations in the comments.
Next week, we'll talk about menus, blocks and taxonomies: Drupal 101: Navigation.
The popular theory is that, with social networks like Twitter and Facebook serving as link referral tools, there's no need to setup and look at feeds in a reader anymore. And I agree that many people will forgo RSS in favor of the links that their friends and mentors tweet and share. But this is kind of like saying that, if more people shop at farmer's markets than supermarkets, we will no longer need trucks. Dave Winer, quite arguably the founder of RSS, and our friends at ReadWriteWeb have leapt to RSS's defense with similar points - Winer puts it best, saying:
"These protocols...are so deeply ingrained in the infrastructure they become part of the fabric of the Internet. They don't die, they don't rest in piece."
My arguments for the defense:
1. RSS is, and always has been about, taking control of the information you peruse. Instead of searching, browsing, and otherwise separating a little wheat from a load of chaff, you use RSS to subscribe to the content that you have vetted as pertinent to your interests and needs. While that might cross-over a bit with what your friends want to share on Facebook, it's you determining the importance, not your friends. For a number of us, who use the internet for research; brand monitoring; or other explicit purposes, a good RSS Reader will still offer the best productivity boost out there.
2. Where do you think your friends get those links? It's highly likely that most of them -- before the retweets and the sharing -- grabbed them from an RSS feed. I post links on Twitter and Facebook, and I get most of them from my Google Reader flow.
3. It's not the water, it's the pipe. The majority of those links referred by Twitter are fed into Twitter via RSS. Twitterfeed, the most popular tool for feeding RSS data to Twitter, boasts about half a million feeds. Facebook, Friendfeed and their ilk all allow importing from RSS sources to profiles.
So, here are some of the ways I use RSS every day:
Basic Aggregation with Drupal
My first big RSS experiment built on the nptech tagging phenomenon. Some background: About five years ago, with the advent of RSS-enabled websites that allowed for storing and tagging information (such as Delicious, Flickr and most blogging platforms), Techsoup CEO Marnie Webb had a bright idea. She started tagging articles, blog posts, and other content pertinent to those working in or with nonprofits and technology with the tag "nptech". She invited her friends to do the same. And she shared with everyone her tips for setting up an RSS newsreader and subscribing to things marked with our tag. Marnie and I had lunch in late 2005 and agreed that the next step was to set up a web site that aggregated all of this information. So I put up the nptech.info site, which continues to pull nptech-tagged blog entries from around the web.
Other Tricks
Recently, I used Twitterfeed to push the nptech aggregated information to the nptechinfo Twitter account. So, if you don't like RSS, you can still get the links via Twitter. But stay aware that they get there via RSS!
But I'm pretty dull -- what's more exciting is the way that Google Reader let me create a "bundle" of all of the nptech blogs that I follow. You can sample a bunch of great Idealware-sympatico bloggers just by adding it to your reader.
Last week, I shared my impressions of Google Wave, which takes current web 2.0/Internet staple technologies like email, messaging, document collaboration, widgets/gadgets and extranets and mashes them up into an open communications standard that, if it lives up to Google's aspirations, will supersede email. There is little doubt in my mind that this is how the web will evolve. We've gone from:
The Yahoo! Directory model - a bunch of static web sites that can be catalogued and explored like chapters in a book, to
The Google needle/haystack approach - the web as a repository of data that can be mined with a proper query, to
Web 2.0, a referral-based model that mixes human opinion and interaction into the navigation system.
For many of us, we no longer browse, and we search less than we used to, because the data that we're looking for is either coming to us through readers and portals where we subscribe to it, or it's being referred to us by our friends and co-workers on social networks. Much of what we refer to eachother is content that we have created. The web is as much an application as it is a library now.
Google Wave might well be "Web 3.0", the step that breaks down the location-based structure of web data and replaces it completely with a social structure. Data isn't stored as much as it is shared. You don't browse to sites; you share, enhance, append, create and communicate about web content in individual waves. Servers are sources, not destinations in the new paradigm.
Looking at Wave in light of Google's mission and strategy supports this idea. Google wants to catalog, and make accessible, all of the world's information. Wave has a data mining and reporting feature called "robots". Robots are database agents that lurk in a wave, monitoring all activity, and then pop in as warranted when certain terms or actions trigger their response. The example I saw was of a nurse reporting in the wave that they're going to give patient "John Doe" a peanut butter sandwich. The robot has access to Doe's medical record, is aware of a peanut allergy, and pops in with a warning. Powerful stuff! But the underlying data source for Joe's medical record was Google Health. For many, health information is too valuable and easily abused to be trusted to Google, Yahoo!, or any online provider. The Wave security module that I saw hid some data from Wave participants, but was based upon the time that the person joined the Wave, not ongoing record level permissions.
This doesn't invalidate the use of Wave, by any means -- a wave that is housed on the Doctor's office server, and restricted to Doctor, Nurse and patient could enable those benefits securely. But as the easily recognizable lines between cloud computing and private applications; email and online community; shared documents and public records continue to blur, we need to be careful, and make sure that the learning curve that accompanies these web evolutions is tended to. After all, the worst public/private mistakes on the internet have generally involved someone "replying to all" when they didn't mean to. If it's that easy to forget who you're talking to in an email, how are we going to consciously track what we're revealing to whom in a wave, particularly when that wave has automatons popping data into the conversation as well?
The Wave as internet evolution idea supports a favored notion: data wants to be free. Open data advocates (like myself) are looking for interfaces that enable that access, and Wave's combination of creation and communication, facilitated by simple, but powerful data mining agents, is a powerful frontend. If it truly winds up as easy as email, which is, after all, the application that enticed our grandparents to use the net, then it has culture-changing potential. It will need to bring the users along for that ride, though, and it will be interesting to see how that goes.
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A few more interesting Google Wave stories popped up while I was drafting this one. Mashable's Google Wave: 5 Ways It Could Change the Web gives some concrete examples to some of the ideas I floated last week; and, for those of you lucky enough to have access to Wave, here's a tutorial on how to build a robot.
Questions you might be asking yourself about social networking -
Have you been asking yourself why you would put time, energy and potentially even funding towards social networking when you are have your hands full just keeping your core technology operational? Or, have you jumped on the band wagon, have your Facebook page up and have begun to tweet but are not seeing the results that you were expecting?
To address the first question – Why even start? – social networking is the “new” communication medium and is used extensively by people crossing many of the boundaries that exist for other media – age, gender, culture, education, etc. Social networking is simply a new tool and methodology for communication. Like any other business critical system, if there is an upgrade available that provides greater functionality, it is in the best interest of your organization to determine if the benefits of that upgrade are worth the related cost.
To engage your community in your mission, efforts have traditionally been focused on producing print, TV and radio advertising materials, providing content on your web site, and more recently many organizations have moved into email marketing/communication. Each of these methods of communication brings with it different costs and benefits, and reaches a potentially different audience. They all have two things in common – you are “pushing” information in one direction – out, and there is limited if any “ripple effect” from your messaging. The concept of social networking is simply that information is pushed out and/or conversations are started, and they are spread via your constituents’ personal and professional networks. The unique characteristic of social networking is that your potential benefit increases exponentially with a single piece of communication, and without increasing the cost of production.
Addressing the second question raised above – Why am I not getting the results I had hoped for?
There are a couple of questions below, and your answers will guide you to the correct action…
1 - Has an assessment been completed including the following items?
Assess your audience
Determine the appropriate framework for your message - Twitter allows 140 characters, Facebook has virtually unlimited capacity, and in both, you need to continue to actively message to stay “above the fold”.
Identify the appropriate tools to deliver the message – blog, Twitter, Facebook, Ning, Flickr, and so many more exist. Each has different qualities and drawbacks.
2 – Have you defined a strategy including the following items?
Training on selected tools and best practices in their use
Implementation plans
Schedule for content updates
Staffing for writing content and ongoing maintenance
Definition of evaluation methods – what are your metrics for determining if your efforts are successful?
A few closing thoughts to help you design a successful social networking strategy – Your planning for entering this new medium of communication should be as thoughtful as the planning for a new education or marketing campaign in any other medium to realize the maximum benefit. You must remember that this is a new medium, and like all new communication efforts, it takes some trial and error to find the best fit for your organization in terms of tools, frequency and substance of content. Know what you are evaluating for and do the analysis necessary to determine if your efforts are paying off. Finally, if you are not sure where to start – there are resources available, both freely accessible information on the web and consulting expertise.
For a recent workshop on email, I planned to cover the familiar point that effective email newsletters drive traffic to one's website. Use the web to have people take action, make donations, or sign up for further organizing on your website. And “Click this link” not only opens the door to useful activity, it also helps avoid the dreaded email attachment.
Sending a mass email with a word document, PDF or other attachment has many interrelated negatives associated with it. It may clog the mail server, get you tagged as a spammer, run into anti-virus software at the recipient end, may require installed software the reader doesn't have, may be presumptuous about their willingness to open your document. For these kinds of reasons, email newsletter software (like Constant Contact) may let you store logos or other images for your newsletter and yet block or make it difficult to attach documents.
In this case, as my workshop partner Linda and I prepared, we realized that the network members invited to the training had way more flexibility in their email than in their websites. There would not be much point talking about web activism and avoiding email attachments with folks with static, hard-to-update websites. And many had a lot to say in their emails, and did regularly attach documents to make up for lack of access to their website.
If you find yourself in that situation, here are a series of workarounds to attaching documents that you may find useful. And in fact, they often have virtues in themselves by offering tagging and other social networking features to increase the reach and value of your message.
Google documents: Upload flyers and other short document to google and publish as a public google document. Easy, free, familiar.
Here are some other initially free, with premium options available, ways to store fliers, documents, slideshows and other materials. Some just provide the file repository. Others, like slideshare and issuu, aslo include a convenient on-line viewer for slideshows or other publications.
Of course, these generally assume that whatever the privacy level of the email news and list, the attachments you mass mail have public value. In some cases, you can add authorized viewers, though this adds to the labor of posting the document.
Another approach is Yousendit.com, a convenient site typically used for sharing large files with small groups. You can also inexpensively purchase a premium service that would allow you to share documents with larger groups.
Ultimately, the lowering the cost and complexity of migrating websites to content management systems such as drupal, joomla or plone will overtime reduce the need for solutions like this. More and more organizations do have the ability to post “read more” content on their website with little more difficulty than the original email. In the meantime, the next notch up from the other solutions here and an interim step toward a website upgrade could be to start an attached blog using standard blog site services such as blogger or wordpress. Have the read more information on the blog and leave the problems of the static main site for another day.
I'm sure there are many other good solutions to this problem, and would love to hear yours.
Even if you will never tweet, it's obvious that Twitter is a source of useful information, and, in some cases, a more timely source than traditional search engines and media. If you use Firefox as your main web browser, and have the popular Greasemonkey add-on installed, which serves as a kind of macro language for the web, then the Twitter Google Results script adds some real power. Any Google search you perform will also search Twitter, posting the top five relevant results. Why is this useful? Well, when we heard rumors that a bomb had gone off somewhere near our Bozeman, Montana office, the Twitter results had current info and links that weren't indexed by Google yet
Namechk checks for your preferred username on a slew of Web 2.0 sites, from Bebo to Youtube. I found this useful to reserve peterscampbell at a few sites that I want to use but hadn't signed up for, and to learn that some other guy named peterscampbell had already grabbed it at Youtube, where I had used a different loginname... snap!
This is a tip, not a tool - if you've been stymied by Facebook's recent changes to how it handles updates, you can make a lot more sense of it by making lists of related friends, and then filtering the updates by group. Click on Friends and the "Create New List" button is at the top of the screen. I have lists for family, nptech, Boston friends, SF Friends, and a special one called "no tweets", which filters out everyone who cross-posts all of their Twitter updates to Facebook (my default view). Keeping up with all of this info is always a challenge, so the ability to filter out the echoes is a must.
Exhibit is a web site that lets you upload spreadsheets, maps and other data to an information rich, filterable, active web page that can then be shared. If your org works with a particular environmental cause, seeks a cure for a disease, or supports a particular community, you can share data about your cause dynamically and expressively with this amazing site.
Google revolutionized email with GMail, the first email platform in decades to question the basic assumptions about how email should work (by filing important email into folders). They're about to do the same thing with Voicemail. A year or two ago, they purchased Grandcentral, a service that allowed you to route multiple phone numbers to one shared voicemail box. A few months ago, they opened the revamped Google Voice to existing Grandcentral customers, and, surprise, it looks a bit like GMail.
When I look at GMail, Google Voice, and the recently announced Google Wave, a real-time communication and collaboration platform, and then picture these all integrated into a Google Apps account, it becomes clear that our phone systems are moving into the cloud as fast as our servers are, and, while it is always that controversial proposition of Google giving you stuff in return for the right to market to you based on all of your data, it still looks like they are poised to offer one of the most powerful, integrated communication platforms that the world has ever seen.
Have you run into any awesome things lately worth sharing? Leave a comment!
Do you run an online community? The definition is pretty sketchy, ranging from a blog with active commenters to, say, America Online. If we define an online community as a place where people share knowledge, support, and/or friendship via communication forums on web sites or via email, there are plenty of web sites, NING groups, mailing lists and AOL chat rooms that meet that criteria.
The current interest is spurred by the notion that this is the required web 2.0/3.0 direction for our organizational web sites. We've made the move to social media (as this recent report suggests); now we need to be the destination for this online interaction. I don't think that's really a given, any more than it's clear that diving into Facebook and Twitter is a good use of every nonprofit's resources. It all depends on who your constituents are and how they prefer to interact with you. But, certainly, engagement of all types (charitable, political, commercial) is expanding on the web, and most of us have an audience of supporters that we can communicate with here.
Buried deep in my techie past is a three year gig as an online community manager. It was a volunteer thing. More honestly, a hobby. In 1988, I set up a FidonetBulletin Board System (BBS); linked it to a number of international discussion groups (forums); and built up a healthy base of active participants.
This was before the world wide web was a household term. I ran specific software that allowed people to dial in, via modem, to my computer, and either read and type messages on line or download them into something called a "QWK reader"; read and reply off line, and then synchronize with my system later. There were about 1000 bulletin board systems within the local calling distance in San Francisco at the time. Many of them had specific topics, such as genealogy or cooking; mine was a bit more generally focused, but I appealed to birdwatchers, because I published rare bird alerts, and to people who liked to talk politics. This was during the first gulf war, and many of my friends system's were sporting American Flags (in ASCII Art), while my much more liberal board was the place to be if you were more critical of the war effort.
At the peak of activity, I averaged 200 messages a day in our main forum, and I'm pretty sure that the things that made this work apply just as much to the more sophisticated communities in play today. Those were:
Meeting a Need: There were plenty of people who desired a place to talk politics and share with a community, and there wasn't a lot of competition. The bulk of my success was offering the right thing at the right time. It's much tougher now to hang a shingle and convince people that your community will meet their needs when they have millions to choose from. How successful -- and how useful -- your community might be depends on how much of a unique need it serves.
Maintaining Focus: many of the popular bulletin boards had forums, online gaming, and downloads. My board had forums. The handful of downloads were the QWK readers and supporting software that helped people use the forums. The first time you logged on, you were subjected to a rambling bit of required reading that said, basically, "if birdwatching and chatting about the issues of the day interests you, keep on reading", and I saw numerous people hang up before getting through that, which i considered a very good thing. The ones that made it through tended to be civil and engaged by what they signed on for. By focusing more on what made for a quality discussion, as opposed to trying to attract a large, diverse crowd, my base grew much bigger than I ever imagined it would.
Tolerance and Civility: We had a few conservatives among our active callers, and that kept the conversation lively. But we had excellent manners, never resorting to personal attacks and sending lots of private messages to the contrarians supporting their involvement. We really appreciated them, and they appreciated semi-celebrity status. It was all about the arguments, not about the attitude. Mind you, this was 1989/90 -- I'm not sure if it's possible to have civil public political debates today...
Active moderation: My hobby was a full time job that I did on top of my full time job. I engaged with my callers as if they were sitting in my living room, being gracious and helpful while I participated fully in the main events. There was a little moderation required to keep the tone civil, and making the board safe for all -- particularly the ones with the minority opinions -- required having their trust that I wouldn't let any attacks get through without my response.
I think that the biggest question today is whether you should be building a community on your own, or engaging your community in the ample public places (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) that they might already hang out in. In fact, I think that where you engage is a fairly moot point, what's important is that you do engage and provide a forum that helps people cope and learn about the issues that your organization is addressing. Pretty much all of the bulleted advice above will apply to your community, or out in the community.
John Palfrey would probably call himself a “digital settler,” someone comfortable enough with technology to help open up the new realms of pervasive digital media and online social networking. I just heard him speak about the emerging population of “digital natives,” those among the 1 to 3 Billion people born after 1980 with access to the new web and/or mobile technology and who have been exposed to the ways and means of its merger with daily life. ("Digital immigrants" make up Palfrey's third and largest clump of the human population--those of us slowly struggling to make their way in the post-email new world.)
To see what it’s all about, before mentioning any websites, I think I’ll just pass on this youtube link.
For anyone working with youth in schools or youth-serving community organizations, Palfrey’s Born Digital, Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, is essential reading. Since reading it last winter, I have found myself referring to it repeatedly in planning meetings about on-line privacy and security on our sites, the constructions of line identities, how advocacy and services can mesh with everyday social networking as experienced by young people today.
Most anyone who went to this year’s nten.org Nonprofit Technology Conference will have returned reporting the emerging mainstream sensibility of integrating facebook, youtube, twitter and more into organizational strategy. I would not call Palfrey’s perspective an antitode to this exhilaration. It’s more that he is balancing the long term risks and opportunities, particularly for young people. And he is trying to explain their perspective to the extent he can interpret it.
An academic (including at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Socieity), Palfrey had something to say on these matters. So being of a certain age and cultural background, naturally, he wrote a book. Likewise, I found it and read it in the traditional fashion. And I truly do recommend it.
As fits his cautiously enthusiastic embrace of our digital era, Palfrey's talk took a somewhat defensive and apologetic tone about publishing a old fashioned book. He explained that in addition to the traditional book, you can read the Kindle edition. You can also visit the Born Digital wiki at http://www.digitalnative.org/wiki/Main_Page and immerse your personal self in a constantly community-updated version of the work. You can take part in the blog at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/digitalnatives/.
And with even more enthusiasm, he recommended absorbing the videos produced by some of his students that are bringing sections of the book to life. According to John, the one linked above was made by a 17 year old with no prior videography experience. Watch the video and I won’t say skip that chapter of the book, but you’ll have the idea. Look for others tagged digitalnative or find the links on http://www.digitalnative.org (including to the book).
His point about the video was that participating in the emerging world of digital social media carries risks, but those native to it and are mastering it, are as literate and as fully contributory to social discourse as other population segments. There is much positive to be gained from the emerging digital world, and those born to it will make the most of it.
Second, more to the point of the privacy and other risks, Palfrey also said that over time, young people born to this world will likewise natively come to weigh and take hold of privacy and security issues attendant to on-line profiles and sharing. The media may focus on teenagers coming to regret underage drinking pictures on facebook, flickr and such. To generalize from Palfrey a bit, their calculations about what to put on facebook may collectively mature faster than older generations’ thoughts about Linked In.
Likewise, thinking about a recent project here, in wrestling the pluses and minuses of whether an on-line database should store such information as “sought pregnancy or family counseling,”it made sense to get closer to the needs and thinking of the participating youth themselves. Sure educate them about what lies ahead for those “born digital,” but put ourselves in their position as well.
The presentation I heard by John Palfrey was sponsored by Boston’s Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Action (jalsa.org). In the discussion, I commented how voluntary self-exposure online has to be put in the context of massive involuntary collection of school, medical, business and credit, justice system and other governmental record-keeping. Many of the participants were thoughtful, experienced civil liberties attorneys and as the discussion progressed, there were many comments about national policy under Bush, recent litigation and such. I love hearing attorneys tie our everyday experiences back to what is going behind the scenes. I listened, and watched John Palfrey hang back and let that thread run its course rather than specifically connect it to his book.
Palfrey’s message is not that we should take data gathering lightly, but that we should pay special attention to what the generation of digital natives themselves do about it. When he showed Kanupriya Tewari’s video mentioned earlier, it struck me that she wove the voluntary and involuntary data collection together in a more accessible way than the book itself. Exactly his point!
I’ll end with an image that kept coming back to me: the kid in the opening credits of The Wire who throws a rock through the surveillance camera lens. One might speculate whether that, that kid, when he settles down a bit, will have a more balanced grasp of the balance between sharing and keeping private than many of us digital settler experts.
So when is too much social web a bad thing? I struggle sometimes in balancing my virtuals against my actuals, and find that many nonprofits I work with struggle to determine this same balance.
This year I attended a small conference where I met a recent college graduate. Actually, before I "met" him, I was sitting next to him in a workshop and happened to glance for a moment at his laptop screen. As the speaker spoke, I was listening, taking some notes, and fending off a few distractions in my email, feeds and my neighbors screen. My neighbor was fully immersed in online distractions - I glimpsed him tweeting away using a Firefox Twitter client, two IM conversations (in Facebook, and Skype), an email half in progress and a half written answer to a question on LinkedIn. Okay, it was more than a glance I stole...
Continuing not to mind my own business, I introduced myself, and asked him what he thought of the workshop so far. He said he had not "heard anything interesting" yet. He had, however, found it interesting enough to announce to his social network that he was in this workshop. I settled back in my chair, wondering if he had any mental cycles available to recognize anything useful the speaker might say. Of course by this point, I had also missed the last several minutes of the workshop.
The Center for Internet Addiction and Recovery describes "information overload" as one kind of addiction where "Individuals will spend greater amounts of time searching and collecting data from the web and organizing information," leading to obsessive compulsive tendencies and reduced work productivity. In a large scale epidemiological study on Internet addiction, Standford found that about 8% of participants used the Internet as a "way to escape problems or relieve negative mood". While on one hand, a major part of my work is to help nonprofits spend greater amounts of time organizing information, I also find myself regularly talking nonprofits out of many tools that add more organization, but also more disarray.
In thinking about this problem, I pulled from my social sciences training to develop this revolutionary Theory of Organizational Disarray (TOD), which can be simply illustrated with the following chart (drawn here in charcoal pencil on recycled printer paper).
Organizations who are phobic of all things technology can indeed dramatically increase order in their work by adopting strong technologies. There is a "Zone of Pragmatism" that we should ideally strive for, where technology is a practical tool for getting things done effectively, one of many such tools. Luddite organizations do not have to move very far to find the Zone. However, we begin to slide back from optimal levels the more we adopt tools, and the more we begin to love technology for technologies sake. In fact, you become worse off eventually with more tools, than you would have been before there ever were Internets as networks become increasingly shallow and fragmented. Implicit here is a correlation between loving technology and using more social networking tools - I am working on a new graph for this.
So it makes sense then that a software tool exists for helping you kick the social networking habit? Indeed there are. One such tool is Freedom. Developed for us Mac users (probably among the majority of social network addicts) for disconnecting you from the network, allowing you to focus on other meaningful pursuits, such as nutrition, exercise and physically seeing one another. Once you start it, you are no longer able to tweet, IM, email, or other virtual engagements without rebooting. I would rather see a social networking solution to this problem, maybe some tool that harnesses the collective shame power of my network by measuring how much folks care about what I write on a tweet-by-post basis and begins to color my computer screen increasing shades of embarrassment red.
What strategies have you employed to balance your social networking activities?
I've heard it a number of times: "Our organization wants our own Facebook." After you've gone through the strategic planning, and made sure that, indeed, building your own social network is exactly what you want to do (instead of building on networks already there, which, I think is what should be done 80% of the time), how do you go about doing it? I've been working on this for a while, and here's what I've found.
You have several options:
Ning. This is, in fact, the option I'd almost never choose, unless this is a very short-term, or throw-away, project. Ning is a Web 2.0 startup in search of a sustainable business plan, and who knows when it will fold, or what will happen to it. The community and data is not your own, and there is some evidence that they might be using that data in social networks on their platform in ways that they shouldn't be.
Elgg. Elgg is an open source social networking platform that had a previous life as an e-learning platform. It's meant for developers - although it does provide an out-of-the-box social network, it takes a fair bit of work to get it looking and working like you'd want it to. And, it's a young project, so that adding custom functionality is going to be harder than with established projects like Drupal or Joomla. I've installed and played with it a fair bit, and there is a lot to like about it, but the lack of a solid developer ecosystem, and the dearth of add-on modules and themes makes it a hard choice.
Drupal. Drupal has a module called Organic Groups, which is incredbily popular, and there are lots of other modules that add functionality to it. Building a social network on Drupal will take more work, but since you are starting from a really solid grounding of Drupal, and can extend this site in all sorts of ways, this might be the best option. It's the option I've chosen for two ongoing projects that are creating social networks.
Joomla. Joomla has a number of components that provide social networking functionality, including Community Builder and Group Jive. I haven't had a chance to play with these yet, but they are worth a look, and there are some great Joomla web shops out there that can help with this.
Proprietary platforms. There are quite a number of proprietary platforms that can also provide a social network site for your organization. In general, these are going to be fairly pricey, and not as customizable as the open source platforms are.
Final work: look before you jump into creating a new social networking site. Careful planning and investment are necessary for success.
Dear Mom, welcome to Facebook! I'm glad you're here, because we don't talk enough, and this is an opportunity to be a little more present in each other's lives. Mind you, it won't, and shouldn't, replace any phone calls or visits.
Facebook is a bit like taking the big, wide, Internet, and narrowing it down to just the stuff that your friends would show you. It's nice because we get to catch up with a lot of old and new friends in one place, but that same convenience also makes it a bit superficial. Since almost everything you say on Facebook is shared with all of your friends, you'll be saying things that you don't mind everyone hearing, That puts a bit of a filter on some of the meaningful exchanges that are so much a part of our true friendships.
Another big thing about Facebook is that it is the product of a private company; not a big, amorphous set of connections like the Internet at large. And, since it's "free", the business model is advertising. So Facebook is a business that makes money off of your interests and relationships. If that doesn't sound just a little bit scary to you, I think it should.
So here are some great things to do and some things to avoid on Facebook:
Connect with people you know (ignore requests from people that you've never met!)
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Share links to useful information, but stop short of sharing stuff that says more about your personal interests than you would want the world to know.
Ignore most of the applications. Our friends and family are, in general, serious and active people who don't have time to speculate on which of their Facebook friends they would like to be trapped on a desert island with. I routinely ignore all of the non-existent gifts and requests to do things that I really don't have any time to do, and, fortunately, my friends take the hint and stop bothering me with them.
Keep in mind that, every time you include a friend in an application invite, you're telling the company that made the application about them. So it's not just that so many of these things are insanely trivial -- they're also potentially nebulous.
Don't go crazy joining groups. Every time you join a group, you open your profile to all of the members of that group. It's better to try and contain your exposure to people that you are fairly certain you would want to know.
Finally, you have my email address - send me personal mail there, not via Facebook's mail. While the mail is useful for establishing communication with people you reconnect with, and the wall writing is fun because you share it with others and can start conversations, I much prefer keeping our personal communication in my regular email.
To my mind, Facebook is a fun place to catch up with old friends and share things with my community, but if I only know someone on Facebook, let's face it, they're not really a friend. Friendship implies a level of intimacy that shouldn't be subject to broad peer review and data mining for advertisers. And Facebook should not be a place that you can't forget to visit for a week, or more, without risking offending someone. Used moderately, with moderate expectations on the part of youa nd your Facebook friends, it has its rewards.
The world is coming to Facebook - it's not just my Mom; it's also my Dad, sister, brother-in-law, co-workers, grade school friends, and an assortment of people from everywhere in my life. What do you want to say to the people you're connecting with? Leave a comment!
Those of us who actively create internet content -- which includes many nonprofits, at this point - were fairly blindsided by a small, subsequently revoked change in Facebook's terms of service this month. The earlier terms allowed Facebook to use any content that a user publishes to the site in a variety of ways, as long as the user kept the content on the site. The change extended Facebook's rights to use beyond it's time on their system. They could keep using it after the user removed it, and they could even keep using it after the user cancelled their account. Facebook's defense of this action, in a blog post by Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, was that the intention was to insure that people whom you shared information with, such as emails, links or notes, didn't lose access to that information if/when you removed it. But, since the policy didn't isolate that use example from the broader uses, such as Facebook advertising their services with your content, or providing it to third parties, the reassurance left a lot of us cold. A use policy on a social networking site should establish, clearly, what will and won't happen with the content that you post to it, not leave it open ended to this extreme.
This incident prompted a fascinating post by Dr. Amanda French, comparing the license agreements of a variety of popular social networks. This is an important read, but the upshot is: Google services and MySpace have pretty clear terms; Facebook and LinkedIn claim a broad range of rights to content that we publish on their systems.
To me this is a bit like the separation of church and state. I expect that a social networking site, like an ISP, is a medium that I can use to communicate and share things, including things that i create and hold copyright to; not a magazine that licenses and retains ownership of works that I submit. If that's not the case, then I want to know that and be very careful about what I'm putting up there. In my case, I'm trying to protect my works and personal reputation; a nonprofit should be just as concerned about how a business like Facebook might portray them as they repurpose their content.
There is media -- content, that we create -- and there are mediums, and in the print world the issues of content ownership are very clearly outlined in contracts. Facebook and their ilk should be applying the same standards, maybe even more so, since they are publishers on a much more massive scale than, say Ms. Magazine or Popular Mechanics.
Twitter is my favorite social network. Why? Because it's easy to use (type a short message and hit enter); it's easy to follow (just keep scrolling through the main page); it's more casually interactive than the competitors; and, because I follow it in Twhirl, which is always in the upper-lefthand corner of my desktop, it's always there. To contrast, I usually have Facebook open in a Firefox tab, as well, but I can go for hours without thinking to click on it.
If you've been curious about Twitter, or you tried it, once, but couldn't see the utility, now might be a good time to try again. Getting started with Twitter can be a bit of a challenge if you don't know many people who are on it, but we have an active community that Idealware readers should fit right in with. The nonprofit Twitter pack gives you a quick index of people that you might actually want to follow. And as we move into nonprofit conference season, with NTEN's big shindig up in April and Techsoup's Netsquared a month behind it in May, there are a lot of people joining in. Just be sure that, before you follow a bunch of us, that you tell us who you are in your profile, and maybe post an introductory Tweet -- most people will not automatically follow back a blank slate.
Convenience, simplicity, immediacy, camaraderie -- these are the terms that I associate with Twitter. There are some features that I'd love to see, though. These could all be implemented by Twitter, or some by a clever third party.
First, I'd like to have the option, and for my followers to have the option, of typing an introductory note to appear in the email announcing that someone has a new follower. That way, if I follow you (assuming that you're on Twitter), I can say "Hi, you, I'm following you because I can tell by your tweets that you read the Idealware blog, and that indicates a refined taste in blogs" or "Hi, you, I see that you have all sorts of tweets about Android and the T-Mobile G1. I'm a fellow G1 user." Make this optional, sure, but the ability to set some context when I'm establishing a social relationship would be a welcome addition.
Second, please, make the user lists (followers and followees) into a manageable interface. Let me sort them by name, location, average number of tweets a day, whether they're following me back, how long since they last tweeted, how many tweets they've posted total. These are all useful metrics, and I can gleam some of them on Twitter; others via useful tools like Tweepler, which takes a stab at this type of manageability. And let me add people to groups, something that I really appreciate in Facebook's feature set. This can be done, in a fashion, by Tweetdeck, but only if you want to donate that much of your screen's real estate to your Twitter client. Twhirl added spellcheck this week, so I'm not going anywhere soon.
Third, while we all appreciate innovations like "Mr. Tweet", a service that analyzes your Twitter connections and makes additional recommendations, the main algorithm for this service seems to be "who are your friends following? You should follow them, too". Seems logical. But the result is that Mr. Tweet tells me, and everyone else, that we should follow the Twitter superstars, mostly social media gurus with followers in the thousands. Analysis of my profile should reveal that I use Twitter to converse with friends and associates, and follow very few people like that to begin with. So a recommendation engine based on my behavior, as well as my friends lists, would be great -- the current options are like a Google without the option to search on terms, just a button that returns the most popular sites on the web.
Those are my top three -- add your Twitter wish list requests in the comments.
I am getting more and more into tracking things online. Who wants to constantly do Google searches anyway, can't everything I want simply come to me instead? After pondering this little bit of laziness, I decided to consult my daughter, who always has a thing or two to say in support of slacking. After all, we both fell in love with the iPhone Google app that you can talk to, especially that day we really needed a Baskin Robbins fix. We agreed that while too much of a good thing can be bad, there is no harm in exploring the options.
I have used Google Alerts to send me updates on keywords and phrases that appear online, its pretty quick and easy to find out who is talking about stuff I am interested in, but it does miss a lot of conversations. Yotify is interesting, I used it to monitor Craigslist for nonprofit jobs involving art therapy for a friend, and after a while it did find a few opportunities I would have missed otherwise. For web work, I recently tried AreMySitesUp.com, which for free allows me to put in several sites and have it notify me if things were down. In particular, I can specify the system to look for keywords on the site, which helps to check if the database is running smoothly on the site. A new one I have not tried yet is called Trackle, which seems pretty similar to Yotify, but more social networky, so I can pick from a bunch of "tracklets" others have created, rank them, etc, and message out discoveries via Twitter.
One one level, these services are adding new ways for me to fill my inbox with noise, but over time I imagine optimizing the tracking to be particularly well targeted to find just what I need, without much effort on my part. Has anyone else had success with using these or other online tracking systems?
Friends of mine who are active on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are fond of proclaiming that email is dead. And, certainly, those of us who are active on these networks send less email to each other than we used to. I'm much more likely to direct message, tweet, or write on someone's wall if I have a quick question, comment or information referral for someone, the latter two if it's a question or info that I might benefit from having other people in my online community see.
But I don't see these alternatives as ships carrying the grim reaper onto email's shores -- I think they're more likely the saviors of email. As I said a couple of weeks ago in my "Myth of KISS" post, email applications are heavily abused, and they're not very good at managing large amounts of information. This hasn't stopped a good 90% of the people online from using email as their primary information aggregator. We get:
Personal emails
Mailing List items
ENewsletters
Automated alerts
Spam!
and a host of other things
in our email inboxes every day. The inbox places new messages on top and older messages scroll down and out of sight. Almost every email program on earth lets you, as you make time for it, pull emails into named folders, mark them as important, order them by name or date or subject, search for them, and archive them to some other part of your storage space, but none of them do more than some basic filtering and prioritizing for you, perhaps IDing 90% of the spam and, if you're a power user, allowing you to place messages from certain people in special folders.
The exception to the standard email processing rules is Google's GMail, which does innovative threading and labeling, allowing for, in my opinion, a superior tool for information management, but it's still a lot of work. The tools will improve, but it's kind of like hiring a better maid service to clean up congress - they'll make the halls shinier, but the same legislators will show up for work on the next day.
The answer is to acknowledge that email applications, as we know them, were never meant to process upwards of twenty or thirty messages a day. The information management defaults assume a manageable number of items, and many of us are way past that threshold. The power of alternative messaging mediums is that they are tailored to the types of messages they deliver, and their tools sets are accordingly more refined and targeted. If you get newsletters and alerts in your email, switch to RSS. If you do a lot of short messages or work coordination, look at IM. If you announce or broadcast information, or survey your contacts, use Twitter or Facebook. These mediums are, so far, much less susceptible to spam, and you can ignore messages once you've read them or skipped them, they don't have to be deleted. The closer you get to only receiving personal email in your inbox, the easier it will be to keep up with it
So these new mediums aren't gunning to eliminate our old, old electronic friend - they're just allowing it to go on a long overdue diet.
We've come a long way since the Pony Express. It's hard to imagine living in a time when your options for communication were limited to face-to-face, sllooowww mail, and, perhaps, carrier pigeon. Today, we have the opposite problem: there are so many mediums to choose from that a key communication skill is to gleam the method that the person you want to reach prefers. I was taken aback by an Australian ruling that Facebook was an acceptable medium for serving subpoenas, until I read that the defendants had been unreachable by phone or email for months beforehand. At first I thought they were just avoiding the subpoena -- still a big possibility -- but then I reconsidered. How many people have completely abandoned their primary email accounts, assuming that anything in them is spam, in favor of only reading their mail on Facebook or MySpace? Probably a considerable number. I know, just from my day-to-day business dealings, that I will reach some of my coworkers more effectively by phone than I will by email, and vice versa.
So we have postal mail, the telephone, the telegram, facsimile, short wave radio, walkie-talkie and intercom holding up the old guard. And we have email, cell phone, IM, chat, IRC, blogs, Twitter, forums and social networking services charging in as new(er) mediums. And I'm sure I've missed a bunch. The internet has opened up a Pandora's box of communication mediums. So why use one over another? If we break it down to a manageable number of mediums, say, Phone, IM, email and Twitter, there are some intriguing differences. These differences don't imply that one is better than another, but, certainly, one is more practical, courteous or efficient than another in a given circumstance. I evaluate the mediums on a few defining attributes:
Private or Social? While allowing that you can send group emails and IMs, and hold phone conferences, these mediums are primarily suited for one to one or a few conversations, whereas Twitter, and many of the web-based mediums, are social, with a large and partially unknown audience included.
Ambient or Invasive? A phone call is invasive, as is, to some extent, an IM. The sender is sitting there waiting for a response, so the courteous thing to do is to immediately re-prioritize whatever you're doing and respond to them. Email and tweets, on the other hand, are casual mediums. Ignoring either one for an hour is within the bounds of the sender's expectations.
Convenient or In Need of Management? I can send and receive IMs and Tweets and forget about them; phone calls as well, although voicemail needs to be dealt with. Email, on the other hand, is a demanding application. i have to manage it, sort it, categorize it, and clean it up.
Disposable or Archived? Phone calls and IMs, unless I record them, disappear after the conversation is ended. Emails and tweets are saved and searchable, giving me an always available archive of my communications (unless I delete them).
I suggested in a post last week that Twitter bridges the gap between email and IM, just as email bridged the gap between the letter and the phone call. Since then, I've been trying to figure out if a social, ambient, archive-able and convenient medium like microblogging is compelling in my organization. I took a look at Socialcast, one of the many corporate Twitter clones popping up, and I was very impressed with their implementation, which breaks the messages into statuses, ideas, questions and links.
Selling my staff on a tool like this is proving to be a challenge. The argument for it is fairly nuanced, and urging anyone to try something new on faith isn't easy. They're asking why this is better than the Microsoft Messenger chat application, or a more full-featured Sharepoint site? Those are good questions. Micro-messaging software lacks some of the features that these other mediums sport, but it provides a very simple and powerful, approach to information sharing that is far more collegial and less invasive than chat, while it's simpler and quicker to use than Sharepoint. And my bet is that, in the war of communications mediums, it will ultimately be the ones that are easiest to use and least disruptive that win. Or it should be.
"Show Options" link on your results page? Do a search for whatever interests you and try it (it's located right under the Google logo). This will add a left navigation bar with some very useful filtering options. Of note, you can narrow to a trendy real-time search buy clicking on "Latest" under "Any Time"; choose a date range,filter out the pages that you've seen, or haven't seen yet - how useful is that for finding that page that you googled last week but didn't save? The funny thing is that Google has an "Advanced Search" screen, which, of course, can do many things that this bar can't (such as searching for public domain media).
But if you're the slightest bit of a power user, or you work in an environment where users share mailbox folders or use Exchange's Public Folders, than keeping track of all of those folders can get a bit tedious. 
That's what the Shortcut view is for. Buried below the Mail, Calendar and Task buttons, you can move it up to the visible button list by right-clicking on the bar area (in the lower-left hand corner of Outlook 2003 or 2007's screen) and choosing "Navigation Pane Options". Highlight "Shortcuts" and then click "Move up" enough times to get it in one of the first four positions. Click OK, then click on the "Shortcuts" bar. From here, you can add new shortcuts and, optionally, arrange them in shortcut groups. You can rename the shortcuts with more meaningful titles, so that, if, say, you're monitoring a norther user's inbox, you can give it their name instead of having two folders named "Inbox". One tip: to add shortcuts to a group, right-click on the group title and add from there. 
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