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It’s Not You. It’s Me. June 22, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Networking.
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Most everyone starts using Twitter in the same way. Trying to gain some traction, we connect to lots of people for varying reasons: friends, coworkers, business partners, church members, etc.  Those connections lead to others and our little Twitter world grows.  Over time, we develop a fairly heterogeneous group of followers.

For some (perhaps most) of us, that group winds up with some fairly disjoint communities.  As a result, you begin to realize that some things you tweet are meaningless to large numbers of your followers.  Instead of bringing value to your followers, you are distracting them.  It may get to the point that you stop tweeting things for fear that they won’t readily appeal to a large percentage of your followers.  When you reach that point, the whole concept of Twitter begins to unravel.

Some would say that this is no big deal, that part of the appeal of Twitter is to bring these divergent worlds together and allow this cross-pollination to occur.  I can understand that approach from a theoretical perspective, but the reality is that there are certain tweets intended for one audience, and other tweets that should only be delivered to another.  In my case, most of my friends couldn’t care less about the finer points of IT leadership, while my business connections see little value in the arcane details of my chaperoning the 8th grade class trip.

Other social tools, like Plaxo and Facebook, understand that there are layers of access to our lives.  Plaxo, for example, allows you to divide your world into family, friends, and business contacts.  You control what each of those groups can see, allowing you to reveal more of yourself to those you are closer to.  Facebook has even more fine-grained access control, giving you the ability to selectively expose different items to groups or even individuals.

Twitter has a much simpler access control model: all or nothing. You can lock your account on Twitter, which forces people to request approval before they can see your tweets.  This is generally considered to be anti-social behavior on Twitter, where most people tend to keep their streams open.  Once approved, people have access to your tweets.  Oddly enough, people can see who you follow (and who follows you) even if your account is locked.

Within my circle, I am hearing more and more concern about this lack of access control in Twitter.  Real people in the real world have real concerns about what they share and with whom they share it.  Our tools should reflect our needs, not vice versa.  Twitter has tremendous value, but it falls short in supporting a more traditional model of progressive disclosure in our social interactions.

What to do?  I don’t want to abandon Twitter.  Instead, I set out to divide my Twitter world, creating a professional stream and a private stream.  Along the way, I knew I would have to drop some followers and hope that others would play along. I’d also have to figure out how to help people understand how my multiple Twitter personalities connected.

How did I do it?  How did it work out? We’re out of space in this post, so you’ll have to come back next time to find out.  In the meantime, share your thoughts: do you see a need for better access control in Twitter?  Would you split your account?  Does this even matter?

Scheduled Network Maintenance January 5, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Networking.
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Start your new year off right: take a moment to get your network in tip-top working order!

No, not the physical network attached to your computer. (Although I hope someone is doing that on a regular basis!)  I mean your social network, the foundation of your personal and professional world.

For many people, social networking tools became an important part of their world in 2008.  For others that have been using these tools for years, social technology took on added importance in the past year.  No matter how you got to this point, your networks need maintenance and care to stay vibrant and useful.

With that in mind, it’s time for a little dusting and polishing.  Here are some places to start:

  • Out With The Old
    Like weeds in a garden, old entries in your network can obscure the real value of your important connections.  Take a moment to review each member of your social communities.  Why are they there?  Do you even remember who these people are?  Have you taken time to keep the connection alive and fresh?

    What to do with old connections?  Two schools of thought prevail: purge or archive.  In the purge model, you ruthlessly delete outdated connections.  Archiving is a bit more merciful; older connections are moved to a separate archive area where they are available but not directly visible.

    Depending on the community, purge may be your only choice.  Outlook, however, makes archiving easy.  I maintain two extra contact folders named “Older” and “Ancient.” Over time, I migrate waning contacts from my primary contact list to Older and then Ancient.  That way, if I renew a connection, I can recall the previous history of that person.  Only my current contacts sync into my phone, making quick handheld searches faster.

  • In With The New
    Have you made contact with someone but not added them to your social communities?  I find this happens a lot: I add someone to my address book, but fail to find and connect to them in LinkedIn, Plaxo, and other communities.  Each of these tools have ways to find connections by searching your address book.  Take a moment to upload your contacts and work through the resulting list of potential new connections.
  • Seek Consistency
    As you add those new contacts into all your social worlds, make sure you have consistent connections among your worlds.  Are your LinkedIn connections mirrored in Plaxo?  Do you follow your Plaxo connections in Twitter? Is there alignment between Facebook friends and business connections?

    Unfortunately, figuring all this out is extraordinarily tedious.  While all of these systems can add address book entries to their own world, few of them have any ability to compare themselves to other social services.  This is a huge hole in the social fabric and a fundamental failure of the “walled garden” model of social services.  Nonetheless, it is worthwhile to have equivalence between all these services so that you are taking maximum advantage of all they have to offer for all your contacts.

  • Strike A Balance
    Twitter has a uniquely asymmetric connection model.  You can follow someone even if they don’t follow you, and vice versa.  If you both follow each other, certain features (like direct messaging) are unlocked for both of you.  Endless debates surround the value of following all your followers, but it makes sense to follow all the important ones.  I generally follow all new followers to check them out; if they become annoying, I stop following.  Take a moment to compare your followers with whom you are following and make appropriate corrections.

    There are handy tools that make this easy to do.  Twitter Karma will show you disparities in your Twitter world, with fixes just a few clicks away.  You might be surprised to see who is ignoring your fervent tweeting!

  • Freshen Your Appearance
    Welcome the new year with a new photo!  Upload a new profile picture to all your social sites.  We’re all a year older, so it’s time to let the world see what we look like now, not a year (or more) ago.  What?  You don’t have a picture in your profiles?  Arrggghhh!  This is one of my pet peeves, which I’ve previously addressed.  I forgive you for not paying attention back then, but now you have no excuse.  Post your picture right now!

    Done?  Ok, now go collect pictures of everyone in your contact list and add them to your address book. I cannot overstate the value of having headshots in my phone as I try to identify people in a crowd.  I have a terrible memory for names and faces and am mortified when I call someone by the wrong name.  Having those photos is a huge help.

    You can find photos everywhere: LinkedIn, Twitter, Plaxo, Facebook, and every other social site prompts people for their mugshot.  When all else fails, a Google image search for people with less-common names can help, too.  Play web detective for a few hours and collect some pictures.

  • Maintain Privacy
    Finally, review the privacy and disclosure settings for each of your social tools.  Are you sharing what you want to share? Hiding private stuff?  Although some sites have limited choices, others (like Plaxo and Facebook) offer more fine-grained privacy management settings.  Take a moment to make sure that all the buttons and dials are set to the right values so that you maintain appropriate relationships across your various social circles.

Whew!  That’s a bit of work, but worth every moment invested. With this housekeeping out of the way, you are ready to begin the new year!  Who knows where these tools will take you in 2009?

Public And Private Lives October 24, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Networking.
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Last month I talked about maintaining privacy in an open world.  Since then, I’ve got a lot of good feedback from people, all of whom share my concern.

As tools like Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo, and LinkedIn become more pervasive and status updates begin to filter between sites, lines are blurring between public, private, business, and personal posts.  Blogs that were once targeted at friends and family are being picked up by business associates.  Tweets intended for friends and classmates find their way to parents and teachers.  Many folks are rethinking what they post on blogs as they consider all the different groups that may read a post.  Even for those who have been long-time proponents of these new open social tools, it is becoming clear that some sort of layering is needed.

A friend of mine recently reported that his boss “de-friended” all of his reports in Facebook.  I can understand this.  Maintaining a professional distance is important, both physically and virtually.  Tweeting that you are calling in sick to take the day off is not a good idea when your boss (or HR) can easily pick up your Twitter feed.

I think there is tremendous value in these tools and am glad that they are increasing in popularity.  Unfortunately, most people are inherently private and will err on the side of communicating less when inappropriate exposure is possible.  It is a shame that, just as broad adoption takes hold, people will stop using the tools for fear of embarrassing themselves.

I don’t have an answer to this.  We’re seeing the first vestige of layered exposure in Plaxo, but Plaxo’s social sharing features are horribly immature.  The best sharing tools, like Twitter and Facebook, don’t provide enough layers to control content distribution.  Something needs to change, and quickly.  As I noted earlier, figure that out, and you’ll be the next social networking billionaire.

Maintaining Privacy In An Open World September 22, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Networking.
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My recent posting hiatus was not for lack of desire, but due more to a shortage of time. The ideas are there, swirling in my head, but getting them captured is a bit more difficult. At the moment, I’m on a flight to San Francisco, which is the perfect opportunity to resume writing.

(Rest assured that I have not had to engage in a seat-back war with the traveler ahead of me. Having an exit row seat provides a few inches of room that defuse any potential conflict with those that seek to recline into my personal space.)

As I become more engaged in online communities via Twitter, text messaging, and blogs, it is becoming clear that these tools provide a great but flawed way to simulate the one-to-many and many-to-many conversations that we have in our lives. It is easy to keep up with friends and family, catch otherwise unavailable bits of information, and develop stronger connections with people that matter to us. Unfortunately, these tools do a poor job of emulating the natural walls of privacy and discretion that accompany “real world” communication.

Most of us are fairly selective in deciding what with share with the world. Trivia about our personal lives gets routed to family and close friends. Work stuff goes to coworkers. Less sensitive things may wind up with public visibility, although few of us go out of our way to make sweeping public announcements. These boundaries are natural and intuitive, developed over a lifetime and enacted without much conscious thought.

Few of these boundaries exist in current social networking tools. Where they do exist, they are cumbersome and detract from the interaction experience. Consider a few examples:

  • Twitter has single level of communication.  People see everything you tweet, regardless of who they are.  The Twitter model presumes that listeners will solve the problem, ignoring things that don’t matter. This results in great streams of unimportant information washing over you with occasional nuggets of wisdom thrown in.  You can protect your updates in Twitter, restricting them to only those followers that you explicitly approve, but this is a fairly draconian measure: your tweets are pulled from the public timeline, your “@ replies” are hidden from general view, and you lose a lot of the value that Twitter naturally brings.
  • Plaxo tries to solve this problem with four levels of access: public, work, friends, and family.  This is a good idea, but is crippled by the tedious posting mechanism in Plaxo.  Updating your Pulse in Plaxo (the equivalent of tweeting) requires direct access to the Plaxo web site.  Unlike Twitter, Plaxo has no cool phone or mobile access mechanisms.  Still, the Plaxo idea of access controls is a start at solving the problem.
  • Yammer is a new service that restricts the Twitter experience to the corporate world.  You can create a Yammer environment for members of a single email domain, with all tweets (yams?) restricted to members of that space.  It solves the sensitive public exposure problem that makes many companies leery of Twitter, but immediately shifts it to the microcosm of the workplace: work has as many layers of privacy as the rest of the world.

What we need is a tool that emulates the natural exposure of data that we use every day. I want to develop a community of followers that, for some inexplicable reason, want to hear what I have to say. Within that community, I want to define many layers of access. When I post (or tweet, or whatever) I want a way to quickly and easily indicate the layers that should see that particular posting.

We seem to be in the early stages of building this system. Step one, being able to develop a community of follows, is well in hand. Step two, defining and applying layers of accessibility, is in its infancy and hardly usable. The last step, posting to those layers in a natural and intuitive way, is simply not possible yet.

Step two is easy. There are plenty of existing role-based security models that would be easily adapted to these environments. Let a user define an arbitrary number of layers, provide a way to map those layers to their followers, and you are done. Design some clever drag-and-drop interface with photo icons that appear to sit on a shiny reflective black surface, port it to Android and the iPhone, and you can probably pocket $10 million in venture capital by the end of the week.

The third step fascinates me. It is horribly difficult and a great exercise in elegant user interface design. How do you capture a message, quickly select one or more access levels, and send it out in a quick and intuitive way? Having to scroll and select from a pick list of levels is horribly invasive and breaks your concentration as you post. Are there gestures or some other interaction technique that make level selection easy and obvious? And I mean easy and obvious to anyone, not just the in-crowd that knows that Ajax is more than a cleanser.

Build this tool, and you’ll own the next wave of social interaction platforms. When it’s ready, give me a call so I can be a beta tester!

Imperfect Integration April 15, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Networking.
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Social networking sites are getting too clever by half, providing more and more features to lure users into their web of connected people.  What they are missing are the features that connect their “walled gardens” to other equally useful networks.

As I’ve posted before, I like different systems for different features.  LinkedIn is the gold standard for professional networking, delivering controlled access to professional colleagues in a manner that most closely mimics (and respects) real-world relationships.  Plaxo is the best contact management tool I’ve seen, with unparalleled cross-platform synchronization.  The Plaxo Pulse, which provides a Twitter-like stream of activity for your connected contacts, is interesting and becoming more useful.  My blogging platform is WordPress, which seems to meet my (limited) needs at this point. To be honest, I don’t know that I have the energy for Twitter, although I’m willing to tinker with it.

The problem with these systems is that they don’t play well together.  They want to attract users, confine them to their system, and keep them there for all levels of service.  I understand the rationale: eyeballs = dollars.  But I dislike the constraints, which makes it harder to use all the services.  I want them to interoperate seamlessly, but they aren’t there yet.

Plaxo makes an attempt at this, allowing you to hook feeds from other sites (like this blog) into your Plaxo pulse.  The problem is that Plaxo pulls the content into Plaxo, instead of connecting to the actual source.  As a result, updates lag and the Plaxo version gets out of date when I update the content.  More importantly, readers in Plaxo don’t see the full blog unless they click through to it.  Reading this in Plaxo?  Click here to read these posts in their full glory, see what I am reading, explore the archives, peruse the tag cloud, and subscribe directly (if you are so inclined).

LinkedIn has fairly pathetic contact management.  Why can’t it get my contacts from Plaxo, so that everything is in sync everywhere?  Why can’t LinkedIn connections be mirrored in Plaxo automatically (and vice versa)?  LinkedIn also has a simplistic Twitter-like feature, as does Plaxo.  Why can’t LinkedIn and Plaxo integrate my Twitter stream so I can update things in one place and see them everywhere?

I suspect this will all happen in due time as this space coalesces and matures.  Like other web technologies (and the web itself), we need this period of experimentation and overlap to figure out what works and what doesn’t.  At some point, it will settle out, great sums of money will change hands, and one integrated system will remain.  Until then, we’ll all be updating lots of similar sites, over and over again.

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