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If you are frustrated with Twitter mobile, then you’ll love Slandr.

What’s missing in Twitter mobile?

Choosing a page

They recently blogged about having 10 tweets per page…but I want more usability, I left this comment:

“At the end of a page instead of just older and newer, is it possible to get “previous 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 next” type of thing.

Reason being is if I’m on page 4, and decide to tweet, it takes me to the front page again. Then I have to click through 4 pages to get to where I left off. Instead all I would have to do is click page 4.”

Replies

Apparently coming soon, as per the end of this post.

Direct Messages

No go.

Favourites

No go.

SLANDR

Choosing a page

Slandr wins hands down with every feature, except probably the most important function…

You can only read one page of feeds (20 per page), there is no “next” or “previous” button

From their site:

“No ‘OLDER’ button:
Browsing back ‘with friends’ history is currently disabled per Twitter API. It will return when the API is updated.”

This makes it a shop stopper for reading your stream.
But I do visit it anyhow to check out my direct messages and replies…read on.

Avatars and Icons

You get avatars (not just a name like m.twitter) and icons for other functions

Replies

There is an icon next to each tweet to quick reply
There is a reply tab to see all your replies

Straight off this makes it a winner.

Direct Messages

There is an icon next to each tweet to direct message
There is a direct message tab to see all your messages (view both inbox and outbox)

Straight off this makes it a winner.

NOTE: the icon is still there for people who don’t follow each other, and if you try and send a direct message it won’t work.

Favourites

There is an icon next to each tweet to favourite.

How often am I on the train and I want to flag a tweet for later action…well now I can.

Only thing is that there isn’t a tab to see all your favourites

Search

Via Summize…how neat is that

Users

In your tweet stream you can click on a user next to a tweet to go to their stream, but there is also a Users tab to find your friends.
- type in friends name (this is not search, you need to know their name…darn!)
- a tag cloud of the most recently active 100 friends…neat!

Location

Change this via “settings”

Change this through the regular status update field
eg. L:Perth
This will not post as a tweet, it will just update your location profile

Geo

You can also change your location here.

More exciting than that is you can see the locations of your last 20 friends who have tweeted (but it does’t display their names)
- it also plots this on a map (click each location to get an exact location)

Not bad hey
- if one of my friends are travelling to my city they could change their location profile easily from the update status field
- next time they tweet I could see who’s around
- other option is to check Twitterlocal

Apparently there is more to come.

Brightkite

The other day I posted on Brightkite, which is a location awareness presence service (geoloco) ie. people check-in to places, so at anytime you know where your friends are located.
Once you are checked-in you can also upload photos and text, this is called placestreaming.

On thing they do is allow your check-ins to change your Twitter profile location setting
- with another option to also publish this as a new tweet (which Slandr doesn’t do).

I wonder what’s going to happen in the geoloco space.
Slandr is using Twitter for very primitive friend location awareness, I wonder if this can soon match the awesome features of Brightkite.

Twitter also has Twemes for hashtags, which is like on-the-fly Placestreaming, only a tag can be about anything, not just a place.
And then, as mentioned there is Twitterlocal for placestreaming based on location profile setting.

Do people use both Twitter and Brightkite, or would it be easier to have just one service for all this?

UPDATE: there is now a mobile web version of Brightkite.

A while back I mentioned that I like the idea that after a conference, conference-call, presentation, meeting, workshop, etc…you can continue the conversations online.

For a big conference like the Web 2.0 Expo, they used CrowdVine as a social networking tool…I’ve posted about it before. And of course this same tool can be used to continue the conversation once the conference is over. Vyew is another tool that saves your conference in a book where you can continue to collaborate and discuss asynchronously, it also has a widget so this book can be embedded anywhere.
Stewart Mader suggests a wiki rather than a conference showbag.

What I found in my last conference call is that most of what we talked about in the call can also be done online, in our community page, when we are not present at the same time (asynchronous).

These are three types of things we did in the conference call, that cover blogs, forums, and wikis:

1. News, and status around the globe from each team member [BLOG]

Each team member had a turn to update the team on their status

- why do this in the conference call, when we can subscribe to the group status blog, or each others personal blogs
- any conversation can be carried out in the comments
- all can read and/or take part in conversations on their own time
- this saves time on the call to do other stuff
- to recall something just go to the blog archive

This is put nicely from the wiki perspective by the Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein case study:

“The teleconference used to be one and a half hours long, with much time wasted on bringing people up to speed on the week’s events. Now team members update themselves on the wiki, and that part of the teleconference takes five to ten minutes.

The rest of the teleconference is used for ideas generation, being innovative, talking about problems and looking at solutions, which is what the meeting should be about. It shouldn’t be about updating people as to what’s happened, but thinking about our clients and how we can service them.”

2. Discussion about issues people had since the last call [FORUM]

The team was asked if there was anything to discuss.

This is what a conference call is all about…conversation.

But, we should not wait for a conference call to discuss things, why not use the community forums everyday.

3. Brainstormed an idea for better usability for one of our systems [WIKI]

What we basically did was come up with a list for things to appear in a drop down menu, that would cover all reasons when a user logs a support call.

It was good to do this synchronously as we could discuss whilst we made the list, nothing beats this.

But I’m sure we could of started this list in a wiki, and used the comments for discussion, and then perhaps join the conference call to finalise our list.

Summary

I realised in one meeting that we covered the use of 3 of the most important social tools.

Why do we need so many meetings, when we can be collaborating and conversing perpetually?

The more we use social tools, the shorter our meetings can be.

Nothing beats synchronous group chats to discuss out issues, but we can sometimes do most of this discussion, updates, and collaboration online, and call a short meeting to finalise and action our findings.

Next time I talk about social tools adoption, I can tell people you are doing it anyway, only this is doing the same thing when we are not all in the same room.

We can still collaborate, discuss, update when we are not in the same room.

The fact is people are fine to physically participate in informing their status and what they’ve been up to, discuss issues, and collaborate…but when it comes to doing this online they feel weird being social (open and visibility). Instead they use email as it’s more closed and private, and they do all three things with email (status, discuss, collaborate) that they do in person at a meeting, it’s like email is their asynchronous voice.

Part of the adoption process is to help people get over the awkwardness of being social online, we have to guide them by informing them social tools are not extra work, it’s what you are doing anyway.

Rough Example 1

“In a meeting you share your status, well here is a blog to do the exact same thing…you can even share any experiences, or whatever you like here.” (Above-the-Flow)

“In a meeting you take part in discussions, well here is a forum to do the exact same thing.”

“In a meeting we collaborate and brainstorm, well here is a wiki to do the exact same thing.”

“Email is for private correspondence, whereas these three tools above are the online version for what we do in meetings.”

“An easy way to think about it, is if it’s not private information, then a community tool can be used. The next step is to work out whether you need a blog, forum or wiki.”

“Please use these three tools when the context of what you want to do is about, status/experience, discussion, or collaboration.”

“These social tools will live in a community website, which assimilates our meeting room, this allows us to still communicate and work together when we are not in meetings.”

Using the approach above we are introducing social tools not for the heck of it, or as a knowledge sharing drive, etc…
We are introducing them to solve issues specific issues, that way people will be more serious about them, and these are issues that effect the whole enterprise.

If the reason of introducing social tools was-we need to collaborate more, and share knowledge-people are going to say “yeah, I’ve heard that before”, “I’m not sharing what I know” (power/trust), and “I haven’t got time”.

Instead if we put it across as solving particular issues, it is received in a more welcoming way, as it’s like we are going to deploy tools that we help them with their problems…it doesn’t come across like we want something out of them as much.

Rough Example 2

“The company is experiencing email stress, as part of this company-wide problem we are introducing communities and social tools in order to relieve this email overload.”

“The company is also wanting to save money on global conference calls, and save people’s time by making these calls shorter and less frequent by using community tools.”

“Within a community will be status diaries, discussion forums, and group brainstorming pages.
Please use these tools in replacement of less time spent in meeting, and please don’t use email if you want to have a group discussion, brainstrorm/collaborate or tell others about your status…instead use the correct community tool.”

“Our introduction of communities are intended to help tackle two serious issues in our enterprise that effect everyone: email and meeting overload. Please use communities for any of these three types of action, rather than email or having yet another meeting.”

“These are two serious issues affecting everyone in the company, and if we don’t all do the right thing, we won’t be able to overcome our issues. The company is one big group, and if a few seeds ignore this message, it will spoil the intentions and dynamics of the group. So remember your behaviour is going to affect the whole.”

“As part of this initiative we will be looking at recognising people and groups that use communities, we feel there will be self recognition anyway. We will also look into this as being incorporated into our company aims, and job performance reviews.”

“To kick all this off I introduce the whole office to the “Office community”, the only communication via email will be a notification to visit an entry at the “Office community”.”

“Business units, interest groups, and task rooms will be set up on request in order to use community tools to get your work done.”

I’m more for a viral bottom-up approach, but even so at some stage you may want to get the message out to the whole company. Perhaps have it in your back pocket in case the bottom-up approach isn’t quite working as expected.

This office-wide approach has to be repeated to staff within their own teams, community leaders will be champions, facilitators, role models…

From the above example I did not once mention: social, enterprise 2.0, web 2.0, knowledge sharing, collaboration (oops, I did mention this), we need to capitialise on opportunities for competitive advantage, getting stuff out of people’s heads, blogs, wikis…
Instead I raised issues like email overload and shorter/less meetings (time) that can be alleviated using social tools.

The sell is about not doing anything extra, it’s only offering substitute tools, it’s focused on specific problems, and it hopes to come across as doing people a favour to help them work less frustrated.

To finish up here’s an excerpt by JP Rangaswami in relation to Facebook, but to me it covers what social tools and the use of communities are all about, this is the engagement we are trying to achieve…social productivity by leveraging the social capital:

“…you’ve taken what happened at the water cooler or at the coffee shop and made it persistent, made it shareable, made it teachable, made it learnable […] Now we have the ability to actually understand what these relationships are, how information and decision making migrates horizontally, laterally through an organization, rather than through the published hierarchies, how people really work, and what people do as part of that work […] to look at the flows that matter rather than the flows of the politics”

It seems Brightkite is gaining a community for location based awareness, I’ve posted on this before including a list of geo-loco services, but none of these have really been on my radar as much as Brightkite. I’m sure some of these other services are doing great, maybe it’s just that my social graph has gravitated to Brightkite.
Just to note so far “The Swarm” is my favourite concept in intimate location awareness.

Twitter has the micro-blogging/presence/conversation community, and FriendFeed has the lifestream/watercooler community, so will Brightkite be the geo-loco tool of choice.

Check-in

It’s main deal is that you can text (email or web or mobile web) to “check in” to a location (just like Groovr and FireEagle)…manually letting others know where you are.
By doing this you can see who else is there, or nearby, or has been there.

So all you have to do is manually tell Brightkite where you are and it will display your peeps who have checked-in to locations closeby.

You can even get your check-ins to change your Twitter location on your profile, and further to this it can auto-tweet your check-in location in your twitter stream.

You can even make Placemarks, which are terms for common check-in places
eg. instead of always texting your work address you can text, “@work”, this will check you in to the location you have entered for your work.

Once you have “checked in” you can upload photo’s and micro-blog to your stream. If you don’t have much of a community at Brightkite, well then your check-in’s and posts can be re-syndicated to your Twitter stream.

There is also an option to hook it up with FireEagle which has a GPS option to auto-post location every so often. Not sure what other plans Brightkite has for GPS or cell tower triangulation.
Fireball is similar but different, it’s a mash up of FireEagle and Twitter.

Place micro-blogging

Once you have checked-in to a location you can blog text and photos, this adds to the “Placestream.” Basically each location has a stream, kind of like using hashtags for Twitter. A place can be anything, a city, state, country, cafe, library, exact address, etc…
Just like your check-ins your posts can also be re-published to your Twitter stream.

Place blogging is not new, check out: Outside.in, Placeblogger, Socialight, Flagr, PlacesToDo, etc…
Slightly similar are the various barcode services that provide information about a place via scanning a barcode.

Put it all together

1. You check-in
2. You see who’s nearby (Around Me)
3. You see a friend is at a location nearby
4. You browse to that placestream and see the activity stream (an archive of content your friends have posted at this location)…it also has a list of visitors and a map.
5. You see texts and photos describing a fun time, so you click on your friends avatar, which takes you to their profile page and send them a private message or nudge them

This is great to see what’s going on and to hook up, I wish it was around when I was a teenager.

You don’t necessarily have to follow these steps to know where your friends are at. Your homepage (What’s happening) has a stream called Me & My Friends. This is your main stream where you see all the latest check-ins and posts from your friends.
And your friends tab will list all your friends telling you their latest check-in location.

Interaction

The idea of Brightkite is to use it on the go, and you can certainly do this:
- SMS
- email
- mobile web

Here is a list of the SMS commands (PDF), the main three are:

Check in - @address,city state
Example: @2911 Walnut St, Denver, CO

Post a note - ! message
Example: ! best coffee in town

Note: photo’s are posted by email
You can also use this email address to blog posts and for checkins.

Message a friend - m username message
Example: m abby where you at?

Notification

Then there are SMS or email notifications.

You can get an SMS, email or both for:

- friend request
- direct message

You can get an SMS, email or both for:

- check-ins
- posts

This can be further limited to:

- friends/everyone
- a radius of 4000 metres, 2000 metres, 200 metres, 20 metres

This doesn’t have to apply to all your friends. For each friend you can change the friendship settings for notifications.
eg. you may want check-ins from all your friends SMSd to you, but not from 2 other friends.

Friends and Privacy

The network settings are quite good, when you add a friend, you have the choice to further cement the relationship by checking a box making them a trusted friend…you can edit these controls later.

More from Read/Write Web on this:

“There are also two modes in which you can post updates to Brightkite - public and private. Public mode is ideal when you’re out and about and looking to meet new people and private mode is for when you want to restrict your activities to only being viewed by friends. By default in private mode:

Strangers see your checkins at the city-level, and don’t see your posts
Friends see your checkins and posts at the city-level
Trusted friends see your checkins and posts at full accuracy
However, all those settings are easily editable.”

As mentioned you can edit these settings, at the moment I have:

EVERYONE
Check-in (hidden)…I’ve changed this from the default city/suburb
Posts (hidden)…I’ve changed this from the default city/suburb

FRIENDS
Check-in (city/suburb)
Posts (city/suburb)

TRUSTED FRIENDS
Check-in (exact)
Posts (exact)

Strangers (Everyone) won’t see what suburb/city I’ve checked-in to, and they won’t see my posts
- this means my check-ins or posts will not appear in my Twitter stream even if I had the setting on

Reason being is I don’t really want strangers to know where I am located, I probably wouldn’t mind that they saw my posts depending on the nature of them.
If I set “Everyone” posts to city/suburb these would appear at Twitter (where a whole lot of other strangers can also see them).

Settings I would consider changing depending at the time:
EVERYONE - change posts to city/suburb (so they can appear on Twitter)
FRIENDS - change posts to exact and change check-ins to exact

Or maybe if I’m feeling in a general type of mood, I’d just switch on to public mode.

I really don’t know why “The Swarm” hasn’t taken off, this blows away all geo-loco services.

Check out their blog for all the lastest features.

We are piloting communities at work, the gist of it is:

Blog - broadcast, experience, ideas, feedback, status
Forum - discussion
Wiki- collaborate, document, website

Step 1

The concept is, it’s much easier to do work using these new tools rather than using email to do all three of these things (broadcast, discuss, collaborate).

Let’s not mention that content is open and centralised for others to see, all have a voice, conversation can evolve into new knowledge, tune into your social filter to ask questions and finds things…pretty much a way to get things done.

Plus all your interactions, contributions, and readings happen in a contextual place. If I want to see the forum contributions I have made on the KM forum, I just go to the KM CoP, or goto my personal dashboard.

For me this beats trying to find this stuff in my email. I like my content to live in context eg. comments about a wiki to be in the wiki itself rather than be separated (disconnected) in my email client.

Jack Vinson talks about context as providing you with a “frame of reference”, he says:

“The better I understand the particular frame of reference (context), the better I can understand what this information or knowledge means.”

This is kind of different to the context I’m talking about. I’m talking about the context of a place, he is talking about seeing data in a context setting (even better if it’s a familiar setting) to help you use your current knowledge to create new information…I guess metaphor is another way.

In a way it does relate to what I’m talking about as reading a forum reply you found in your email, makes much more sense when you see it in the bigger picture of the actual forum.

Anyway so I call the use of our communities as Step 1.

We can now learn to use social tools to get work done with much less confusion, and of course this creates a perpetual open dialogue where knowledge is continuously created and re-used in the open.

Another benefit is that you end up with less email to deal with, as now what would of been email lives at the context of the place (as a blog post/comment, forum topic/reply, wiki contribution/comment).

Although, without an inbox for each community (private messages), one-to-one messages are done in email. I’d rather these emails as private or public messages that live in context, ie. at the community…see more.

Step 2

Does this really give you less email to deal with…I don’t think so.

It’s great we are attempting to no longer just rely on the intelligence of the email system to do our work, these social tools enable us to work easier and content is no longer siloed (a centralised and flowing corporate memory). But we are still using email.

How? Notifications, that’s how.

In our communities we currently have RSS disabled for some reason, maybe it’s a good thing for now, to prevent scaring people with too much new stuff to absorb.

For each blog and forum you can get new content delivered as a new email, and this is not just a notification, it’s the full-text of the blog post or forum topic.
When you subscribe to a blog or forum you are also subscribed to blog comments and forum replies (personally I’d like a choice).

Also, each blog post and each forum topic has an email address.
This means when you get an email for a new blog post, you can hit reply and it will post your comment to the blog…nice one.

You can also publish a new blog post by writing a new email and sending it to the blog email address (you can include non-subscribers to your blog in the to: or cc: field, that way they will get the content even though they don’t subscribe to your blog…nifty!)

OK, first thing.

I really like this email interoperability, it’s bringing the use of new tools to people’s comfort zone. But at the same time I would also like people to visit the actual community to experience the whole realm. There’s more chance you are going to read something else or contribute, if you are at the community itself.

So right now, this email interoperability is both good and bad.

The more concerning issue that some people have been talking about in the forums is since the introduction of communities they are getting just as much email.

They allude to “what’s the difference to my inbox overload if someone writes an email or publishes a blog post which I get in email anyway…isn’t communities meant to help with the inbox firehose.”
They also mention that community content gets lost in their inbox amongst all other types of emails.

This just screams RSS Reader.

But it also may scream our community Watchlist page.

The Watchlist page is a stream of the lastest stuff you are subscribed to, so throughout the day you can go to this page to see what’s new in the stream. The saves you visiting every blog and forum that you like from every community you like…instead it’s in one personalised page.
But I think I have to have an email subscription in order for this stuff to be on my Watchlist…darn (gotta look into this).

Whether it’s a Watchlist or an RSS Reader, it becomes a second dashboard.
You have your email dashboard and your what’s happening dashboard.

You can read RSS feeds within your email, but the idea is that email is a tool for personal correspondence, and that’s it, and an RSS Reader is a tool for the latest updates.

Perhaps a startpage could combine both into one dashboard, or Outlook could have an RSS Reader module that is just as important as the email inbox…in fact Outlook would no longer be an email client, it would be a personal productivity dashboard.

Conclusion

At the moment we are in the pre-introductory stage of Step 1. - a social way of doing work
(lots of learning, and culture change issues to go with this)

We also need to be prepared for Step 2.

And it’s Step 2. that may win the KM team acclaim in reducing the common email overload problem.

Any department that can reduce the email overload problem is going to get kudo’s, will it be the KM team.

Luis Suarez is creating a wave of interest in his self administered email detox rehab program

He links to one of my posts on examples of re-purposing email, in this post I want to talk about more tricky situations.

Invites

Blogs, wikis, and forums enable us to work socially and keep up to date using RSS Readers.

But email still has to be used to invite people to a new forum, a new blogger on the block, a new wiki set-up for an event, etc…

Luis talks about email just being for one-to-one sensitive correspondence…well invites are not sensitive and you’d want to broadcast an invite to a lot of people. So what to do?

Email is not alone here, blasting a private message to a list in your Facebook private messages is no different.

Although it is slightly different if you blast a private message within a topic community, this is like having numerous email inboxes, one for each community, and they each live at the community site.
But still with lots of inboxes you need some sort of dashboard to be notified on what’s going on, is email this dashboard, most of the time yes.

What I can think of is for each community or business unit to have a news blog, this blog can announce an invite to a new blog, wiki event, etc… This is the only way I see of bypassing email.

But what if that invite to a new wiki event is only intended for a few people in the community, the rest of the members have to put up with seeing the blog post even though is doesn’t really concern them.
You wouldn’t have got this occupational spam using email as it wouldn’t of been sent to non-relevant people, in this case a blog is causing more occupational spam in your RSS Reader, than spam in your email inbox.
This is the whole reason for my post on mesh blogs.

Tasks

My idea of mesh blogs also applied to tasks. Since a mesh blog is a specific blog set up for a two way audience, a member of one sub-team can post tasks to this blog without feeling they are spamming other sub-teams. The recipient can leave comments or create new posts to the sender as clarification, status, etc…

But what happens when the task is only for one or two people?

If a task was posted in a mesh blog for the support and tech team to communicate, then the one member of the tech team (sender) and the one or two members (recipients) of the support team are not going to be the only people who get this post. All members of both these sub-teams will get this post plus subsequent posts.

The only answer I can see is setting up a blog for each task, this way you don’t need to spam anyone.

Like Luis says, you could use a wiki, forum, or a blog for tasks. If it was a bigger task you could have a community or room so you can use all these tools.

In the end these are better than email as you can collaborate easier and it’s centralised in an open archive, rather than email siloes. This documented trail is knowledge sharing by doing work, there is no extra effort in having to think and share your knowledge for the greater good…and hopefully others can see your documented activity and re-use it, rather than re-inventing the wheel.

But why not use a task management tool to do the job, such as Lotus Connections (Activities)…I’d like to hear Luis’s progress on this addition to his program.

Anyway, whatever system is used, the idea is to use an RSS Reader for progress updates, or the dashboard widget itself.

On-the-fly conversation

The idea of a task is a unique communication between two or more parties to get a job done. An existing channel like a blog or wiki may not exist for this task, so a new one may need to be created, no matter how small or temporarily.

I find on-the-fly conversations in a very similar area.
In a past post I explained the difficulty in using existing blogs or forums to have a discussion that may only last 2 or 3 back and forth communications.
Basically you only want specific people to be in the discussion (perhaps privacy or simply courtesy of not spamming them), and setting up a forum for a very brief discussion can seem too much compared to sending an email.

But as mentioned earlier, at least the discussion can be re-used by others as it is visible.

I think in this situation email could be used if setting up a forum is too much work, unless the first email you send automatically sets up the forum. And subsequent back and forth emails are threaded into the open forum. With this system you can still use email for the discussion as it’s posted to a public space at the same time, or you could just go to that public space and post there, and subscribe to the feed for updates.

I covered this in a blog post a long time ago, once of the tools that seems to fit the bill is 9cays.

Basically you email people and 9cays…9cays will send people an email invite. When the reply to emails it will also appear at an public or private space, and this space is pretty much one blog post and comments.

Hmm, 9cays could be used for tasks.

Email the task to a worker and 9cays, and then just back and forth discuss via email or at the blog post comments, in the end you have a central place to house this (yeah for no email silos).

Rooms

Either a task or an on-the-fly forum, I think, is seen as it’s own thing. It may not be related to a community, but you still need to be able to use social community tools.
I feel that templates that are used to set up a community can be stripped down to a basic template to serve task requirements. And unlike a community, you would not need to request a task (room) space, any user can just set one up in one click.
Setting up a task room needs to be as accessible and easy as sending an email, otherwise people won’t use them.

So next time a few others and yourself have a task, don’t use email, instead set up a room in one click. You will have an instant blog, forum, wiki and document folder to do your work.
Others can eavesdrop, subscribe to or visit your room to keep in the loop.

Next time someone needs to do a similar task (perhaps the person who did the original task has left the company), they can re-use the knowledge that lives in the task room.

Next time you come off a cross business unit conference call and want to keep the discussion going online for about 2 weeks, don’t worry about trying to find the right CoP to use, just set up a room.

Yeah, no email siloes.

Plus the task information you are going to re-use isn’t just a deliverable, it includes all the workings out from blog posts, forum discussions, and wiki collaborations…now that’s tacitastic!

The reason I’m harping on about tasks is that sure you can get people using communities to do work rather than email silos, but quite often work is done as a task by just a few people…and your communications and collaborations in a community may feel like you are spamming these people.

At our work we are starting to use communities to leverage the social captial and get away from email, but I’m finding task work is still done in email, that’s why I see “rooms” (with social tools) as another way to use tools that are more appropriate than email.

For those of you who love email, please adhere to two.sentenc.es

I was leaving another comment on CapGemini’s Lee Provoosst’s blog (Capping IT off), and it just became more of a blog post, and I wanted more people to see my stream of consciousness…so here it is.

Swarming (the collective)

Lee’s post is about the invisible hand, self-organising, swarm intelligence, etc…I left a comment about my post on the participation economy, as well as a link to a video clip on the most chaotic, but yet self organised road traffic in Mumbai.

Lee’s comment reply is very insightful:

“The Mumbai traffic participants are selfish in the sense that they do not want THEIR car to be damanged, thus resulting that other cars don’t get damaged either. I sometimes feel that this selfishness lacks with knowledge contribution.”

I really like Lee’s perspective, but it almost sounds like an oxymoron, because if you are selfish you withhold, you don’t share/contribute. You still “do”, but perhaps not visibly in the open. I’ll have to think about this one.

Incentive (culture and adoption)

Lee also says:

“One of the things I’ve learned is that no matter how good the tools are that you provide and no matter how supportive the management is, it still comes down to the individual of contributing and reusing. If there is no incentive for a person to participate in this sharing ecosystems, it all breaks apart. It always comes down to the question “what’s in it for me?”"

The word “incentive” really drives it home.

On the open we know that once we discover (weave a network) and tune into our trusted social filter, the personal and social benefits are enormous.

I ask any web 2.0 person now, would you ever stop participating, collaborating, and connecting to your social graph. For me it’s, no way, as I get to centre the world around me. Why would I ever go back to old ways, I am so much more “aware” now…actually I’d need an “incentive” to go back.

I plan to do a post in the future about participation barriers and incentive models, but for now here’s what I was going to write in Lee’s comments:

Lee,

These 2 posts of mine also build on conversations, and the conditions for knowledge creation and exchange.

http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2008/04/17/tap-into-the-social-capital
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2008/04/22/k-flow

But like you say, this all means well, and people could see the benefit, but they are just too ritualised in email and intellectual captial.

It’s just like when I tell my mum that regular deodorant is bad for you as it contains aluminium. She really understands what I’m saying, but does she do anything about it, no…she still buys the same deodorant.

I can’t force her…she has to learn herself. Often in life we have to have a scare before we wake up to a better way. Basically routines are safe, and change is annoying and unpredictable, hence the resistance.
But constant role models and repetitiveness also help…the more you are in a social environment, the more you adapt to their ways, the more you become like them.

This is how I see it, all we can do is get some teams to use these tools, probably the tech populists (IT rogues) who are already using them anyway.

Their successes will hopefully breed more interest, and this has to be recognised by senior management…to generate a message to others that if you participate you are recognised.

When these people work in new teams they can introduce social ways to work, influencing new people. Hopefully this will have a word of mouth, organic, viral effect.

Maybe it should be part of job descriptions and career reviews…maybe as Thomas Friedman says, a few stock options may persuade people to want to do the best for the organisation as now they have a direct vested interest.

No-one can be told to behave or work with certain tools, they have to want to do it themselves, the more they are influenced and surrounded by people that do, the more chance they will have of catching the social bug.

There has to be a “culture of negotiation”…from Using Wikis on the Intranet: The British Council Case Study:

“It is in this culture of negotiation that people are aware that they don’t know everything; that others know different things; and through dialogue and negotiation, they can together create better things.”

I think the social enterprise is going to be a real slow process, as a lot of it is about undoing old habits, ways of being…that’s huge, just ask your wife

Maybe we need enterprise celebrities to use social tools, to influence knowledge workers to be just like them. It works on kids…we need a Beckham of the enterprise.

To get right down to the fundamentals, I believe it’s about being a “learning organisation”, to get workers to have as much enthusiasm as your “R & D” department to learn new things and new ways. If “learning” is drummed into the corporate mission just as much as “profits” or “quality” or “client satisfaction”, I think initiatives like social tools will be more accepting…as long as “learning” becomes part of the corporate culture from high up. This paragraph was inspired by a quote by Chris Corrigan (via my Tumblr).

I heard in a IT Conversations podcast today that if people don’t get the gist of social tools, they say, oh, I’ll just send an email.

But before the introduction of email, you couldn’t do that, because your international phone bill would be huge, so you were kind of stuck with having to use email.
And once people got the hang of it, they loved it.

It’s different now, if people are reluctant to adopt social software they know they have email to fall back on.

This is a real learning organisational, culture, and change management issue…bring the cognitive scientists in, not the knowledge consultants.

I mentioned this in my Enterprise 2.0 fad Tumblr post.

Planning (deploy and sustain)

Suw Charman talks about the issue being with “social”, not the “software”, and failure, determination and change:

“Failure, real or perceived, is inextricably entwined with status and, frequently, if a project looks like it’s about to go bottom up, instead of figuring out how to save it, people figure out how to distance themselves enough to save face. In a business culture where rewards and punishments are focused on the individual, the teamwork and collaboration required to make a social software project a success can become too much of a risk. But if you’ve got the right skills and personality, you can turn that around.

To be successful at social software implementations in business you need firstly to have a solid understanding of how people work and relate to computers, tools, and each other. You need to understand how to introduce tools in a way that is non-threatening and which emphasises utility and benefits. You need to understand the political climate within your business, and know how to route around anyone who’s threatening to be obstructive.

Secondly, you need to be really pigheaded. If one team doesn’t take to a wiki, try working with another. If one blog fails, try to figure out why and then start another. Iterate. Change things. Experiment. Try again. After all, it’s only failure if you give up.”

I also like her comment:

“Strategy and planning is essential, but it’s not the only thing you need. The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men, after all, gang aft a-gley. But just because a project goes a-gley, doesn’t necessarily mean that the tool is flawed. Perhaps there’s a flaw in the plan? Perhaps the plan was fine but the execution lacked? The problem is, it’s easy to succumb failure and dismiss the tool out of hand, rather than examine the reasons for failure, and then try again with a better plan.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard “We installed blogs/wiki/social bookmarking in our company, and it was useless!” and, when I’ve dug a little, discovered that their plan was “Let’s throw shit at the wall and see what sticks!” Organic is for vegetables, not software implementation and rollout.”

For more on planning, use and sustain, see Planning & Sustaining Wiki-based Collaboration Projects, and How To Develop a Business-Aligned Social Media & Social Networking Strategy.

Conclusion

People want to have to change, so all we can do is create an influential environment (role models, success stories, recognition), where it grows on them, or perhaps they may decide to adopt because it eventually becomes the social norm.

I think adoption is going to be super hard, we want to show them a more socially productive way that also benefits business innovation…but will they really care when they can already do their work.

At present without the new breed of social software, business goes on as usual, but without phones and email it doesn’t.

In the future could we imagine business not being without social software. I already mentioned above in my personal life I could not live in just a phone and email world. Social software has to become the new norm, which we get addicted to, and then can’t do without.

The game is how to get them addicted, and overcome them being invested in their old ways.

NOTE: Since drafting this post, I have made another post on how the extent of knowledge sharing is tied to how you get paid.

More on swarming

Just before I published this post I see Lee has just made a follow up post.

Here’s more on the road traffic in Mumbai and how it relates to Swarm Intelligence, but firstly Swarm Intelligence:

“Swarm intelligence (SI) is artificial intelligence based on the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems. … SI systems are typically made up of a population of simple agents interacting locally with one another and with their environment. The agents follow very simple rules, and although there is no centralized control structure dictating how individual agents should behave, local interactions between such agents lead to the emergence of complex global behavior. Natural examples of SI include ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, bacterial growth, and fish schooling.”

Lee says:

“To extend the list of “natural examples”, I would like to add “Mumbai drivers” as well:

“The agents follow very simple rules”: Mumbai drivers honk in all situations to warn others
“no centralized control structure dictating how individual agents should behave”: very true, haven’t seen any speed camera or police controls
And the best one: “local interactions between such agents lead to the emergence of complex global behavior”: As John pointed out in his link that he supplied in the comments, it is the selfishness of the individual that drives a knowledge base, or applied to Mumbai traffic: “The Mumbai traffic participants are selfish in the sense that they do not want THEIR car to be damaged, thus resulting that other cars don’t get damaged either.” This all leads to a situation where there are not that many accidents as you’d expect. The selfish drive for self preservation, benefits the whole system.”

Read the rest of Lee’s post and the comments on Organised groups vs Self-organising groups.

ENDING THOUGHT

The selfishness of the individual could drive a knowledge base, but how do we get them to be selfish “out-loud” (visible and connected in the open).

TweetWheel - find out which of your Twitter friends know each other

Twitter Blacklist - test a user name to see if they are a fake or Twitter spammer

Twitt(url)y - yet another site that tracks the most popular tweets that point to a URL, and you can also vote for items on this site.

TweetSpeech - a hack to listen to tweets, it adds an audio enclosure to your Twitter RSS feed (basically an audio version of a Twitter feed)…also see TweetSpeak.

Twitterfone - Send Tweets by dialing a local number and speaking your message to TwitterFone, it will convert speech to text and post to Twitter…also see TwitSay, Twittergram, Spinvox and Jott.

BONUS LINK
I previously posted on Twitterlocal, where you can get a stream of tweets from people around a location.
Now they have a new leaderboard feature on the sidebar which lists the top tweeters in that stream…they also have a top cities leaderboard list.

Check out top tweeters and a stream of tweets from people in Perth, Australia.

The other day I posted on, Participation is the currency of the knowledge economy.
The word “participation” can be interchanged for “social captial”, “conversation”, “contribution”, knowledge sharing”, but I chose “participation”, because “conversation” cannot happen without “participation.” And “participation” sounds more involved, sustained, or perpetual than “contribution” or “knowledge sharing.”

Anyway in that post I mentioned that the way companies currently operate is driven by each worker building their “intellectual captial” to get ahead, and to differentiate themselves. The more “intellectual capital” you have the more you are worth something or unique to the company. This kind of means workers compete with each other, or at least try to have unique power that will make them an asset to the firm. In this environment “knowledge sharing” would be the worst thing you could do, as you would be giving away your “edge”, giving away what makes you a unique asset to the company.

Of course we all know the “wisdom of crowds”, and an open and transparent participation model leads to ideas and conversation, which leads to discovery and collaboration. The act of sharing and finding saves others from re-inventing the wheel, saving money and project cycle-time.
A company that runs on a social captial model runs on the notion that “two minds are better than one”, so why not have a culture where these minds have open dialogue. In the end this opportunity for access to knowledge to help you with your work and to find new work brings the company closer to innnovation, and more honest client relationships.

No matter how simple the tools, and no matter even if people understand the benefits of “knowledge sharing” it just won’t happen if the company culture is about “intellectual captial” rather than “social capital.”

Enterprises ought to be thankful that enterprise 2.0 knowledge sharing tools can be a catalyst for culture change to a more social enterprise.

All the good stuff you knew about “social captial” but couldn’t practice because of the deficient tools, is now no longer a frustration.

Culture has to change to a learning organisation and social tools can help achieve and sustain this notion. And that’s what they are, “tools”…just because I have a hammer it doesn’t mean I can build a house. Likewise just because I have a blog doesn’t mean I will use it, I have to be guided facilitated, exposed to successes, see others doing it…build confidence.

Anyway the reason for this post was an article by David Fitch in KM Review Vol 11 Issue 1 March/April 2008, called “In pursuit of justice-and knowledge.” It perfectly illustrates the “knowledge hoarding” characteristic, and why I think knowledge sharing tools won’t do anything to allieve this unless the “culture of work” changes to a more social culture, and only then will these social tools augment this whole new attitude.

Here is this quote on why keeping knowledge to yourself makes sure you keep getting your pay cheque:

“Lawyers at large corporate law firms in the US tend to be paid on an “eat what you kill” basis - they earn according to the business they personally bring into the firm. That means that lawyers in the same firm are competing against each other, so there’s not a lot of incentive for them to exchange knowledge with each other. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that it kills knowledge sharing.
In the UK, by contrast, the system “lock-step equity” means that lawyers are paid according to the financial performance of the firm as a whole, so they’re more willing to share knowledge with each other.”

That’s a top-down move I’d like to see.
Basically we work for passion and to get paid, and if the ecosystem you work in pays you according to how well the family is doing, rather than how well you are doing, then it’s in your interest to help out your family.

The workplace has to change from the “competition” model to the “social” model.

I agree that competition is good for achievement and performance, and some might say that the people who get more sales are paying the slackers.

But this really won’t go unnoticed, if a slacker is not making use of the shared knowledge pool to apply to action opportunities, then that’s an even worse excuse to not getting results, as now they have the social captial to draw on, not just their own know-how.

Sure you get paid based on the holisitic performance, but if you’re not doing any work, you’re not gonna last long.
If you’re not a regular in online social conversations, then it’s seen you are not part of the family growth.

Basically, since each member of the team’s know-how affects everyone’s pay check, then it’s in the interest of the team to educate each other, and to make sure everyone member is “aware” of what’s going on in order to perform optimal output.

I bet in this type of “lock-step equity” ecosystem, enterprise 2.0 tools would be a god-send as it helps share knowledge which is crucial to getting your pay check.

In this ecosystem blogs and wikis help you share knowledge easier and more effectively, and the more tuned this system is, the more the know-how is spread. And the more you know, the better you can perform, and the better you perform, the better the enterprise performs, and inturn guarantees everyone a pay cheque.

In an indirect way knowledge sharing = money.

In this ecosystem taking away a blog or a wiki, is like taking away a hammer from a builder.

I still don’t think sharing knowledge in this environment is quite “altruistic”, as you are only doing it for personal benefit, it’s in your interest everyone does well inorder to sustain a good pay cheque. But you hope after a while this may evolve into genuine passion for the family.

In a past post I talked about Re-purposing email, and after that I was going to give some examples, but I got sidetracked on what blogs an enterprise would have when it would come to communications, see Enterprise blog channels for communications.

If these examples seem universal, then perhaps we can start a “Re-purposing email wiki”…I’m sure Luis Suarez would agree.

Emails are not just about communications, sometimes they are about collanoration, tasks, sharing tips, etc…

This post is not just focusing on communication type blog posts, in fact it’s not focusing on blogs at all. It’s going through example emails and proposing how that email could be re-purposed.

What I have done is listed the email under the social tool it could of been delivered in.
Any notes have been denoted by an (*).

BLOG (team/project/personal/office-wide/community)

Announce

To:OFFICE-WIDE
From:IT
A new security patch on 25-12-07 will be implemented when you login, please let the PC do it’s thing

* This is an easy one, the general IT Office blog

To:OFFICE TEAM LEADS
From:Training Lead
We are running courses, on Access database training, please ask your team members if they are interested.

* All my boss would have to do is publish a blog post on our Team blog pointing to the post on the Corporate Training blog
- this would work as she would be subscribed to the CorporateTraining blog, and we would be subscribed to the Team blog
- in fact if I came across the training blog post (if I had access), I could potentially know before she even told me

To:TEAM and 2 other closely related teams
From: TEAM LEADER
A new banner and overview sheet has been included in our toolkit.
Please let others know.

* Perhaps this could be posted to our Team External blog, where we publish stuff that other team leads can see
- since our team and other team leads subscribe to this blog we will all be in the know
- each team lead can then let their members know by posting a brief blog post on their Team blogs, pointing to our TeamExternal blog.

To:OFFICE-WIDE
From:IT
There is now a colour printer in the office

* This is an easy one, the general IT Office blog

To:OFFICE-WIDE
From:Admin
Please welcome the new global manager for “social software” (hehe)

* This is an easy one, the general Office blog

To:PROJECT TEAM
From: A Project unit manager
The new project workspace has been set up at this URL.
Here is the getting started overview.

* This is an easy one, the general Project blog

To:TEAM
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
Here are the usage statistics for December

* This could be published on the Team blog
- then again this may be of no value to the Development team, or another sub-team, this is what lead me to my post on mesh blogs

To:OFFICE-WIDE
From:Admin
The trains are on strike this afternoon, you will need to make alternate arrangements

* This is an easy one, the general Office blog

To:OFFICE-WIDE
From:Admin
A staff member was mentioned in the national newspaper today for a job well done on one of our projects

* This is an easy one, the general Office blog

To:PROJECT TEAM
From: A Project unit manager
Our main repository does not support media files, please assist clients by using this alternative

* This is an easy one, the general Project blog

Status

To:OFFICE-WIDE
From:IT
We are having problems with internet access, we are speaking to our providers to resolve this

* This is an easy one, the general IT Office blog

To:OFFICE-WIDE
From:IT
The internet is now working

* This is an easy one, the general IT Office blog

Work

To:SUB-TEAM
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
If anyone is interested, here is a workaround to this problem

* Perhaps this could be posted to a Sub-Team blog,
- other sub-teams in the team can subscribe if they like

To:SUB-TEAM
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
The solution to this issue was a setting in Outlook

* Perhaps this could be posted to a Sub-Team blog,
- other sub-teams in the team can subscribe if they like

To:TEAM
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
I’m finding I’m learning a lot about our industry in Africa from my work on this deliverable….

* Perhaps this could be posted to a Sub-Team blog or personal blog
- others can subscribe if they like

FORUM (team/project/personal/office-wide/community)

Question

To:OFFICE-WIDE
From:Admin
We are looking for someone to offer their expertise on….

* Perhaps this could posted in a few community forums
- this way the whole office is not spammed

To:TEAM
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
Does anyone know how to do this excel formula…

* Perhaps this could posted to your team forum
- otherwise search for an excel or Office tips community that may have an excel wiki or excel blog

To:TEAM
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
Where can I find a file for our team logo?

* Perhaps this could posted to your team forum
- or IM blast a portion of your network

To:TEAM
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
What do people think of Windows Vista, what are your experiences?

* Perhaps this could posted to your team forum, or a community forum, it depends which audience you want to ask

To:TEAM
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
Where would I find information on…

* Perhaps this could posted to your team forum, or a community forum, it depends which audience you want to ask

To:PROJECT TEAM
From:1 PROJECT TEAM MEMBER
Does anyone want to car pool, I live outer eastern suburbs?

* Perhaps this could posted to the project forum, or the office forum, it depends which audience you want to ask
- or IM blast a portion of your network

IM

To:WORKER
From:WORKER
Can I use the Adobe writer on your computer?

* This is a quick question that can easily be done in IM, rather than an email in each inbox

To:WORKER
From:WORKER
I forgot to ask you was it cold when you were just outside…I’m about to go out.

* This is a quick question that can easily be done in IM, rather than an email in each inbox

To:WORKER
From:WORKER
The conference is about to start, where are you?

* This is a quick question that can easily be done in IM, rather than an email in each inbox

To:WORKER
From:WORKER
Are you free for a chat, I have 3 others that are free now.

* This is a quick question that can easily be done in IM, rather than an email in each inbox

WIKI

Collaborate

To:4 TEAM MEMBERS
From:TEAM LEADER
Can you all make a list of issues and email them to me and I will put them in one big list

* This could be a wiki task, see my post

To:4 TEAM MEMBERS
From:WORKER
Can you all review this attachment and send me the changes

* This could be a wiki task

To:4 TEAM MEMBERS
From:WORKER
Sorry, here’s another addition to the meeting agenda

* This could easily be added to the meeting agenda wikipage without emailing people

Knowledgebase

To:7 TEAM MEMBERS
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
If anyone is interested, here is a workaround to this problem

* This could easily be added to the solutions wiki
- or perhaps Tips and Tricks blog

To:7 TEAM MEMBERS
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
I can’t find the documentation on…where is it kept

* This wouldn’t happen if there was a centralised team wiki or a wiki that lists documents in the repository
- otherwise ask the question in the team forums

To:7 TEAM MEMBERS
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
When you load this in the database remember to change this element as the template is not yet fixed.
This is not documented in the procedures.

* This is a reply-email to someone who didn’t need to send the email request if there was a Workarounds wiki or blog
- otherwise ask the question in the team forums

Event

To:7 TEAM MEMBERS
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
I can’t find the email for when that workshop is taking place

* This wouldn’t happen if there was an Event wiki
- otherwise ask the question in the forums

To:TEAM
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
The workshop is kicking off today.
Here is the agenda.
This person cannot make it.
I will further email you the presentation attachments

* This wouldn’t happen if there was an Event wiki, with a wiki blog
- perhaps a community could be set-up for the workshop

Task

To: SUB-TEAM
From: 1 TEAM MEMBER
Could everyone please sign off that the new features have been tested and work

* This could be a wiki task, and perhaps posted on the wiki task blog
- rather than once person sending out an email to about 10 people with an attachment
- then each person sending back an email to say they have actioned it

To:7 TEAM MEMBERS
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
The test server will be going down for 3 days to be patched.
I will let you know the moment it is back up

* This could perhaps be posted on the wiki task blog
- or if it’s part of a bigger picture like a project where the wiki and blog could be in a community

To:3 TEAM MEMBERS
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
I am currently at stage 3 of my report, I’m now doing field research for stage 4.
Tomorrow I will fly to China, and need to find accomodation.
I will meet with client and let you know of the results.

* This could perhaps be posted on the wiki task blog
- or if it’s part of a bigger picture like a project where the wiki and blog could be in a community

To: SUB TEAM
From: TEAM LEADER
A new advanced editing feature will be rolled-out on 25-12-07
Please test this and report back.

* This could perhaps be posted on the wiki task blog
- or if it’s part of a bigger picture like a project where the wiki and blog could be in a community

To:3 TEAM MEMBERS
From:1 TEAM MEMBER

The server has been set up and the program installed, you can now proceed.
I had issues with the subscription module, so it’s not installed yet

* This could perhaps be posted on the wiki task blog
- or if it’s part of a bigger picture like a project where the wiki and blog could be in a community
- only members of this community will be subscribed saving other team members not having to be spammed
- so in fact this example is more a project communication, rather than a team communication
- I think it’s important that quick short-lived communities are set up to achieve tasks

To:1 TEAM MEMBER
From: TEAM LEADER
Can you please do this task, and report back and then contact Bill do take it onwards.

* This could perhaps be posted on the wiki task blog
- or if it’s part of a bigger picture like a project where the wiki and blog could be in a community
- just have to put up with other subscribers of the blog getting this post that is only intended for one person

To:1 TEAM MEMBER
From: TEAM LEADER
Can you please update the appendix on this report

* This could perhaps be posted on the wiki task blog
- or if it’s part of a bigger picture like a project where the wiki and blog could be in a community
- just have to put up with other subscribers of the blog getting this post that is only intended for one person

I’m finding with a lot of these tasks a more focused tool like Activities from Lotus Connections would be more appropriate.
Or a commuity or wiki that has social networking so you can message a member in the inbox of that wiki task, rather than your email inbox.
This way the task request is not separate from the task itself, you would only get a notification in your email inbox or perhaps a dashboard to alert you of your task.
It’s also bringing to mind Foldera…but then again there are heaps of task, workflow type tools.

The ultimate scenario is for a team to have a community site that includes:
- sub-communities
- social networking
- blogs
- forums
- wikis
- IM
- tasks

All your work and communications are together. The idea is not to have stuff in your email related to where the work lives, it should all be open and together…no siloes and no people out of the loop.

A while back I mentioned that Google Reader Shared Items (which is like a clip blog) needs to be merged with a service like Google Shared Stuff (which is like a clip blog).

The problem I was having is that I could not clip stuff I found outside Google Reader into my Shared Items stream, this meant I had to have two clip streams.

Well now this has been solved with Google Reader Notes.

In the Google Reader console there is now a page called “Your Stuff”, and under this there are two pages called “Shared Items”, and “Notes”.
Clicking on the “Your Stuff” link is a way to see “Shared Items”, and “Notes” in the one stream.

Share with Note

For any item in Google Reader there is an addition to the one-click “Share”, now there is another choice to “Share with Note”
- this pops-up a box where you can add a note/annotation (just like with my Facebook Posted Items).

Notes

“Notes” allows you to make a note without it having to be about a webpage, it’s just like blogging an item.

This can be done via going to the “Notes” page in Google Reader

This automatically shares the item into the “Shared Items” stream, as well as being in your “Notes” stream (which is private).
You can unshare a Note so it no longer appears in your “Shared Items” stream, and is only in your “Notes” stream.

“Note in Reader” bookmarklet

The “Note in Reader” bookmarklet allows you to add an item (along with a note if you like) into your private “Notes” stream.
The bookmarklet also has a box to check to include it in your “Shared Items” stream, before you press submit…otherwise you can decide to share it later on from your “Notes” stream.

Issues

- I wish a Note didn’t share by default
- I’d like to filter the Notes stream by Notes I have shared, and Notes I haven’t shared…this way I can keep some private notes in one spot.
- I can’t edit or delete a Note
- There isn’t a bookmarklet to create a new note (you can only do this from within Google Reader).

What could be next?

- Comments
- Tag “Shared Items”
- A calendar archive
- Template/sidebar additions
- Reblog and item from someone’s “Shared Items” to yours (like Tumblr)
- Merge your “Shared Items” with your friends (like a Tumblr group), or perhaps this could be a network instead like Friendfeed (this is more probable as there already is a “Friends Shared Items” feature.

Google Reader seems to be where I live, so instead of having another window for Webnote, I just like a tab in Google Reader…I wonder if there is a hack.

You’d think they may do this with there own set of products, at the moment at the top of Google Reader I have links to Gmail, Calendar, Docs, etc…what about tabs instead…maybe I’d use Google Notebook, rather then Webnote.

Actually this is what you can do with OtherEgo, but this is more of a profile aggregator by tabs (not quite a lifestream). Not sure if you can add a tab from a private service like Google Reader.

But I like this idea of a private startpage, but instead of widgets on the one page, it’s the whole page by tab.

In one window I could have access to:
Google Reader
Gmail
Twitter
Friendfeed
Facebook
Webnote
del.icio.us
My blog
…and several other pages.