Library clips

The other day I posted on Knowledge flow networks and Post-KM : enterprise 2.0, facilitation and complexity, these along with an older post include how I think KM and enterprise 2.0 can come together.

In this post I pointed to a post by Tom Davenport on recognising the difference in the planned and outcome KM approach compared to the enterprise 2.0 emergent approach (with sharing, learning, connections happening along the way). He also concurred with Andrew McAfee saying there is an element of facilitation and gardening, this is the part I call KM 2.0. I think KM 2.0 is a layer on top of enterprise 2.0.

Samuel Driessen’s post pointed me to a comment by James Dellow on Tom’s post. Samuel disagreed with James that enterprise 2.0 is only about technology, saying it’s also about the people and the networks.

It’s all semantics at the moment, sure enterprise 2.0 is a technology that allows connections, network effects and emergence that we didn’t have previously, but we all know without participation and management 2.0 values it’s nothing.

When we talk about enterprise 2.0 we often also mean the culture, adoption and human part of it, we assume a new style of bottom-up work. The last thing we want to do is stifle the potential of the tools with a top-down approach. I think KM 2.0 comes in to make sure enterprise 2.0 is left alone and emergence can happen, but then comes in to guide and facilitate, to make sure it’s adaptive in the best possible way.

Anyway this leads me to some descriptions of this movement by James Dellow in an article in the Image & Data Manager Magazine Sep/Oct 2008.

Lately James writes a lot about Intranet 2.0, and is even seeking a publisher for a book on this subject.

James offers various ways or choices in implementing Intranet 2.0 into your organisation.

1. Tactical Social Computing
2. Enterprise Web 2.0
3. Enterprise 2.0

Tactical Social Computing

This isn’t really Intranet 2.0, it’s more about a team here and there using social tools like blogs and wikis to get their work done. eg. using a wiki in a call centre to list workarounds and contexts that aren’t covered in procedures, using a blog rather than email to communicate and announce to the team, etc…

Often these instances of social productivity are by IT Rogues and Tech Populists who are early adopters and using tools to help be more effective because IT is just too slow. But as James says this tactical approach is a great stepping stone to a more holisitic or broad implementation…a way to demonstrate to IT and get them involved. It’s a great idea to pilot a few teams with some low cost/free tools to showcase and be a role model of how effective it is to work with these new social tools, and the things that happen along the way like emergence and sharing. If your plan is to get more serious about this don’t make your pilot group too big, otherwise you will have migration to do when you move to you new system.

So whether it’s on your own, or with the help of IT it really costs nothing to test the waters, compared to traditional enterprise software…this is a big difference in itself, and inturn allows us to take this type of approach.
At my work we have not gone Intranet 2.0 just yet, our Intranet is still top-down, lacks customisation/personalisation, user input, etc… But we do have Communities of Practice for teams, cross-team workgroups, and shared interest groups. You could say this is our tactical social computing approach, parallel to our Intranet. If things go well here, which they are, this warrants confidence to revamp our Intranet into a social network of sorts.

Enterprise Web 2.0

This is more focused on Web 2.0 oriented architecture and Web application frameworks (AJAX, XML, AIR, ATOM, RSS) rather than the social aspects such as blogs and wikis. From the article:

“- Dashboards that can be rapidly “mashed” together in days to answer an emergent business problem

If you follow this path, be aware that an Enterprise Web 2.0 strategy may perhaps intentionally open the door to Enterprise 2.0. Once the lid is off the box, it may be difficult to quarantine the social aspects from the technology components of the Web 2.0 software development philosophy. The nature of Web 2.0 tools and a key ingredient of their success is that theyempower users to build their own tools and contribute content, so getting the benefits of Web 2.0 technologies without the social element will need to be carefully managed.”

I’d also like to add to this the emergent nature of the tools themselves, not only can we publish, comment, and tag content to watch it evolve and see patterns emerge, but this also happens with the technology. Here’s an excerpt from Rod Boothby on this:

“VCs usually don’t like the idea of a “platform”. They want to see a killer app first. But, it is quickly becoming obvious that having a platform IS the killer app. Or at least the killer differentiator. By platform, I mean something beyond a simple API. It is a mechanism for letting 3rd parties add value to your application through extensions and plug-ins.
WordPress, with all the 3rd party themes and application plugins is a great example of something that gets better as more people use it.”

Enterprise 2.0

From James Dellow’s article:

“…an Enterprise 2.0 strategy is something quite different from either the tactical use of social computing or the narrow adoption of Web 2.0 technologies - it is both a technology and business change, where social computing tools help flatten and also reflect the flatness of organisations.”

James uses Andrew McAfee’s SLATES model as a criteria for Enterprise 2.0, which I have mentioned before , and which Stephen Collins describes in his encompassing blog post.

As James points out a tactical strategy is not going to meet the criteria of the SLATES model which describes the components of Enterprise 2.0. James says something really important here for those that think they are doing Enterprise 2.0 just because their work has a few blogs and wikis.

“…for it to work the SLATES model must apply across the information workplace - not a single siloed tool, since this represents a tactical strategy instead.”

“…the subtle difference between a tactical strategy and Enterprise 2.0…is really the relationship between the enterprise social computing environment with the shape and culture of the organisation.”

The posts I linked to at the start of this blog post have my view on the conditions for enterprise 2.0 to take place and the facilitation involved to nuture and guide the emergence.

To spread and evolve know-how, percolate emergence, create autonomous behaviours, and social productivity, we need the conditions for these things to happen.

Network Effects - without a critical mass of participators, contributors, and collectors (and tagging, linking, voting) we cannot have emergence. A sign of this are sites like Wikipedia, TechMeme, delicious, Twitter, etc…

Participation - we need bloggers, commentors, editors, taggers, etc…

Self Interest - we have more chance of Participation if our motivation is self interest and connection, and easier ways to do our work. Along with self satisfaction, a feeling of belonging and connection, and socially generated reputation.

Ease of Use - we have more chance of Participation if the tools are easy to use and unstructured so we can bend them to our needs

Transparency/Support/Bottom-up - management need to govern rather than manage, they need to lax control and take a facilitative and leadership approach. Less planning for outcomes, and more emergence of output. People need to able to express themselves, within a governance framework, without fear, otherwise this may stifle contribution, which gets us nowhere.
The facilitative approach is to cultivate connections/networks/conversations, garden, steer, guide… This leads to a paradigm change to management 2.0, in order for enterprise 2.0 to flourish. Strategy can now be influenced or gifted by what’s surfaced from the crowd, rather than just a bunch of bigwigs in one room, really it’s a win-win situation.

James points to some quotes on these points:

Michele Egan, World Bank
“Collaboration and facilitation (rather than control and vetting) are key drivers in the successful utilization of new and existing technologies, as well as in unleashing the willingness of people to contribute with their effort…Let a thousane flowers bloom does work, even if you have to pull a few weeds on ocassion”

Andrew McAfee
“These tools may well reduce management’s ability to exert unilateral control and to express some level of negativity. Whether a company’s leaders really want this to happen and will be able to resist the temptation to silence dissent is an open question. Leaders will have to play a delicate role if they want Enterprise 2.0 technologies to succeed”

As I mentioned my work does not have a potential fear factor as we can so far only express ourselves in blogs and forums within communities, these are small boundaries governed by a owner, compared to the boundary of the whole enterprise. If something not suitable was said in a community, only people in that community would know of it, and it could be easily picked up by the owner and dampened.

The real test would be if our intranet had a social network component, where rather than seeking a community and requesting to blog, instead each person is given their own house (as opposed to a shared house in a community) as their personal profile where they can connect with others and blog what they know, or…This is more of a test on management as people are given a blog even if they don’t know what it is, and it’s their own space, rather than a group space. If something out of line is said, it may spread to all eyeballs in a flash.

More on Enterprise 2.0

I thought we’d better include Andrew McAfee’s definition, compared to others:

“Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.”

And more…

“Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities. (Wikipedia’s definition).

Freeform means that the software is most or all of the following:
- Optional
- Free of up-front workflow
- Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities
- Accepting of many types of data”

I really liked this excerpt by Rod Boothby:

“In McAfee’s article, Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, McAfee says “When I use ‘Enterprise 2.0′ as an adjective, I mean “supporting of emergent collaboration.””

“I believe what McAfee is saying is that everything new and interesting in the Enterprise isn’t necessarily emergent. If IT builds an AJAX application that must be used by end users to account for their time, there is nothing emergent about that system. Therefore it isn’t Enterprise 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0 is about decentralization of responsibility. This requires a completely different way of managing people.”

“Enterprise 2,0 isn’t about building solutions for end users. Enterprise 2.0 is about building tools that end users can leverage to build their own solutions.

To be truly useful, these tools have to plug into the back end of any corporate entity. Critical features will include audit trails, access control, version control, authentication, provisioning and backup. The best Enterprise 2.0 systems out there will have thought through these issues.”

Related
Seven ways enterprise 2.0 differs from web 2.0

[ADDED 23/12/08: From the SocialText blog: Company-wide deployments are very different from departmental ones]

[ADDED 05/04/09: Enterprise 2.0 or Department 2.0? Discuss]

[ADDED 05/04/09: Who owns Enterprise 2.0? (and, why should you care?)]

I’ve echoed words by Dave Snowden and Jon Husband that rather than trying to create a knowledge sharing culture, we are instead creating conditions and environment for that to happen naturally via a participation model that facilitates connections and shared context.

These conditions are:

…once people form interdependencies, then sharing becomes essential to get work done.

Email is simple, people who trust each other can exchange know-how in emails, and this requires no facilitation. Enterprise 2.0 tools (along with facilitation) can do a similar thing with tools that are more open and transparent, enabling more of an amplified and visible knowledge sharing culture to emerge. The difference here is an ecosystem is manifested where people are networked, and knowledge flows, this is much more connected for people to tap in or tune in to the social capital.

For more on this see my posts, The KM generation of networks and emergence and The KM Core Sample in relation to IM, KM 1.0, Social Computing, and KM 2.0.

Here’s a brief recap of the main points:

My post on KM 2.0 culture listed some general points to creating adoption of these tools or approach to work, such as:

I also posted on a KM 2.0 model where this type of ecosystem manifests into offshoots, that is, we start off with a participation model where people can publish, discover, and connect with each other (basically an open publish and subscribe network), which can lead to offshoots such as new bonds/relationships, collaboration, communities, etc… So once we can connect and converse, knowledge starts flowing, and people are more aware and learning off each other, as a result groups and projects assemble with like-minded people (autonomy).

This is less of a focus on knowledge itself, and more on the platforms for it to flow, we cannot force people to share (we can’t measure this anyway), we can only offer tools that make sharing easy, and more in tune with human nature.

Matthew Hodgson says sharing knowledge is a social activity, which the primary method is conversation. When we have news or need to work on an issue we get together to talk about it; creating a perpetual online version of this is knowledge flow as we can’t always be in the same room, and we may not always be involved in the task, but it may come across our radar where we can chime in. Engaging online means all this tacit interaction is documented and flowing around, but it’s more…a Minutes of the Meeting is going to try hard to be a recording of the discussion, but a raw online forum discussion or blog a post is actually what comes out of people’s mouths. More from Matthew:

“If we look back to the rich oral history of many of our cultures, blogging is a reflection of the need to story-tell, carrying with it important information not only on the what – the facts like the reports we typically store in our recordkeeping systems – but also the meaning behind the why and how.”

And a complementary quote from Nassim Taleb:

“The journal was purportedly written without…knowing what was going to happen next, when the information available…was not corrupted by the subsequent outcomes.” “While we have a highly unstable memory, a diary provides indelible facts recorded more or less immediately; it thus allows the fixation of an unrevised perception and enables us to later study events in their own context. Again, it is the purported method of description of the event, not its execution, that was important.”

And finally we have Dave Snowden’s 7 Principles of KM (I’ll just list them, see the post for an explanation on each one):

Networks

Patti Anklam points to some great posts by Steve Borgatti on facilitating knowledge flows in a network.

The two conditions that facilitate knowledge transfer are relational (quality of relationship between people) and structural (macro-patterns in the network).

Relational

Multiplexity - “…refers to the extent to which one kind of tie between two people is accompanied by another kind of tie between the same two people. For example, two people who trust each other might also share information with each other, lend money to each other, and so on”

What facilitates relational sharing? What allows me to seek information from you?

- Knowing you are an expert in an area
- Already being aquainted (as Dave Snowden would say a shared context, high abstraction and trust)
- Access (time zones, too busy-burden of being an expert, competing business units, higher status)
- Trust, interdependencies, reciprocation

Structural

“The structure of social network affects how rapidly information flows from one end of the network to the other. Ultimately, the speed of information flow is a function of path lengths. When the length of the shortest path between a pair of nodes is high, it will take a long time for information to flow from one to the other. Networks with high average path lengths take longer to transmit information to all members. In turn, the average path length in a network is a function of a number of structural factors.”

Density - the number of ties in a network

Higher density means information flows faster, as there are shorter paths. It also means the same or popular/pertinent information may keep surfacing.

Centralisation - a network centralised around a well connected node has great information distribution, but is highly dependent on one node, which can be damaging if they spread misinformation, and lose their dynamic if that person leaves and has to be replaced.
This aspect has good searchability as the the central person (goto person) can point you to where information lives

Core-periphery - revolve around a set of central nodes, and also with the periphery. Note, peripheral nodes are connected to the core, but not each other and core-periphery is not the same as lots of unconnected centralisation islands (clumpy networks)

Conclusion

“In sum, dense, core/periphery networks are very efficient at spreading knowledge. The other side of coin, however, is that they are not good at innovation because it is too easy for the conventional wisdom to swamp new ideas.”

“Promoting knowledge sharing is a matter of (a) creating the relational conditions that facilitate interpersonal transfers, and (b) creating the structural conditions that facilitate diffusion.”

Steve Borgatti has another post called, Creating Knowledge: Network Structure and Innovation, where he talks about the two ways knowledge is created.

Individual Creativity

“In some cases, an individual interacts with a number of others who may be completely unaware of what problem he is trying to solve, and then, with the knowledge gained, the individual goes off by himself and synthesizes a solution.”

I can see a social network doing this all the time, by participating and interacting we are learning from each other.

“People who interact daily come to know many of the same things, and are in that sense informationally redundant. In contrast, people who do not interact will often know many things that the other does not know.”

“The property of having ties to people who are not in the same social circles with each other is called betweenness or “structural holes”. A person rich in structural holes has many ties, and the people they are tied to are not tied to each other.”

I did not know that betweenness or “structural holes” was another way of referring to the “strength of weak ties”

Interactive Creativity

“…new knowledge is co-created by interacting individuals who are bouncing ideas off each other and actively integrating their different perspectives.”

“Interactive creativity also calls for heterogeneity — it is the successful synthesis of different perspectives that creates something new. But because the interaction in this context is more intense and more important, the relationship between the people needs to be very good. In particular, they need to be able to understand each other well. This tends to mean that the participants are fundamentally similar in language and background concepts. It also means that affective elements like simply liking each other are helpful, as are good social skills.”

We have heard Dave Snowden talk about this very point where he refers to: trust, interdependencies, reciprocation, and the level of abstraction (common wavelength of your relationship). If these aspects ain’t there, you ain’t gonna get any sharing happening, even if you have the ferrari of social networks and blogs.

Innovation

“People need access to a diversity of skills and knowledge in order to innovate. This argues for being as well connected as possible. If we want everyone in a group to be in a position to innovate, this will mean a very dense network in which everyone is connected to almost everyone.”

“…radical innovators are too well connected to the network, they can get swamped by the prevailing wisdom. As a result, radical innovation is facilitated by sparser and clumpier networks…”

This is similar to the “strength of weak ties” mentioned above. In a social network we can form our view of the network by adding contacts (subscribing to parts of the flow), but because it’s unbounded we are free to roam and investigate, we may decide to search and browse or subscribe to blogs of people we don’t know, or subscribe to a keyword search. All this allows us to go beyond our usually circle of know-how…Andrew McAfee expands on this with his enterprise bullseye post.

Conclusion

“The answer to the question ‘what should my organization’s network look like to enable innovation?’ depends on the kind of innovation.”

[ADDED 14/11/08: “Enterprise 2.0 is more likely if…

Technologies
- Tools are intuitive and easy to use
- Tools are egalitarian and freeform
- Borders seem appropriate to users
- At least some of the tools are explicitly social
- The toolset is quickly standardized

Support for the Initiative
- Incentives exist, and are soft
- Excellent gardeners exist
- Patient and dedicated evangelists exist
- Energy and activity are primarily bottom-up
- Effort has official and unofficial support from the top
- Goals are clear and well-explained

Culture
- People are trusted
- Slack exists in the workweek
- Helpfulness has been the norm
- Top management supports lateralization
- There are lots of young people
- There is pent-up demand for better information sharing”]

[ADDED 24/04/09: I Know It When I See It, The Enterprise 2.0 Recovery Plan]

Related
KM: Round 2.0
Conversations, Connections and Context
7 seconds to knowledge share
Post-KM : enterprise 2.0, facilitation and complexity
Knowledge Management…NOT!
KM 2.0 : doing your job or giving back to the organisation
Knowledge sharing in the new KM
The emergence of Serendipity 2.0 and Innovation 2.0

A while back I posted on Twitter and similar platforms in relation to groups. “Groups” is an ambiguous word, so I cleared it up to be more precise about what I mean, here’s a little re-hash:

Groups - community type shared interest member groups, or perhaps an aggregation stream from a bunch of people, like a public version of one of your contact groups (in this instance there are no members)

NOTE: Channels are similar to Groups, but people are not members. A channel is not organised and doesn’t really have an agenda beyond existing, the topic is usually short eg. #athletics. Whereas a group topic could be more precise eg. Women in athletics who have won medals but had them taken away due to steroid use, and a group could have sub-topics.

Contact Groups- organising your contacts into folders/tags

Groupings - based on implicit attention or on a slice of data such as: people who also saved this bookmark, people who also bought this book, all Twitter users located in Perth, a Techmeme cluster of all the people who posted on this meme (or all people who linked to this site)

Groups

TweetPeek (no longer exists)
Tweet Thread
Tweet Boards
Twapper (mobile)
Crowd Status
Twitter Digest
Twitter Teams (like a channel-hashtags-but limited to a group of people)

FlockUp (a communal contact group, but soon this will stream tweets)
Twitterpacks (a place to find groups or people by topic, location)

[ADDED 17/12/08: Twitter Groups]

Twitter groups in Japan

[ADDED 23/03/09 : tweetworks - twitter groups]

[ADDED 24/03/09 : Tweetizen - create a Twitter group…unlike tweetworks this is not a member based group, rather it’s public streams you can make based on keywords or sources]

[ADDED 08/05/09 : Twibes - join an open group and view the latest tweets]

[ADDED 09/05/09 : Tinker - create a keyword/group stream]

Channel

Twemes (mobile)
Hashtags
Roomatic
TweetChannel

[ADDED 08/05/09 : Twubs aggregates various types of hash tags]

Groupings
Twitterlocal
@locals
TwitterWhere
Another TwitterWhere
DailyTwitter

[ADDED 18/03/09: Nearby Tweets]

[ADDED 28/05/09: hoodlenow]

TweetMemes and others
TwitScoop
Tweeqs
Twitterholic

There are also lots of recommendation services based on groupings data, here’s a few:
Twubble
Twits Like Me
Twitter Poster
Twannabe

Contact Groups
Twitly (mobile coming soon)
Tweetdeck

[ADDED 18/01/09: TwitTangle]

Something Twitter are working on

[ADDED 25/02/09: Peoplebrowsr - enables to create contact group streams (called tags), there is also a default one called VIP. You can even search within these streams. And it does much much more.]

[ADDED 1/03/09 : Ginx does Twitter groups]

[ADDED 08/05/09 : TweetGrid - create group streams of up to 30 people]

[ADDED 18/03/09: filttr]

CONTACT GROUP DIRECT MESSAGE
Twitter Groups
TweetParty
GroupTweet

At the moment the conversational tools on Twitter are Tweader, Quotably and Twitter Threads.

Wall-to-Wall

I had an idea like the Facebook wall, to show Wall-to-Wall conversations between you and another Twitter user.

The best I found was Twitter Advanced Search, where I can do a search like from:johnt to:trib (or vice versa).

The juicy part is when you click the “Show Conversation” link on a tweet it displays this wall-to-wall idea.
Each tweet has this link, and I’m not sure if a conversation is based on time or what.

But still I would like to see “Show Conversation” as its own page, and a clean history of our Wall-to-Wall conversation, kind of like doing a search…”from:johnt to:trib” AND “from:trib to:johnt”

And then I realised I can do this at Tweet 2 Tweet, check it out (not sure what search query they are using).

Replies, Shoutouts, and Comments

The other day I realised that if you click on the reply icon next to a users 2nd last tweet, your tweet when published will link back to that exact tweet, rather than linking to that persons latest tweet. The linkback is on your tweet as a hyperlink called “in reply to userA”.
NOTE: I used 2nd last tweet as an example, it could be 19th last tweet

But if you just type in “@userA” in the text box, then your tweet will default link back to that persons latest tweet. This is fair enough because using this method may not be a reply at all, it may be an initiating shoutout.
If you use Twitter by IM or SMS, then you have no choice but to use this method.

Coming back to it…

When I click the reply icon on someone’s tweet, my published tweet will have a hyperlink (in reply to userA) to that exact tweet , but that person’s tweet will not have a hyperlink back to my tweet ie. it doesn’t appear as a comment on their tweet.

This is what I like about Jaiku
- instead of a reply icon on a post, it just has “leave a comment”
- this threads your comment under their post
- your comment also becomes a new post in its own right

I’m gathering most Twitter use is web, mobile web, and web and desktop widgets; rather than SMS or IM, so this lends to more of a reason why a comment structure would now work, as people can pinpoint the post they are replying to.

If Twitter does end up have commenting one day, will it still be called replies? And what about shoutouts, this is when we use the reply feature to ask a question or say something to someone, but not in response to one of their tweets.

[ADDED 19/05/09: Twitoaster threads reply tweets to your tweet. This is what I referred to on my post the other day. On our reply tweets we have a link to the tweet we are replying to, but on the original tweet we don’t have a list of replies (similar to comments on a blog)

Twonvo - similar to Twitoaster]

I mostly use Twitter on the mobile web, when I’m on the train. I once tried to keep up with Twitter, but gave up that idea a while ago, now I just tune in and take a dip in the river now and again, there’s always lots of great stuff floating by.

My issue at the moment is I am following too many people, sometimes I’d like to tune into Twitter and just see what my KM buddies are up to, but I can’t as Twitter mobile doesn’t allow you to group friends into a folder or tag stream like an RSS Reader or Friendfeed. None of the services below offer this either, for me this is something sorely needed. There are some Twitter apps out there that allow you to make your own group streams, but I want this in a Twitter mobile web service so I can just choose a tag/folder at will.

Anyway that’s my 2 cents, here’s a quick list of some mobile Twitter services

NOTE: I’m not including download clients or iPhone specific web sites like hahlo (which doesn’t function properly on my phone)
I once installed Blue Whale for Facebook on my phone, and it didn’t stop buzzing. Out of interest what are the similar Twitter install apps for a mobile phone, where you get pushed content without being on the mobile web (and, can you limit this to just replies and direct messages?).

1. Slandr

Let’s start off with Slandr as this is the most comprehensive…I’ve posted on it before, and it was time for an update.

EACH TWEET HAS
- avatar
- reply
- direct message
- favourite
- retweet
- also includes thumbnails from Twitpic and others

CLICK ON A USER
- follow/unfollow
- direct message

REPLY STREAM
- self explanatory

EGO VIEW

This is all public tweets containing a keyword which is a user name eg. “johnt”
- this is important as Twitter will only show you replies where your name eg. @johnt is at the start of a tweet. If the tweet is - coffee sounds good will @johnt be there - I will not see this in my Twitter reply stream as it’s not at the start of the tweet.
- As you can see the ego view is not for “@johnt”, it’s for “johnt”, so it’s gonna pick up tweets where people have perhaps forgotten to put the @ symbol or perhaps they are just tweeting my name without trying to ping me.

Here’s are some examples of Tweets that will not show up in your Twitter reply stream, including a Retweet, which is like a trackback or linklove really

DIRECTS
An archive of your in and out box for Direct Messages, you can also send a DM

GEO

Geo friends
- The last 20 locations from the last 20 tweets from people I follow
- update your location (which I recall you can do from the regular tweet box as well using an L: prefix]

Twitter local
- a stream of Tweets based on location range

Local Events
- what’s happening based on location range

SEARCH
- powered by Twitter Search
- what I’d like to see here is a hot link to Twemes mobile for hash tag streams

EXTRAS

Friends/Followers
- a tag cloud of your 100 most active friends
- look up any user

Public Timeline
- self explanatory

Favourites
- self explanatory

HQ
- Slandr’s blog

Twitter Status
- the Twitter Status blog

2. Dabr

After writing this post I infact may be a Dabr convert.

EACH TWEET HAS
- avatar
- reply
- direct message
- favourite
- retweet
- also includes thumbnails from Flickr, Twitpic, and Twitxr

CLICK ON A USER
- follow/unfollow
- friends
- followers
- favourites
- direct message

REPLIES
- this also merges an ego search

DIRECTS
- create, inbox, sent

SEARCH
- self explanatory

PUBLIC
- self explanatory

FAVOURITES
- self explanatory

FOLLOWERS
A long list of people who follow you
- to get a list of people you follow you need to click on your user name stream (a massive scrollable list)
- unlike Slandr you can’t search for users

3. Twitstat Mobile

EACH TWEET HAS
- favourite
- reply
- retweet

CLICK ON A USER
- no actions

FRIENDS
- self explanatory

REPLIES
- self explanatory

EGO
- self explanatory

DM
- self explanatory

4. Tweete

EACH TWEET HAS
- reply
- dm
- favourite

CLICK ON A USER
- reply
- dm
- follow/unfollow

REPLIES
- self explanatory

DIRECTS
- self explanatory

FAVOURITES
- self explanatory

5. Twitter mobile [THE OFFICIAL SITE]

EACH TWEET HAS
- nothing, you cannot action a tweet

CLICK ON A USER
- follow/unfollow
- friends list

You also have menu links to your REPLIES, FRIENDS LIST and PUBLIC

BONUS

friendfeed mobile - FF to go

Not all my Twitter friends are on friendfeed, but of those who are, I can limit the stream to just Twitter.
Further to this unlike Twitter, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, friendfeed allow you to organise your friends into folder/tag or section streams.

[ADDED 22/12/08: psychzzz]

[ADDED 18/03/09: filttr]

[ADDED 19/03/09: Set up your Twitter List, Twapper]