Some thoughts on the Delicious fiasco

News about Yahoo's decision to "sunset" Delicious is nearly a week old, so I might as well add my own thoughts.

First, financial.  In the current economic climate, Yahoo has been forced to identify their core services where it can realize profit (a process many companies - profit and non-profit - have been going through).  Many may not remember that at one time (prior to 1998), Yahoo was a web search engine.  By not anticipating and preparing for competitors (like Google), they proved themselves unable to adapt to the constantly changing nature of the web.


I don't see much difference in the nature of the company today.  They gather content, but seem are unable to adapt to the current circumstances of the web.  They are like survivors on a life raft, trying to weather through a storm.  

The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault

Maybe they tried to imitate AOL in overloading their homepage with so many ads that everyone knew to avoid that page at all costs.  There was so much on there you couldn't find anything.  (Even today, it's a dreadful page to look at, although it's easier to find your content.)


Those of us who have used Delicious for a while barely noticed Yahoo as the owner.  At one point early in the relationship I noticed greater speed in processing bookmarks, but no interfering ads.  One wonders how Yahoo was planning to monetize their investment.  Perhaps they would derive it from aggregating/analyzing which bookmarks were hot, but other than the front page, I saw no evidence that they used the information strategically.


I know a number of us Delicious users wanted to stay with the company if only because it is simple to use (and who wants to move hundreds if not thousands of bookmarks to a new platform?).  But it was also obvious that practically all other bookmarking tools were better, many taking advantages of Web 2.0 design techniques.  Why wasn't Delicious catching up?  Because, from the outset, I believe Yahoo bought Delicious purely as an investment.  They probably thought it would gain value just by holding on to it (assuming increasing numbers of users), and then they'd sell it to the company anxious to drop a few million.  


The result of their waiting is that the product value (as software) has steadily decreased so that it is approaching worthlessness.  Today, I feel the only worth inherent in Delicious is its user community.  By now that user community has jumped ship, migrating to other bookmark tools.  (Large notes on Diigo give detailed instructions on how to move one's booksmarks there and asks for patience, as they've had a large influx of users -- more in the past week than they've had all year.)  


Second, let me speak on the nature of bookmarking.  The term has become obsolete:  bookmarking suggests a placeholder - a site to which you want to return.  But bookmarking has become much more than that.  In today's world where "curation" has become the current buzzword, having bookmarks suggests much more than placeholders, but a means to crafting a profile or multiple points of views on numerous topics, and sharing that view or  information in general.  It is particularly that last feature which has been beneficial to so many.  It is a feature (often invisible) of sites such as newspapers, where they gauge the popularity of articles.  In this way, much valuable information can be obtained from observing bookmarking activities.


I wonder why Google didn't think of of a bookmarking tool.  For a web search that can reveal hundreds of desirable links, wouldn't it have been great to have a bookmark tool to save interesting links as you browse through your list of tens or hundreds of search results?  
Ever note that in a Google search, sometimes the same search reveals different results on successive days?  That link you glanced by on one day might be missing the next day.  How good it would have been to have Google produce its own bookmarking tool.  (I generally prefer to see a list of at least 100 results rather than anything smaller, so I would like such a tool.)


Now that the story is basically over, there is much to be learned from the Delicious fiasco:

• Always have a backup plan
• Don't reveal your plan until you are ready to implement it
• Assume your secrets will eventually make it to the web sooner than you want
• If you don't intend to modify your software for a year, it will be overtaken by products which are better, reducing your products' value
• Don't buy products as investments; buy them because they are in sync with your vision and mission, and because you are willing to commit resources to them to make them better

And the Web 2.0 world keeps on shifting.

Web 2.0 Expo: Transforming Your Company To Embrace Empowered Employees and Customers

My first session on Tuesday: Transforming Your Company To Embrace Empowered Employees and Customers - by Josh Bernhoff and Ted Schadler (both of Forrester Research).

Much of the talk could probably be found in their book Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business.

They are into empowering individuals through technology. They showed a diagram of the "ladder of participation" - from passive web watchers to activist participants:

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/ross/470424239/)

There are 4 technologies that empower consumers:

1. Mobile devices
2. Social technology
3. Pervasive video
4. Cloud computing services

The authors took us through a brief history of the web illustrating the change in business-to-personal relationships. Empowerment is the next part of the story.

Social computing is the new customer service. This is all where's it at for the future. In this new environment, the company can NOT lock you out! Instead, companies need to respond holistically to the era of the empowered customer. How to achieve it? It's very hard.

Existence of empowered customers make it took easy to spread negative images about your company through viral techniques such as Twitter, Youtube, etc.

Instead, a company should cultivate HEROs: Highly Empowered and Resourceful Operatives. These are the people who will like your product so much they will function as goodwill ambassadors, and spread recommendations, nice stories, and other good words about your product and company. Clearly, a customer transaction no longer concludes with the purchase of an item. Now, it's ideal if the customer develops an ongoing relationship to the product and company. (Raises the participation and stake of the company.)

How to get there? There are 4 steps to build customer influence:

1. Identify the mass influencers
2. Deliver excellent customer service
3. Empowerment through mobile devices
4. Amplify your fans

(This ties up with previous Web 2.0 talks which spoke about how word-of-mouth from fans is probably among the best advertising you can receive.) No. 1: Who are these consumer influencers? In the US alone, people create circa 500 billion impressions of things. According to Nielson, the number is just under two trillion!!! People really want to let others what they think of things. Peer influence is highly concentrated: only 6.3% of adults create 80% of the influence impressions. (Reminds me of email paradigm: 10% of participants make 90% of the content.)

No. 2. It is these groups on which you need to focus. Deliver a groundswell of customer service. Good example: Best Buy.

No. 3. Empowering people using their cellphones. Example: AutoTrader.co.uk. They allow you to take a pic of a car and the software will automatically identify it for you!

No. 4. Amplify your fan activity. Good example: Marty Collins. Also: Microsot had a video conference of what do you do with your pc. It was a big success and enabled Microsoft to aggregate fan activity.

But here's the challenge for companies: Only empowered workers can serve empowered customers. Increasingly, customers are assuming the duties once owned by IT specialists. Companies should regard the consumerization of IT as not a problem but an opportunity. To know what's happening "out there," to remain engaged with the world of the customers, you need to empower the employees.

IT staff is accustomed to having sole responsibility for software. But now we're seeing that employees are using applications not sanctioned by IT - why? To get the job done better. If the employer throws up barriers, the workers will still find ways to get around them. So employers need to approach things differently.

Companies need a new contract - a new way of letting works increase their work productivity by any means they can, any software they can. Some examples: A worker within Black & Decker created instructional videos using YouTube. Black & Decker then created their own YouTube channel to support these efforts. At IBM, Gina Poole made collaborations possible using their Intranet.

How does the employwer support the empowered employee? With a HERO contract. Employees can create, but must know the company's mission, and the boundaries must be carefully spelled out. Bosses need to think differently about technology: Works need mobile apps, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc. Business manager need to recognize that technology is now part of the landscape that they can't ignore. IT has to stop being a barrier and let workers create and flourish in the work environment.

Not surprisingly, all these ideas were anticipated in The ClueTrain Manifesto some 15 years ago. Examples: Thesis #12: The networked market knows more than companies about their products.

There are 3 models for efficient groundswell among customers:

1. Build a service team
2. Integrate service and marketing
3. Make service a core value

Also ClueTrain Thesis #42: People talk to each other directly inside the company. This results in 5 ways to maximize collaboration:

1. Extend existing tools
2. Create value
3. Dedicate people to project
4. [lost the rest, but it's in the book]

It was a very nice talk. Unlike previous talks I've seen, this one really tried to wrestle with the notion that employees must be up to the energy of the consumers. They must be "on call" to explore whatever software, sites that consumers are using which could add value to the product.

Closer to the library world, the only place I've really seen this work is at the Smithsonian, where they have their own social network. Of course, most community libraries probably don't have the staff or resources to create and maintain these networks. There's no reason to think they'll be static, or will stay on one platform or one site. So being an empowered employee will require a great deal of committment and work. It's not going to be a job "extra responsibility" but will soon be an essential responsibility of every job.

For me it was one of the best talks on Tuesday, well presented. It elaborated on themes presented in the earlier Web 2.0 Expos - namely that there is so much more one can do if one harnesses the energy of customers - letting them create, and giving them a space (e.g. a company social network) in which to create.

Web 2.0 Expo: Tying It All Together: Implementing the Open Web by Joseph Smarr

The final talk I attended at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City was appropriately titled Tying It All Together: Implementing the Open Web given by Joseph Smarr of Plaxo. [See also his blog and his Plaxo page.]. His PowerPoint presentation is here.

Being on the staff of Plaxo, one would think he'd promulgate Plaxo as the answer to everything - but he didn't (and that was welcome). Although Plaxo was clearly present in some of his slides, his goal of achieving a broader topic was what made his talk very good. He really believes that we are close to wiring the web to become the social web, so that information people have filled out on social websites can be easily transported to others. As usual, I take any responsibility for any faulty transcription of his talk.
--------------------------------
There is an important fundamental change going on the web: The entire web is going social and the social is going open. Here are some of the open Social Web building blocks: OpenId, Open Social, Jabber, microformats.

How does it all fit together? What will new Social Web look like?

Today the Social Web is broken: we have to register anew for each site. We must re-establish our relationship, our profile, etc. It's a pain (and disuades one from trying out new sites). Current social applications have limited options. At least more and more people have the same info somewhere on the web (in various sites).

But we know how to make things better. The new building blocks of social apps can establish important identification of people and their relationships. Here's how. There are thee significant ways to define yourself in relation to the Social Web:

1. Who I am
2. Who I know
3. What's going on

1. Who I Am. You create create a lasting, portable, durable online identity. For example, OpenID allows you to link profile data between sites.

Then consolidate your online identify with me-links: rel=me (XFN)
You can use Google Social Graph API to see what your users said about themselves.
In Plaxo it's called the Pulse Stream - a stream of all your contacts and what they're doing on the web.

2. Who I know.

You build and maintain real relationships. Sometimes it's just a way to keep in touch with already known people. Traditional ways of friending people can now give way to these techniques:

• Contact APIs (ex. find people from your address book), and leverage previously established relationships (learned from address books)
• OAuth - share private data between trusted sites.
• Friends-list portability - to create continuous discovery across multiple sites. (Most robots just scrape just once.)

Some examples: Flickr and Gmail - allows one to import your address books to set up network of existing friends. Dopplr also has a unique way of doing this.

3. What's Going On

Staying up-to-date with people you know. OpenSocial -- You can build apps that can run anywhere. Aggregates activities all over the web - brings all feeds together. Examples: Plaxo, Friendster, Orkut, Hi5, Myspace.

RSS/Atom -- open standard for aggregating open events. one can syndicate activity with others.

Jabber - XMPP - real-time update stream between sites.

Imagine a picture of how it might be: You want to interact with many different websites. So there's an emerging service layer between you and the sites.

The Social Web Ecosystem:

Who I am: Identity providers
Who I know: Social Graph providers
What I know: Content aggregators

Social Graph (i.e. Network) Providers will be emerging.

The virtual cycle of social discovery: John checks out a new site, finds people he knows there (using his address book/friends list), then creates some content and shares it on the site; his friend Joe then discovers that content and site and continues the cycle.

There are hurdles to overcome:
* How does friends list portability work?
* Tell the site your Social Graph Provider: XRDS Simple (discovery tool) + OAuth (access - method to interact with protected data)
* Site fetches your data to find local friends (no standards way to do this yet)
* Site lets you connect to people you want - can periodically look for new matches

The missing link: Portable contacts.

Currently there are efforts underway to standardize contact schema, discovery/auth, and common operators. There's a focus on ease and speed of adoption with active involvement from large and small players

For more info see http://portablecontacts.net (one of Smarr's projects)

Picture of how it will work:
* User signs on with OpenID
* Site tries to get contacts with API - no go
* Site sends user through OAuth flow to grant access
* Users now access users' contacts data via API+

The future of the Social Web will really be where all interconnections will work smoothly.

Web 2.0 Expo: What Would Google Do? How Media Must Revolution Their Thinking

The second session of the Web 2.0 Expo in New York that I attended on Friday, Sept. 19 was "What Would Google Do? How Media Must Revolution Their Thinking," a panel discussion led by Jeff Jarvis (BuzzMachine.com), with John Byrne (executive editor of Business Week and editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek.com), Steve Adler (also of Business Week). Jarvis was the center of the show. My guess was that his points were taken from What would Google Do? his forthcoming book on lessons intuited from Google, taken to business world to see how these lessons work. He was a passionate and dynamic speaker, speaking to-the-point with these axioms below.

Google's rules:

• Give the people control and they will use it
• Dell hell [lessons learned from Jarvis's own experience with Dell]
  
• Your worst customer is your best friend
• Your best customer is your partner

We have a new architecture:

• A link changes everything
• Do what you do best and link to the rest
• Join a network / be a platform
• Think distributed

Additionally there is a new publicness:

• If you're not searchable, you won't be found
• Everybody needs a little SEO (search engine optimization)
• Life is public, so is business
• Your customers are your ad agency

We live in a new society: You don't start communities, they exist already. So the question is: How do you harness them? ou give them: "Elegant organization" - Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook)

• Small is the new big
• Maintain audience
• Join open source - it's a gift economy
• The mass market

Welcome to the new business reality:

• Atoms are a drag
• Middlemen are doomed
• Free is a business model
• Decide what business you're in

New attitude

• There is a inverse relationship between control and trust - David Weinberger (author of Cluetrain Manifesto)
• Trust the people
• Listen

Google creates new ways of listening to people - us.
There are ten signficant things in our lives [this is evidently a pun on Google's corporate philosophy. Sorry, I didn't catch them all because he went way too fast].

• Make mistakes well
• Life is a beta
• Be honest
• Be transparent
• Collaborate
• Don't be evil

Michael Dell (co-creator of computer company) has these aphorisms:

• New speed
• Answers are instantaneous
• Life is live
• Mobs form in a flash
• Be transparent

From this we derive new imperatives:

• Beware of the cash cow in the coal mine (i.e. can blind us to strategic necessities)
• Encourage enable and protect innovation
• Simplify, simplify
• Get out of the way

Once Jarvis was finished, the talk part of the program switched to how Business Week has embraced the Web 2.0 world and aesthetic. Byrne and Adler's Powerpoint presentation is here although it appears kind of cryptic. [I apologize for the brevity of my notes, and how they trail off at the end.]

How has Businessweek opened up? Through simplifying URLs, tagging stories, staff training sessions, more SEO-friendly headlines.
Now Google refers 38% of search traffic to Businessweek.com

They've create their Business Exchange: a place to relate to others - a user community optimized for search. It's "a more sophisticated digg.com" and helps people find what they want. User profiles can link to their profiles on Linkedin.
They've made a widget for bloggers so that readers can see what they're doing at that moment.

Today, content is no longer king; rather, context is king. Journalism is no longer a product but a process. questioning what are the rights of users.

In comparing the print audience to the one online, Businessweek found their online audience about ten year younger, smarter, more women, more global.

Enterprise 2.0, Wikipedia and Facism

(I've become quieter than usual because my employer unleashed a bombshell: blogs for the entire staff!! That's well over 1,000 people! So I've focusing on (internal) blogging for my institution (sorry - not visible to the public), but hope to get back here more often.)

I began noticing the phrase Enterprise 2.0 before I realized it was used by Professor Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School. (He thought he invented the term in 2006, only realizing later that it was first used in 2001.) I began taking notice with a good article in Harvard Business School's weekly ezine Working Knowledge. Entitled How Wikipedia Works (or Doesn't), author Sean Silverthone succinctly recounted McAfee's experience dealing with Wikipedia and how it serves as a model for collaboration - with both positive and negative attributes.

It fascinated me, so I headed to Wikipedia's (now-defunct) article on Enterprise 2.0. Seeing it incomplete, I added several links, expanded the definition, and made a few more corrections, while arguing on the talk page about why the decision for deletion should be rescinded.

Despite McAfee's credentials as an author of serious work, his and others' arguments could not withstand the fury of anonymous Wikipedians, who wielded their power (which ultimately was more important than factual data) in eradicating the Enterprise 2.0 article by merging it with the more generic article on Enterprise Social Software. In his summary, Silverthorne pointed out that this represents top-down administration on the part of Wikipedia, ironically a type of adminisration which is the opposite of what Wikipedia represents. I call it fascism. :) It reminds me of what happens in certain countries which give the illusion of democracy until it becomes uncomfortable - and then take top-heavy action to roll back the uncomfortable attitudes.

What does this have to do with librarianship? It's about the hurdles of library administration in a 2.o world. For example, if a library adopts a 2.0 attitudes, adopting a flatter way of communicating, allowing decisions to be made from the botttom, but then suddenly issues a top-down ultimatum, that would really quash the functioning of the institution.