Collaborative Conversations, FriendFeed for Enterprise?
If you are following Twitter, FriendFeed and the real time web, you probably have seen the TechCrunch article on FriendFeed's future and that Robert Scoble disagrees with that. Both the arguments make sense, FF is a very cool app but there is a risk of not getting into the masses or may be it will. I first heard about Twitter on 11/28/06 but I did not signup or start using Twitter until 09/18/08. If you asked in 2006, if I would use Twitter, I would have probably said 'why in the hell would I write 140 char messages for strangers to see' and 'why would anybody care about what I have to say'. Now I tweet on average once a day. So today someone might say that FF is too fast for me or it wont let me focus on work or why the hurry in getting the information. However, they might find themselves gluing to FF soon and figured out on how to effectively work and use FF to stay on top of the feeds. In anycase, I am no expert when it comes to the so called "social media" and I am not going to predict Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed's future, I am sure going to watch and adapt. However, I have a lot of experience in enterprise development and managing multi-shore teams. I love all the awesome tools that are available on the web. However, I hate that I cannot use them in the enterprise. I tweeted recently about few tools that I wanted to use http://bit.ly/28ORZX . Oh yes to all the cloud computing fans, I am a huge fan of cloud computing but there is no way large enterprises will let you discuss/post future product development issues on a outside the firewall hosted services. Traditionally Enterprise collaboration is achieved with very minimum set of tools, email server, file server, calendar server etc. Slowly wikis and blogs have made their way. Its time for enterprises to adopt real time collaboration. Its no wonder Yammer, Socialtext Signals, Presently are having good success in providing enterprise microsharing solutions by selling their SAS and packaged software. Laconi.ca announced plans to host paid microblogs on status.net. Hop over to Pistachio Consulting and you will find tons of information on "Twitter for Business". You can even find a detailed list of twitter style solutions for enterprises that are already available. Granted "Twitter for Business" and "Enterprise Microsharing" are going to be huge. However, I think FriendFeed style solution has equally huge opportunity or even more in the Enterprise, let me try to explain on why. One of our employee built an internal twitter in his spare time (Yeah, you read that right). Internally its hosted for all the employees to share information. I requested him for a packaged solution so that I can set one up for my multi-shore team. So why do I want to setup for my team? I want to setup one to improve the collaboration between my team members across shores, have them publish their daily work activities, have them share things that could help others. They already post their status reports on a team wordpress blog that I setup, which helps each other know whats going in the team, where I post any big news, major process changes etc. The micro-sharing would take this collaboration to the next level in exchanging useful information that we would normally not send in emails and probably not a blog post about. However, after setting this up and test driving it for the team, I soon realized what I need is a system for Collaborative Conversation. The micro part actually is not that important, whats important is to drive every team member to participate in discussions. Twitter is great when there is not one focussed topic but people exchange random, interesting content. However to drive focussed conversations, friendfeed rocks. I know building such conversations will bring my multi-cultural, multi-shore, multi-interested team lot closer, will help boost the productivity and will help grow as a team. I can drive centralized conversations on every aspect of the development process including design discussions, bug discussions, code review discussions, release time line discussions, document discussions. How? Everything is a feed:
- Someone publishes a design document (just like how you feed your blog post to friend feed) a thread is created with the link to the doc automatically
- When some check-ins in a code set a thread is created and reviews comments are exchanged over that thread
- I create a thread with release date time line and discussions are driven on it
- A customer issue comes, discussions are driven on it.
