Communicat.us

I hear a log about "open standards" as it pertains to technology and software. The fear of being "locked in" is great. For the most part, the discussion is greatest when it comes to acquiring new software – especially things that are considered "Web 2.0".

This is all well and this is all great but what could it mean to the non-programmer ?

I recently resolved to take better advantage of my company’s social network. We use Lotus Connections and like all self adopting technology, my usage has grown but mostly in the areas that were tactical to my day-to-day work. What I started to notice was that I was seeing information from colleagues – both current and past – posting status (micro-blogging) which I’d remember days later when I was working on something new. Had I not seen those updates, I’d have missed valuable details which were making my work go faster. I wanted more !

Lotus Connections has a rich web experience for all of it’s capabilities. The problem for me is I like desktop software. I like things to seamlessly integrate into what I already do. The use of standards like ATOM and REST and the exposure of all aspects of Lotus Connections through APIs means different people can have different user experiences to the same set of services. I already knew about the tight integration to Lotus Notes and Sametime as well as seamless extensions to my Symphony, Windows PC, and Office products. Recenlty I also found a number of options for integrating Lotus Connections Status Updates – an internally developed plug-in for Sametime and Lotus Notes, a "hackday" project call Bluto, and Connections Glue, a great 3rd party app that gives the look and feel of TweetDeck.

Here’s my picks for favorite integration …

• Lotus Connections Files into Windows Explorer using the Plug-in for Microsoft Windows
• Lotus Connections Activities into Lotus Notes using the integrated features shipped with Notes 8.5.1
• Lotus Connections Status Updates into my system tray using Connections Glue
• Lotus Connections Communities into my feed reader (using the feed that gives me ">/news/atom/stories/public?source=communities&container=>" href="http://>/news/atom/stories/public?source=communities&container=>" target=_blank>everything new")

What tools do you use every day and where can social software extend your reach and productivity ?

Alan Lepofsky blogs over at LepoLand and recently wrote a great post of the value of publishing your status update within your organization …

This morning I signaled a status update [think twitter] "Generating a list of 2000 fake name, titles, phone numbers, and office locations for our new demo sandboxes."  … one of my colleagues Graham, read what I wrote and replied with "Once you’ve got that list, could you send me a copy?"

… Alan’s entire post is here.

I’ve been in this exact situation myself – building a demo and feeling the need to generate a bunch of sample data. I would be grateful to discover someone else was already ahead of me and just as grateful to see my work get reused. Odds are good there are lots of work items that are small enough that you "just do it" your self but are probably already out there or being done by others.

Deploying a microblogging capability inside your firewall – whether it be Lotus Connections, Socialtext, Jive, or a stand-alone open source option – provides the value of sharing work information while not exposing it to the internet at large. If you prefer the outsourced experience of status updates but still want the privacy of your information, then a cloud service may be your preferred channel.

But microblogging is not the only mechanism for sharing information and reducing duplicate work. A "Shared Files" capability has a similar value. Consider the example above. The producer of the sample dataset may be separated from the consumer by days or weeks. If the dataset is published to an internal file sharing service, it can be found by others, tagged, rated, and more. If the status updates and shared files are linked to the author’s profile, then adhoc expertise evolves and it becomes increasingly easy to find the people you need to work on any given activity.

What social networking software capabilities are you considering ?

I only recently took the time to experiment with Twitter. "The question has always been, how do I get value from Twitter ?"

The reason it has taken me so long is I WILL NOT TWEET MY EVERY MOVE / THOUGHT / DIATRIBE / etc. Further, I really don’t what to listen to others’ every move / thought / diatribe / etc.  And on the surface, *that* is exactly what Twitter seems to be.

So what is Twitter ? It’s nothing more and nothing less than a short messaging service.

What makes Twitter interesting is *how* people use Twitter. Yes, there are those that tweet (the act of sending a short message through Twitter) verbal diarrhea. There are also those who use Twitter as self promotion (where ‘self’ is either the individual or the company). There are also those who use it an an intelligent pub/sub infrastructure. The unique bit is that Twitter itself has almost none of the intelligence – it is how people use Twitter and how they have developed clients and tools that leverage Twitter that is interesting. One of the most powerful of this is the ‘hashtag" …

Once you’ve started using Twitter, it won’t take long before you come across what’s known as a hash tag. That’s when you see something in a tweet that has a # prefix. (The # is a hash symbol, hence the term hash tag or hashtag.)

For example, if you’ve seen tweets related to the recent U.S. government stimulus bill, you may have noticed some of them had #stimulus in them.

It took me a while to wrap my head around what the purpose of this thing was but, once I “got it,” I realized it’s not as complicated as it seems.

A hash tag is simply a way for people to search for tweets that have a common topic. For example, if you search on #LOST (or #Lost or #lost, because it’s not case-sensitive), you’ll get a list of tweets related to the TV show. What you won’t get are tweets that say “I lost my wallet yesterday” because “lost” isn’t preceded by the hash tag.

It is the "search" aspect of hashtags that is so powerful. You do not need to "follow" every user and you do not need to read every tweet. You find (or create) a hashtag that relates to a topic of interest and you "subscribe" to it. Most Twitter clients let you create persistent searches. In this way, you do not need to know all of the user who are discussing a topic, you just need to know the hashtag for that topic.

… hash tags are NOT any kind of official Twitter function. The company has not created a list of topics that we can browse through to see if there’s one that interests us … any user can create one simply by adding it to their own tweet.

For example, when the plane went down in the Hudson River some Twitter user wrote a post and added #flight1549 to it … somebody else read it and when he posted something about the incident, added #flight1549 to *HIS* tweet. it didn’t take long for this hash tag to go viral … it’s a very organic process.

[Before creating a new hashtag] The first thing I would do is a basic Twitter search on the term itself so I can see if someone’s already created a related hash tag. Before you create your own tag, you might want to search on a few variations to make sure they don’t already exist.

Source: The Twitter Hash Tag: What Is It and How Do You Use It?

I only follow a small number of people but I have hashtag searches on a number of topics and it is the tweets on those specific topics that provide the value. Not only can I learn about the topic, I can also ask questions to "the community" (regardless of who that may be). In my first few examples of asking questions I had multiple good answers in a matter of seconds! The power of a huge network of people, connected by a simple messaging service.