Communicat.us

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 ?

From a simple perspective, "analytics" for the end user means three things: Data + Processing + Display. While purists may say analytics is just the processing, the old adage of "garbage in / garbage out" is apt. So too is the recognition  that great data with great processing can still leave you scratching your head if you can see what is important.

All of this is to say I found it interesting to read that NBC has added a live twitter "pulse" analysis for the Olympics. At the moment I would guess it is must another gimmick to generate buzz. However, there could be real value in what it does.

The purpose of Twitter Pulse is to show the relative volume of tweets and the topics they represent.

Data: The data is Twitter but its not clear how they select tweets about the Olympics vs. all other tweets. For now, we will assume its a good data set.

Processing: Next, there is some type of analysis – presumable to pull out key words such as the sport, the interest, some data keys ("video", "medal", etc.) locations, athletes, and so on. All of this data is processed for one metric, "volume of traffic".

Display: the "volume of traffic" metric controls a box size. The other data keys are used to generate some text overlay and to choose a suitable background image. All of this is then rendered "tree map".

What does it mean ? OR more important to a company, what use is it ?

The resulting data could indicate what people are interested in seeing and thus influence what what content is broadcast as well as what types of advertising will have the highest impact. If this were trusted, then it could impact the cost of advertising as well as the size and demographic of the audience.

However, we need to remember the data set – Twitter. So perhaps this is not a sufficiently accurate sampling to make changes to broadcast content. But, what about using the data to change web content ? It could be a good predictor of web site traffic and thus advertisement selection and placement as well as to focus content.

As an aside, I found it interesting that over the 30 minutes or so of watching the Twitter Pulse, the sport of Curling rarely dropped out of the top 1/3rd of the graph’s boxes.

My observation of "analytics" is that success requires all three disciplines working in concert and more often than not, there are three distinct skill sets – data management, processing, and visualization. If you are interesting in the display component, you might be interesting is looking at "Many Eyes" which not only provides visualization of data set but also lets users share their discoveries – a kind of "social data processing" capability.

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.

I’m still on the sidelines when it comes to Twitter. I have an account but I am not very active. that is not to say I don’t use Twitter, I just don’t tweet very often. So, if I don’t tweet, and I’m not logged into Twitter, how do I use it ?

Let’s start with two related concepts. First – Twitter has been identified as “micro-blogging”. Second, nearly all blogging solutions have support for feeds built right in. Twitter is no different.

Rather than follow a Twitter-er through Twitter or SMS, or one of the many clients, you can use a feed reader. Further, those feeds can be processed using filter services like FeedRinse or software like Yahoo Pipes.. These allow you to reduce the total Twitter flow down to just messages that fit your criteria.

Thus far we have a Twitter feed, a filter service, and a feed reader. That represents the “output engineering”. But it doesn’t need to stop there. What about automating the input ? Here is where there are some interesting uses for micro-blogging. Let me give you an example.

This evening at 7:55PM EDT, a four stage rocket was launched from NASA’s Wallops Flight facility. In addition to having a viewing facility, there was also a live streaming video feed. There was also a Twitter feed. Here is an excerpt …

• NASA_Wallops – 2009-05-19:18:35:25EDT: 6:35 p.m. We are T-60 minutes and counting for launch of the Air Force Research LabTacSat-3 satellite on an Air Force Minotaur 1 rocket from Wallops Island. The Coast Guard is clearing some boats in the avoidance area. The target launch time is 7:35 p.m. The launch window runs to 11:30 p.m.
• NASA_Wallops – 2009-05-19:19:05:01EDT: 7:05p.m. T-30 minutes and counting. No issues for range,rocket or spacecraft. Range is clear.
• NASA_Wallops – 2009-05-19:19:20:27EDT: 7:20 p.m. T-15 minutes and holding. Boat in the range.
• NASA_Wallops – 2009-05-19:19:34:24EDT: New launch time is 7:55 p.m.
• NASA_Wallops – 2009-05-19:19:39:53EDT: T-15 minutes and counting.
• NASA_Wallops – 2009-05-19:19:45:05EDT: 7:45 T-10 minutes and counting
• NASA_Wallops – 2009-05-19:19:50:04EDT: 7:50 T-5 minutes and counting.Go for launch
• NASA_Wallops – 2009-05-19:19:53:00EDT: T-2 minutes
• NASA_Wallops – 2009-05-19:19:54:09EDT: 50 seconds
• NASA_Wallops – 2009-05-19:19:54:31EDT: 30 seconds
• NASA_Wallops – 2009-05-19:19:54:59EDT: launch
• NASA_Wallops – 2009-05-19:19:58:20EDT: 3rd stage burn
• NASA_Wallops – 2009-05-19:19:58:54EDT: all systems nominal 3rd stage burnout
• NASA_Wallops – 2009-05-19:20:04:03EDT: 4th stage ignition
• NASA_Wallops – 2009-05-19:20:04:18EDT: systems nominal
• NASA_Wallops – 2009-05-19:20:08:41EDT: TacSat-3 deployed

In this case, the Tweets were actually messages direct from the RCC. Those messages were submitted to Twitter using their public interfaces.

It was a very effective use of Twitter and micro-blogging technology … and a spectacular launch !