Socialtext

Thank you to everyone who voted for us in the first round.  We're now one of the finalists, and would love to have your vote.  

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Mashable is proud to present the second annual Open Web Awards.

Open Web Awards is the only multilingual international online voting competition that covers major innovations in web technology. Through an online nominating and voting process, the Open Web Awards recognizes and honors the top achievements in 26 categories.

Please use the widget below to vote for Socialtext.

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While wide awake at 4am the other night, I found myself reading Twitter status updates.  People were discussing the presidential election, conference that were going on, sports, etc.  I was consuming vast amounts of information.

However, it got me thinking... "There is something wrong when I know more about what is going on with "web folks", than I do about many of my family and friends."

Technically the answer lies in how easily accessible information is via the web, which people I've chosen to follow, who I add to my social networks, the blogs I read, etc.

But there is more to it.  What defines a friend?  An acquaintance?  A colleague?  Where does family fit in?  Has technology helped me connect to people, or provided me distractions which keep me further away from those I should be spending the most time with?

Some facts:

• Almost none of my "closest" friends on are Twitter
• Zero family members are on Twitter  (except my mom, whom I set up an account for, so she can keep up with me)
• Many of my friends, and even some of my family are on Facebook
• None of my best friends or family blog.  However, many family members read my blog to keep up with what I'm doing.

As the "people-centric" nature of work becomes equally as important as the "content-centric" aspect, I think this very important to think about.   Who is important to helping you get your job done.   How do you know them, and how can you discover the people you should know?

I started coming up with a rating scale for how close I am to people.  The list below is just brain storming.  At best it is a rough guide.  It is not very accurate, as I can easily think of exceptions to each category, and reasons to move each category up or down.

Complete strangers

I'm sorry, I've never heard of you.



 




They "know" you, but you don't "know" them

This is quite common on the web, or in a job or position where you are a "public figure".

This category feeds your ego.  Everyone loves people to attend their sessions at events, read their blog, follow them on Twitter, etc.  Anyone who says different is lying! ;-)

These are the Facebook and Linked in invites from people who you have no clue about.

You "know" them, but they don't "know" you

In contrast to the people above, here you are the follower.  (just don't be a stalker!)

These are the people you keep track of at some regular interval.  You find them interesting, informative, or controversial enough that you want to know what they have to say, but you really don't know them personally.


You interact with them on-line regularly, but are not "close"

This is your "social network".

These are the people you try and take the time to keep up with, respond to their posts, comments on their photos, etc. However, a majority of these "on-line friends" are people I would not know if I passed on the street.  That is not intended to be offensive, it is just reality.

There is also a portion in this group who is more important than others.  Come on, do you really know all the people you're connected with on Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, etc, etc, etc, etc?

You've actually met in person

Obviously technology has enabled us to meet, interact, stay in touch with, and work with people around the world, across time zones, across borders, even across languages.  The telephone, email, chat, web conferences, etc are all wonderful, but I always feel closer to someone once I've met them.




You've had a meal or drink together

Bonding with others over food and drink has always been a way to form relationships.  Now the question is, does someone mean more to you if they pay, or if you pick up the tab?






You know details about them not found online

These are the friends whom you shared real experiences with.  You've met their families, you've travelled together.  You've stayed at their house.  You look forward to seeing them at conferences.  You miss them when you don't see them for a long time.





People you interact with often in the real world

These are the people that touch your life, either at work or at play.








Friends and family that are closest to you

You have a long history together, from childhood, or school, or love.
You were at their graduation, wedding or other major event, and they will be at yours.
You answer the phone when you see their name on call waiting.
You'd hop on a plane to see them.
You've confided in them and value their advise, and vice versa.



You'd take a bullet for them

I'm not sure who exactly goes here, but it is some subset of the group above.  Unless of course it is your job!







My Grandmother

Nuff said.

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Also releases its OpenSocial widgets as Open Source

PALO ALTO, CA - November 5, 2008 - Socialtext, the Enterprise Social Software leader, today announced it will host Widget Wednesday on November 12, a distributed hackathon for widgets and mashups. Socialtext partners Box.net, Denodo, Newsgator, Meebo, Six Apart, Slideshare and others will participate in the hackathon to develop OpenSocial standard-based widgets and mashups on the Socialtext platform. Socialtext also announced that it will release all of the widgets it develops under an Open Source license -- to help partners, customers and developer community members create mashups leveraging Socialtext's best-in-class REST API.

"We look forward to participating in Widget Wednesday and enabling Slideshare widgets for sharing presentations with Socialtext users, " said Slideshare CEO Rashmi Sinha. "Socialtext has a history of hosting community events like Barcamp and Dcamp that lead to great things and we are happy to be part of the developer community."

Participation in Widget Wednesday is open to those who wish to join the developer community. At the end of the day, participants will be able to vote on the best widget created and the winner will receive a $300 gift certificate for Kiva.org. Participation details can be found at http://socialtext.net/wikiwed

Socialtext recently launched Socialtext 3.0, and is focusing on completing the business social software offerings, including: Socialtext Dashboard, Socialtext People, Socialtext Workspace, SocialCalc and Socialtext Signals. Socialtext does not plan to update or support the Socialtext Open wiki in the short-term for the distribution benefits of Open Source, to instead focus its immediate energies on core development and cultivating a larger development community with widgets and mashups. All widgets in Socialtext Dashboard conform to the OpenSocial standard for widgets. Widgets developed by Socialtext will be released under the Apache 2.0 open source license.

About Socialtext
As the Enterprise Social Software leader, Socialtext applies Web 2.0 technologies to the critical challenges facing businesses. Enterprise 2.0 holds the promise of dramatically increasing business productivity, stimulating greater innovation, and creating tighter connections between employees, partners, and customers. Socialtext provides hosted and appliance-based solutions to more than 4,000 customers world-wide, including BASF, Boston College, CondeNet, Epitaph Records, Humana, IKEA, Intel, MicroStrategy, MWW Group, Nokia, Ogilvy, SAP, Sunguard, Symantec, USA Today and Washington Post.

Socialtext's flagship product, Socialtext Workspace, is the first enterprise wiki and the foundation of the social software platform. Socialtext People enables enterprise social networking. Socialtext Dashboard provides personalized and customizable widget-based interface for people and teams to manage activities. SocialCalc is the social spreadsheet for distributed teams. Learn more about Socialtext and how these innovative products are turned into solutions at www.socialtext.com.

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Gartner released their 2008 Magic Quadrant for Social Software last Friday. Socialtext is the only vendor to be in the Visionary quadrant for the second year in a row. Thirty three vendors were judged to be Niche Players. The remaining five are Atlassian, IBM, Jive, Microsoft and Socialtext.

Since the original report came out a year ago, Socialtext has made tremendous progress.

• We made a smooth CEO transition and Eugene Lee has brought another level of execution to the business
• Socialtext 3.0 has shipped, including Socialtext People, Socialtext Dashboard and Socialtext Workspace
• SocialCalc and Socialtext Signals are currently in Beta
• The customer response to our innovations has been overwhelmingly positive. Even in turbulent times, customers find our solutions to be a strategic imperative.

We've come a long way. It should be noted that there is still room for vision and execution according to Gartner's criteria, and no vendor is in the Leader quadrant. I'm sure the other four top players have set their sights on next year as we have -- up and to the right.

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On Thursday October 30th at 1:00 pm Pacific time, Socialtext and Motorola's Good Technology Group will deliver a combined webinar showing both the Good Mobility Suite and Socialtext 3.0 Wiki solution, including access via Motorola mobile devices.

More information can be found here, as well as a link to register.

If you have any topics you'd like us to cover, please post them as comments here.

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Meetings are a big productivity killer that you can control by working together better.  Studies have shown the cost of meetings, you probably spend a week per month in meetings, and you can calculate your own cost of meetings. The issue isn't just where you spend your team's time, but how you spend it. Vinnie Mirchandani, following my post in Forbes on Email Hell, points out the productivity problem isn't just email.

The other big productivity killer in corporations is meetings. I am constantly surprised to see too many of my client employees just go from meeting to meeting - then, of course come back to their desks to handle the deluge of email!

Like email, improving meeting productivity requires more than personal tactics.  Through leadership, the behavior of the group must change.  This distinction is critical in our current climate.  Companies need to make do with less -- and doing so cannot be done through personal productivity gains -- but with efficient and effective coordination and collaboration of teams, the organization as a whole, and how partners and customers intersect.

Changing meetings is difficult because nowhere does company culture manifest itself, if not define itself, than through meetings.  The meeting culture of some companies puts a premium on presentation, or cooperation to consensus, or conflict as creativity.  Research has even shown that most meetings are status contests.  Beyond this theater as a disclaimer, here is some practical advice to make meetings more effective and efficient:

Do I need to be there?

Without a criteria for who should attend meetings, the attendee list tends to grow.  Not only does having more people in the meeting effect the productivity of the meeting, but it keeps people from working on other things.  Put responsibility for this criteria upon the person calling the meeting, as they have the greatest odds of abusing it.

Share notes

At the beginning of every meeting, ensure that someone is taking notes and how they will be shared.  Better yet, have an established practice for how this is done in every meeting.  Sharing notes can help decrease the attendee list for efficiency sake.  How notes are taken can make the group more effective:

• Consider having the note taker project while taking notes.  This clarifies and gains support for what was said and what is agreed to. 
• Take notes in a wiki to make it easy to link to supporting materials, pass editing control to others, share while taking and makes the notes searchable and discoverable alongside other knowledge.
• Don't aim for meeting minutes, encourage summarization, but try to capture as much as possible.  The great thing about meeting notes is that they carry with them the context of an event.  Small things said may mean a lot in the future. For example, someone might contribute an alternative point of view that wasn't part of what might be the summary, but when someone finds it outside the meeting they can contact the person to further explore it.
• Focus on next steps.  Conclude meetings with agreement on what was learned and the action items.

One tendency I have seen is to constrict note sharing for sake of politics.  Sometimes this necessary, but the instinct for control tends to hamper productivity.  For example, if division heads need to meet on an HR issue and craft a message for broader consumption, sometimes the meeting owner controls the notes.  Always share notes with meeting attendees and have a protocol for how they will be shared further.

What's the goal?

A meeting without a clear goal shouldn't exist.  Goals help focus conversation, but also ensure time is being spent towards the right outcome.

The most unproductive outcome of a meeting is having another meeting.  Usually because of unclear goal setting.  Unfortunately, meetings are autopoietic, meaning they self-propagate.  The only time a meeting should lead to another meeting is if that is the up front goal (let's plan the annual sales kickoff, or let's divide the strategic planning we need to accomplish into these three meetings).

What's the agenda?

The structure of an agenda should support accomplish the goal of the meeting.  One challenge is trying to limit agenda items while everyone has their own agendas and need to be heared.  One of the quickest produtivity gains available is to perform agenda setting in a wiki beforehand.  Be sure you bring people's attention to the agenda as it changes.  Link to supporting materials so everyone arrives at the meeting not only understanding the goal, but understands the subject matter behind each agenda item.

Will this ever end?

Always have a firm start time and end time for meetings.  Notice that when meetings have a firm end time, and you get close to it, suddenly the meeting becomes more productive?  Consider how time as a constraint can provide focus for conversation.  Consider trying that hour long meeting in 30 minutes.

Identify Subgroups

Before a meeting, consider if a subgroup of attendees can better discuss and decide or recommend a course of action.  During a meeting recognize when the conversation really is for a subset of attendees, and if time allows, table the conversation until the subgroup can work it out.

Standup Meetings

One of the best practices businessfolk can adapt from agile software development methodologies is the standup meeting.  Have the team meet daily for 5-15 minutes to synch on status.  Sometimes this is done litterally standing up, which gives even the most diligent of soldiers a stake in ending the meeting before they pass out.  Each team member takes a turn updating everyone, perhaps taking clarifying questions, but not using the forum for protracted discussion.

Prep Time

The beauty of the standup meeting is that everyone comes prepared to update others.  However, this preparation doesn't come for free.  You need to allow the team members time to prepare for the meeting. 

One evolution I've witnessed at Socialtext is how they increasingly shared their status updates in the wiki before the standup meeting, and then it became convention for everyone to read the updates before the meeting.  In any meeting format, status updates are better replaced with coordinating conversations, unblocking issues and gaining a shared understanding of priorities.

BAHM: Big Hairy Audacious Meetings

So far, I've provided general considerations for making meetings more productive for groups. But what are some bold things you can try with your team? For the more adventurous teams, here are some Big Hair Audacious Meeting methods to consider:

• Barcamp Your Retreat -- At Socialtext, half of our employees are remote, so our face to face meetings really matter when we have them.  Initially we did like all companies do, lots of time preparing the perfect agenda, with lots to cover.  Once we tried a Barcamp-style open space methodology for the first afternoon.  People liked it so much, we threw away the structured agenda for the week and let it self-organize.  At the end of the week, everyone revelled in the experience, but we also reviewed the original agenda and found we covered every single item.
• Turn it Off or Turn it On -- Companies have gone to the extreme in adapting to having connectivity available during meetings.  Some have banned laptops and blackberries during meetings, which I think completely misses the point.  Doing email in meetings is bad, but the cause is usually a culture of unproductive email and meetings.  Having laptops augment meetings, with wikis, backchannels and the ability to search, is good with the right focus.  But you need to make people conscious of the issue.  Try three things:
  • During specific portions of a meeting, or certain kinds of meetings, the organizer needs to demand all laptops shut for 100% focus on the people in the room.
  • Try meetings for a week where you specifically ask people to bring their laptops and look to augment the meeting with social software and search. Afterwards, ask people how this made your team more productive, or not.
  • Try meetings for a week where you specifically ban everything but pen, paper and people.  Afterwards, ask people how it helped or hurt productivity -- but more importantly talk about if time and effectiveness is being lost because people are not valuing attention.
• Standups -- I used standup meetings as an illustration of how time is best use for status reporting, but do try this format with your team.
• Make Every Meeting a Party -- I always quote Pete Kaminski's insight that "time spent face to face is too valuable for work" to make the point that teams need to socialize.  If you don't afford the time to help your team be unproductive, they will make meetings unproductive.
• Turn Recurring Meetings into Processes -- survey the meeting topics of your organization and you may find recurring meetings that are the result of broken business processes.  Fix the process or lackthereof.
• Get Back to One-on-Ones -- short one-to-one meetings can be incredibly productive.  They even help decrease email volume.  Consider the patterns with your team, and if you can carve out the time for one-on-one meetings by having less group meetings.
• No Meeting Monday -- this is the obvious audacious one.  Consider banning meetings on Monday, not just because it is a good day for people to collect themselves and orient how meetings should be conducted for the rest of the week.  But it will raise the conciousness of meeting cost.  As with email, knowing it is an issue we are all responsible for is half the battle.

In summary, I don't take the extreme position that meetings are wholly unproductive, and the issue isn't the cost of meetings, but how to increase their return by working together better.  In future posts I hope to address how to make meetings more effective and efficient with partners and customers.

Related readings:

• Best Buy's Results Only Work Environment (ROWE)
• Tim Ferriss' Do-Not-Do-List
• 37signals' Meetings are Toxic
• Short case study on meeting augmentation
• Outsourcing memory
• 43 folders on Topless meetings
• Productivity of Far Flung Teams
• The hidden cost of meetings

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The following is an article I contributed to Forbes.

E-mail overload is the leading cause of preventable productivity loss in organizations today. Basex Research recently estimated that businesses lose $650 billion annually in productivity due to unnecessary e-mail interruptions. And the average number of corporate e-mails sent and received per person per day are expected to reach over 228 by 2010.

The fundamental problem of this otherwise great technology is largely behavioral, and new practices and technologies are arising to solve it.

A major contributor to e-mail overload is broken business processes. When an environment changes, business processes fail to adapt, and this causes exceptions. For example, when a customer requests information that isn't provided by a standard support process, it can kick off a chain of e-mails hunting for information--and what is found isn't easily captured into the redesign of the process.

We haven't had good tools and practices for resolving these exceptions and learning from them. In The Only Sustainable Edge, John Seely Brown and John Hagel identify that most employee time is not spent executing process, but handling exceptions to process.

Commercial e-mail spam filters and virus protection do a reasonable job today. What remains is behavioral--not how e-mail works, but how we work with it and how we shouldn't. According to Gartner Group, 30% of e-mail is "occupational spam," characterized by excessive CC, BCC and Reply-All use. Not by coincidence, Socialtext customers commonly decrease e-mail volume by 30% and moving e-mails to collaborative workspaces that are designed for one-to-many or many-to-many communication.

From a user's point of view, e-mail is what you could call a push medium. Beyond your control, anyone can push an e-mail into your inbox at near zero cost. By contrast, new Web 2.0 media emphasize pull technology: You choose who or what you want to subscribe to, pull information to you when you want it and unsubscribe when you want. Ideally, we would use push mediums for directed private or time-sensitive communication and pull for less formal, more public and less urgent communication. Now there is a choice--so long as you can gain agreement on which to use for what and how to use it.

Eugene Kim says there is "no such thing as collaboration without a shared goal." For every group that you regularly communicate with, one of your goals should be to increase communications efficiency and effectiveness. Without these shared goals and practices, behavior will not change. And with new technologies, you have the opportunity to transform communication habits into collaborative best practices.

Here are the top five tactics for making e-mail an efficient and effective collaboration tool:

Establish Internal E-Mail Practices

Within your organization or community, review your current e-mail habits. Consider establishing agreements on the formality, tone, brevity, distribution, responsiveness and timing. Then try bold experiments such as "E-mail-Free Fridays"--not necessarily because they will work, but for learning what could work and raising awareness of the cost of e-mail. Other peers might help bring awareness to work/life balance issues when always on mobile e-mail.

Move Group E-mail to Collaborative Workspaces

With enterprise social software solutions available on the market today, identify group uses of e-mail and move them to private workspaces. This creates a spam- and noise-free environment for the team. Different workspaces with different features can accomplish different goals. For example, create one where your team can hold less formal, blog-style conversations and general context sharing. Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) employees blog weekly in lieu of more formal reporting to make employees' work searchable. Or create more structured project workspaces with a process for archiving them at the end of the project.

Establish Public Protocols When Possible

For communicating with the outside world, establish protocols such as preferred methods of contact. As you communicate, be clear about how private or redistributable an e-mail is. For example, I include this line in my signature:

This e-mail is: [ ] bloggable [ x ] ask first [ ] private

Reply to E-mail by Blog

Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Doc Searls once described blogging as "replying to my e-mails in public." Of course, you can't do that with every e-mail you get. But for the ones you can, you decrease the odds of answering the same question again and make your ideas discoverable. And while not everyone will blog, there are other public ways to share when appropriate.

Leverage Special-Purpose Social Software

Luis Suarez of IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) is successfully replacing e-mail with social software. It's not just about reducing e-mail, but using Web sites to help you communicate efficiently and effectively. For example, LinkedIn is a better tool for referring new contacts. Dopplr is great for sharing travel plans. Flickr for sharing photos. Delicious for links.

As with private workspaces, these Web sites might create separate inboxes for you to manage. Ironically, for those who don't use advanced tools such as dashboards and newsreaders, the e-mail inbox becomes a place that notifies you about communications in other places. And that lets e-mail stick to what it does best.

Ross Mayfield is chairman, president and co-founder of Socialtext, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based social software company.

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Stowe Boyd recently posted the following statement:

It came in response to a post of mine about Enterprise 2.0 adoption where I wrote that:

Boyd's drawing a really important distinction here. In our daily lives, we are all members of various groups: our families, neighborhoods, church groups, ethnic groups, etc. Also at work, we are members of groups: departments, business units, project teams, carpools, weekend soccer players, etc. These are collections of people--more or less dynamic, more or less formal--who share some common set of attributes, activities, or interests. At the same time, we all have our personal networks--the individuals whom we know and interact with. There is of course a lot of overlap between a person's groups and her network; we know many of the people in our groups. But an individual's personal network typically spans multiple groups. My network, for example, includes my colleagues at Socialtext, my former McKinsey colleagues, my neighbors in Philadelphia, the other parents at my childrens' day care, and so on.

When Boyd says that Enterprise 2.0 is about personal relationships in networks and not group membership, I think he's saying that the point of Enterprise 2.0 is not to enable existing organizational groups, but to empower and mobilize social networks for getting work done in new ways.

Who's right? I think we both are.

Boyd makes a really important point about social networks. Web 2.0 is waking us all up to how powerful it is when social networks are made transparent. From a professional standpoint, a worker's long-term career development,  sense of belonging, job satisfaction, mentoring and guidance, etc., are often driven more by social networks than by formal groups. That trend will accelerate as social networking takes off in earnest within enterprises.

But it's important to recognize that the fundamental unit of collaboration is the group. Departments, divisions, business units, teams, committees, etc., are the wheels on which almost all companies run. That's not an Enterprise 1.0 or an Enterprise 2.0 thing; it's a reflection of the fact that collaboration around tasks of any size requires continuity and accountability.

This isn't an either/or thing, however. The sweet spot for Enterprise 2.0 lies at the intersection of group collaboration and social networking. As I've blogged about before, Enterprise 2.0 has business impact when it's integrated in-the-flow of everyday work. For most workers today, it's their group work that's in the flow. Social networking becomes truly valuable--and generates meaningful organizational adoption--when it's layered on top of, and appropriately integrated with group collaboration.

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Because of my role working with Socialtext's partners, for me, the most exciting thing about this week's introduction of Socialtext 3.0 is the opportunity to quickly expand our partner ecosystem.

The Socialtext 3.0 platform enables our customers to choose from the over 100,000 widgets that have been developed based on the Google OpenSocial Gadget standard.  Many of these widgets provide popular extensions that are great complements to the collaboration capabilities inherent in our platform.  And, we are working with a number of new developers to create additional widgets to add to this portfolio and make available to our SMB and enterprise customers.

This activity around new Google OpenSocial development is in addition to the work being done on Socialtext connectors to other enterprise systems.  The new Socialtext People profile combines the information available in a company's LDAP or Microsoft Active Directory system with the business social networking features available with 3.0.  Socialtext is also working with its developers and partners to add to the capabilities of our connectors that integrate Socialtext 3.0 with IBM's Lotus Connections and SocialPoint which enables integration with Microsoft SharePoint.  We are working with our customers and partners to prioritize additional system integration opportunities for Socialtext 3.0, so stay tuned!

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