I was involved in enterprise microblogging right from its start. Being part of something, it is always hard to have a neutral opinion on it. However, due to my academic view on the topic I would claim to stand somewhat outside the hype centre. So I ask myself these days: what is next?

While others made several predictions yet (i.e. Gartner’s view on the topic) I am especially interested in the level of microblogging adoption. Is ‘microblogging’ really what we see today for example in Twitter? Is that the end of the development? This would mean that the only challenge in enterprise contexts is to adopt it in the right way to create enterprise twitterers.

When I look at microblogging I primary see a huge instrument for information transmission with the recipient choosing the sources. Sources today mostly are humans. There are funny exceptions like the London Tower Bridge (http://twitter.com/towerbridge) or the Tweeting Cat Door (http://twitter.com/GusAndPenny). However, we do not see such implementations in the enterprise. Most enterprise information would fit for microblogging usage but we cannot find it there. Think on new quotes, new orders or new customers (coming from an ERP system), or alerts from the fire control system, or oil level alerts from the company’s cars. There is huge potential in integrating the company’s stream of microinformation using microblogging. Human text messages are only one part of it.

The problem is that in using 100% human postings we started with the most difficult part. Every Twitter user can tell from the problems one have with several 100 followed users. You simply cannot be aware of every posting. However, every posting might be worthy. Therefore intelligent systems should help us to find connections between postings and to filter the most important ones. The bad thing is that this is very hard to achieve in an unstructured 140 character long piece of text. In combining these contents with well-structured streams of machine-readable data we (respectively our computer) could better understand the whole information ecology evolving out of microblogging. I expect the future to bring further developments in this area. Let’s see

Yesterday evening I found a very interesting new research paper (via the Twitter search for ‘RT microblogging’). It was presented by Daniel R. Sandler at IPTPS09 on 21 April and deals with decentralized microblogging:

Daniel R. Sandler and Dan S. Wallach. Birds of a FETHR: Open, Decentralized Micropublishing. 8th International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS ‘09) April 21, 2009, Boston, MA, 2009. [BibSonomy: microblogging p2p] URL

Wow. At first that was quite shocking as one of my current research projects deals with the same thing. On the other hand it is great to find researchers with the same interests and thoughts. And: a nearer look at their work shows that they have a different solution for the same problem.

The first part of the paper is a great motivation for decentralized microblogging. They show the disadvantages of Twitter’s monolithic architecture and I strongly agree with them. However, their solution is a new protocol, ‘FETHR’, which has to be spoken by all applications in their decentralized microblogging space. Further, via FETHR the microblogging postings are sent to the subscribers (rather than fetched by the subscribers).

Personally, I strongly believe that the big advantage of microblogging is its characteristics of blogging enhanced with a social network (following/followers, @-refers, replies) and combined with the publish-subscribe-mechanism. There currently exist wide-spread standards in the web which could help us implementing decentralized microblogging. In my opinion there is no need for a new protocol.

However, they wrote a great paper, they go in the right direction and they were the first to publish their approach. Kudos! I am looking forward to future discussions on the topic!

Have a look at this great project: http://socialcollider.net/.
The application is completely based on Java Script - no Flash or other non-standard technologies. It visualises your (or anyone else’s) Twitter history:

It is always hard to explain the Web 2.0 phenomenon to people who are not used to it. I tried to compare microblogging with Newspapers earlier. I had another analogy in mind on my way to work today.

Let us compare cars with their drivers and the user in the web. The old web was build like a car without windows on the sides and in the back. It had no horn, no headlamps and no reflectors. The front window was just so big that the driver could see all things 1 meter in front of her. This is like the anonymous web user who discovers his own lonely way throughout the huge web and its knowledge.

But this is not the way we build cars. What we need for effective traveling is awareness. For this reason we have all these windows, headlamps, winkers and brake lights. Modern cars even have electronic systems based on infrared to enhance the awareness of objects around. We have navigation devices with integrated traffic jam detection and so on.

This is exactly what happened to the web. Users are aware of each other. Comments on blogs lead to other blogs and persons. Social Networking Services like Facebook tell you what is new in your network. You can read recommendations from other users before you buy a book online. And so on. Web 2.0 today even goes beyond this car analogy. This is because the modern web is personalized. If every car had your name and email address on the bonnet it would be something similar. Let us see what happens next

As I was strongly involved in the creation of Communote I enjoy still being connected to the team. However, after finishing my studies I am PhD student, research assistant and lecturer at Chemnitz University of Technology now. The job at the university is highly communicative and full of multi-tasking activities. Naturally my answer to this was: “Let’s use Communote.” Communote is in productive use for several weeks now. Here is how we use it:

Research Group Information Sharing

As in every team context there are several colleagues with similar interests. The field of research is characterised by lots of new stuff every day. Without Communote there was the problem of information sharing. I discovered a great piece of information or have an idea: whom should I send it? The microblogging approach is great to spread the information to all colleagues. And everyone can pick the information she likes and needs. Although our central research microblog only has 6 members I am glad to have tagging and the extended filtering functionality. As we use microblogging not so much for real-time communication like instant messaging but for quick and easy information publishing it is very important to find the knowledge pieces afterwards.

Student Supervision

Microblogging is an outstanding technique for supervision. Communote allows you to create as much microblogs with different participants as you like. So every thesis or student project gets its own microblog with the student and the supervisor as members. In this way the student cannot see the other microblogs (there could be confidential information).

I encourage my students to track their activities in the microblog. I suggest them to write down what they are reading, what chapters they are working on and what new ideas they have. In this way I can help them much faster as in the traditional meetings after several weeks. In addition to this it helps me to participate in the student’s work and understand her working process. Finally, such dissertation microblog is a great help to create a history of the student’s work and your own activities. Or do you know exactly whether you told the student about your citation guidelines three months ago or not?

Special Interests and Projects

Of course you can create microblogs for everything. Writing a new research proposal – microblog. Working out a new website project for the research group – microblog. Documenting the weekly Scrum meetings – microblog. The big advantage of these separated microblogs is the noise reduction due to the topic-centric approach. And in case the research proposal does not work: just end the special microblog. But it is still only one click away if we want to recycle the idea half a year later – and not on page 152 of my Twitter history.

If you have a look at the current sales rank of video game consoles you find a product named “Wii” on the top. This is quite amazing because the Wii is slower as its competitors, it has much less features and the graphic is years behind. The little secret of the Wii is literally little: a ½ foot long controller whose position and angle is detected by the Wii and allows unprecedented ways to navigate in computer games. And that is fun!

Some people designing Terabyte data stores or programming high-end enterprise software will probably tell us that they have nothing in common with this nice after work fun. But maybe they are wrong.
Traditionally the market for video game consoles was focused on power users. Sony’s Playstation and Microsoft’s Xbox competed each other with high-level gaming machines brimming over with power. Nintendo’s Wii just left them behind in doing exactly what is challenging enterprise software today: they broad it to the masses. Nintendo followed the Blue Ocean Strategy. This means that they focused on people who were not the classical target groups of game consoles. This required a design which allowed people to play Wii games without having years of experience in using consoles. And this seems to work.

Though it is even possible to use SAP Systems via your Wii controller it will sure not be the solution for enterprise software redesign. It is the general idea behind the Wii which could be a model for enterprise software: Make it easy. Beyond that it is not a full redesign what has to be done: enterprise software is not easy. But it is the user interface which could get simplified and has to be renewed. Fortunately there is some other innovation that we could use in our domain to enrich the front-end. We are talking about Social Software.

It has been written much about what Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 and Social Software is. You could fill books with definitions. But the key factor is very simple. Flickr, del.ico.us, Wikipedia & Co. made the user develop from a passive consumer role to an active engagement as co-author of the World Wide Web. This key factor’s name is participation. The rule is easy: Success has who gives power in the hand of his users - power to produce content but also to structure and explore existing content in new, own ways and share them afterwards. Tim O’Reilly says „a platform beats an application every time”.

Cem Basman organises Europe’s first Microblogging Conference mbc09. It takes place on 23/24 January in Hamburg. I am looking forward to meet many of my virtual contacts from Twitter there for real for the first time

I will be there in my function as team member of Communote. We are going to hold a presentation about our enterprise microblogging tool.

Well, „What is microblogging?“. I heard it several times over the last days and always do people expect an answer as simple as their question. I did not have this answer. Of course I know what microblogging is. I wrote my thesis on this topic. But how could I make them understand it without experiencing themselves? I tried “SMS in the web” or “Public emailing” but I always looked into faces formed to questionnaires. Afterwards I tried telling larger stories. Did not work. And I even demonstrated Twitter to show what it is and Communote to point out what it could do for a company. But even this did not help. I guess that you have to try microblogging by yourself a longer time to feel its benefits.

A few days ago I had the chance to talk to Prof Martin Gaedke, pioneer of Web Engineering research. He told me something very interesting: What is the difference between subscribing to a newspaper but not reading it (who has time for this today?) or not having a newspaper in your letter-box at all? The saved money on your cash account? No! The loss of information.

Prof Gaedke told me that even if you take the newspaper out of the letter-box, carry it to your house and place it on the kitchen table just to throw it away 2 days later keeps you informed. Even if you do not read it you will at least see some of the headlines or pictures or just single words affecting you. And you always have the possibility to have a look inside if you want to read more.

So this is (enterprise) microblogging! It is a company’s newspaper written without editors. It is a newspaper in realtime. It updates itself after every single new posting in one of its categories. And it even extends the idea of categories towards the idea of tagging. In using this an “article” can be part of multiple categories which helps you to get exactly what you are looking for. And finally, microblogging is a newspaper in a format readable by digital agents (i.e. RSS reader). Imagine you could have your personal robot searching the 1000 pages of your daily newspaper for exactly the information you need. Imagine this information could tell you about your company, its projects and the feelings of your employees. Imagine you could drill down from the general overview to the single information. Imagine you could even write the newspaper’s content yourself. This is microblogging.

Yesterday was the last day of my studies. I presented my diploma thesis to the examination board and passed this final exam. Due to many requests I am going to publish my thesis here. The bad thing is for all of you outside Germany: it is written in German. The good thing is: there are many many screenshots i.e. of Twitter with English content and even my own graphics have a high degree of English words. So maybe you will be able to get the message The title “Social Software im Projektmanagement: Einsatzpotenziale und fachliche Konzeption eines Enterprise Microblogs für die wissensbasierte Projektkommunikation” can be translated with “Social Software for Project Management: Potential Uses and Conceptual Design of an Enterprise Microblog for knowledge-based Project Communication”. The essence of this is: A Concept of an Enterprise Microblog. This concept was the basis for the Enterprise Microblogging tool Communote which launched its public beta two weeks ago.

The structure of the thesis is as follows: After introductory text chapter 2 starts with basics from project management, knowledge management and so on. Chapter 3 introduces basic concepts of social software. It starts to get interesting in chapter 4 “Microblogging” where I explain the issue and give an overview about existing tools. 4.4 is a great case study about a company using microblogging since 1998. Yes, 1998! This story is worth writing an own paper about it and this is exactly what I will do after Christmas. So just wait a bit and you will have it in English.

Chapter 5 deals with possible usage scenarios. For this I have a look at Twitter and give some examples for plain communication, coordination and cooperation and discuss possible uses in an enterprise context. Chapter 6 shows the conceptualisation of Communote and 7 evaluates this process. Chapter 8 shows my visions for the future development of the microblogging technology before I finally give a sum up and lessons learned.

I am going to pick out some highlights of the thesis during the next weeks and publish it here at my blog in English.

I want to say a great Thank You to the brilliant team of Communardo, the company behind Communote, and espacially to its CEO and Communote project manager Dirk Röhrborn. During my thesis there were many people out there in the web who helped me with input. I want to thank all these guys from Twitter and the Blogosphere.

Finally you can find the document here: Thesis Enterprise Microblogging (Communote) (9 MB)

From time to time I am involved in discussions about the best reference management programme. Personally I use BibSonomy and I am  very happy with it. BibSonomy is a Web 2.0-like online tool with a powerful tagging functionality and an open API (see BibSonomy content at the sidebar here or the tag cloud on the my research page).

However, good friends of mine use other tools like Citavi. They say that Citavi has nice features for knowledge organisation. For example you can create the structure of a research paper in Citavi and add references to the sections. Finally it takes seconds to export the reference list for this paper.

As I know BibSonomy has only rudimental support for such use cases. You can “pick” references from your existing lists and collect them in a basket. The basket’s entries can be exported for a reference list. Unfortunately there is no support for paper creation.

One possible way would be to use BibSonomy for collaborative reference sharing/tagging and export/import all the references to Citavi once I want to create a paper. Ok, this is not the most elegant way but it would work. But imagine you would have a Citavi-like functionality for BibSonomy. You would not only be able to share your references but even your paper structures and drafts. This mashup would be able to suggest a further reference D for a paper’s section just because there is another author who used A, B, C and D in the same paragraph while you only use A, B and C.

Another lack of function of BibSonomy is the missing support of knowledge extraction from the sources. When saving a HTML page or a PDF document I probably have one or two sentences I am interested in. Maybe there are even different parts of the document and I want to give them different tags. It would be great to mark interesting parts of a reference and write comments/give tags.

Both extensions - support of paper creation and extended knowledge management - would perfectly fit together. Ingredients for the mashup would be the BibSonomy API, a powerful JavaScript-library (paper creation would be good with drag and drop) and maybe an online editor like Google Docs to finally write the paper. It would take much time to build a ready application. I do not have this time. But maybe I try to build a little prototype of the paper-creation-functionality and than we will see. Maybe someone wants to participate?