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)

I was strongly involved in the development of the enterprise microblogging service communote. Therefore it is very exciting to see the launch of the public beta today. The German launch was successful earlier this day (see the recorded session here). Today at 5pm GMT | 12am EST | 9am PST will be the English launch. You can follow it on mogulus.

Communote has some great features. I would love to see the powerful tagging and filtering functionality in other social software tools. For example you can combine filtering by author, tags, full text search and time period. You can drill down through the tags. In every view you will see an updated version of the tag cloud and the remaining filter options. Every combination can be saved (it is like a strongly extended following-functionality from Twitter) and has its own RSS feed.

You can see a demo of the core features here:

I did a little analysis of our survey participants. The following picture shows the social network between the people who answered our questions. Red nodes are users who retweeted my announcement. The big node in the middle is me (I did not take part in the survey but added me for the network analysis). There is a little bit wrong influence in this analysis because I added some of the participants to my network after the survey because their updates were protected and we needed access or just because they were interesting. You can clearly see that all but two nodes are connected to each other. The survey was promoted 99% via Twitter so this is a logical consequence. The two lonely nodes may come from this posting on the Microblogging Conference blog.

I used a great piece of software called Network Workbench (nwb) for the visualisation. The connection data was retrieved via the Twitter API and imported into nwb as CSV file (one row of the file looks like “usera, userb, true” that means that “usera” is following “userb”).

Here are some more:

A few weeks ago I run a survey in and about Twitter (together with Stuart). Now it is time to present a summary of the results. We are going to contribute the results in detail combined with a PLS analysis to one of the major IS conferences in 2009. We want to thank all our participants!

The survey lasted 13 days and had nearly 140 participants. After clearing up the data (i.e. spelling errors in the Twitter user names) we had 131 data sets. The following figure shows the origins of the participants (information from the QuestionPro logs, data visualization using Swivel):

The majority of participants has a very good opinion on Twitter (1..”Strongly Disagree” till 7..”Strongly Agree”):

The answers to all the other questions concerning confirmation, perceived usefullness and satisfaction were very similar to the figure above. Questions about the intention to use Twitter in future showed a slightly shift. This might be a result of downtime and reliability issues (i.e. archive accessibility) as well as of powerfull competitors (not only other microblogging tools but status updates in Facebook as well as activity streams like Friendfeed).

The most interesting results were indeed the answers to the critical mass questions. There is no clear average opionion as the participants split into two halfs: one group says they have many friends on Twitter while the other group says they have not. There is a clear correlation between a person’s network size (friends as well as followers) and her/his attitude to the critical mass questions. You can see the result for “Many people I communicate with use Twitter” here:

The implication of this finding is that although people say there are not many people on Twitter they communicate with it still can be usefull and they want continue using it. This means that there must be other valueable usages beside communication: networking or just reading updates of others (maybe strangers).

It will be announced here once the full survey paper is available. I look forward hearing your comments and thoughts.