Dave Jenkins

Posit: All software becomes commoditized over time.  Either the original developing company reduces its price point to maintain market share or extend into ubiquity (MSWindows), goes freeware to maintain format hegemony (Adobe PDF), or more often– gets reverse engineered and released into the wild by those communists in the Open Source community.

Posit: The online user community has swung from corporate-driven top-down groups (slashdot, classmates, espn.com) to individualistic spewing (blogs), to childish connected networks (friendster, myspace, facebook) to now swinging back somewhere in the middle of all three: new corporate startups using grass roots networking to tie together individuals within their tribes with a more complex purpose than just zombie biting and superpoking each other.

Posit: This evolution is the result of the combination of those two points: facebook-like social networking software is now commodised and freely available.  People will no longer blog in their separate spaces, but will collectively blog within their tribe.

Just today I signed up for another social network: www.planetetail.com — a network limited to ecommerce professionals with only one apparent rule: no job postings (not sure why, but okay).  Last week I signed up for www.geni.com — a social network with all my in-laws, sisters and their extended families.  Literally, my blood, my tribe.  It is no longer enough to just be a random collection of people, it now must be a social network with some purpose.  Ironically, this may actually hold some value for MySpace if they took a draconian step: kick off every person who doesn’t play in a band.   That network was supposed to be a place for indie rockstars to get their message out.  But just like MTV, it soon became cursed with tweens, hangers-on, and the dredges that read gossip magazines.  If MySpace kicked them all of, and required people to submit just one original MP3 recording of their band/song/rap/whatever to get back on, the site could retake the high ground, and become the network of musicians.

At a recent conference in Las Vegas, everyone was yaking on and on about social networking and tapping into “web 2.0″ (which shows you how far behind the marketing people are).  There were plenty of vendors there to try and sell me such packages, but every last one of them suffered from three fatal flaws:

1. These software services wanted money– a lot of money– stupid corporate big software-like numbers.  Nope.
2. No one could explain to me what/how it would work, other than to simply try and stick something on at the bottom of every page with all the other suckerfish.
3. Online communities hate corporations (just like someone else I know) telling them what to do and how to think.  If anything, the only real communities come up by themselves with two 15 year-old kids hacking things together in a basement somewhere.

I’ve got a couple of ideas myself cooking up on some network sites.  Now, thanks to Drupal and the other freeware packages out there, I can build my social network concepts with just two turntables and a microphone.

Well, I told ya so.  The iPhone isn’t doing so well in Japan, and has an uphill climb ahead of it.  As reported in a poll conducted by the Nikkei Business, 59% of respondents had “no intention to buy”, and another 26% had “no interest.”  That left 2.5% who intend to buy, and another 13% who may think about it.

Apple just doesn’t have the juice in Tokyo– almost everything there is either clearly wabi-sabi and traditional, or slick-plastic-wonderland-emotive.  This goes for cars, buildings, magazines, shows, and even the girls in Harajuku.  The iPhone’s sex appeal that is so compelling to clunky plaid-shirted Americans is just another plastometallic toy to the Japanese.  Even at that, the iPhone comes up short in functionality– no terrestrial TV, poor kanji anticipation, and an underdeveloped app market.  Japan, like Europe, has fierce competition amongst calling plans and contracts; they don’t have the Faustian vendor plans like in the United States, so iPhone’s lock in with Softbank is a big turn off.

I don’t have an iPhone.  I think I want one, but at the same time, I find myself using a cellphone less and less.

Meh.

(thanks to Gen Kanai and Joi Ito for the photo)

Most IT execs try to boil down their decisions to simple dichotomies: build vs. buy, distributed vs. centralized, minimum ante vs technology leadership, good vs. oracle, freedom vs. microsoft. This pattern repeats amongst the developer crewmates: visual studio vs. rational rose, DOM vs. script, cron vs. UP, and the most ancient of wars: vim vs. emacs.

Now that I am on the business side, and not held directly responsible for the tactical stuff, I can see why the business suits always simply stare at IT people in agogged wonder– these tight decision trees have nothing to do with the real world. Developers and engineers live their whole day in an artificial construct of reference hash tables, primary keys, routing diagrammes, and copies of 1s and 0s that need to be shephered from here to there and back safely. The engineer’s job consists of either a) building more of that artificial construct, b) cleaning up someone’s poor interpretation of that same construct, or c) defending their version against someone’s proposed revision.

Business people think in analog– sales are way up, slightly up, break even, almost to goal, a little off, under plan, or ‘in need of budget revision’. Notice the complete lack of any diacritical statements next time you talk to marketing– it’s all shades of orange (the new gray), very little black and white. Notice how the IT guys will pepper endless questions trying to make some logical tree out of statements like “make it cool”.

So what? Well, I don’t know yet. I’ve spent several years trying to come up with the magick formula, the correct set of questions to ask, the right analogy to frame things for the business owners. I hve learned the following points (in no logical order):

• never start with a stark choice– it scares the business types, and makes them inherently defensive
• when picking your analogy, try something close to the listeners’ heart: cars seem to be popular here in the midwest, while history worked well on the east coast. Japanese like to use organic metaphors: seeds, vines, roots (nemawashi), etc. Be careful with chess– your listened either has no clue about the game, or is a grandmaster– either way, they’ll start asking questions about your analogy for which you don’t have answers (you didn’t think that many moves ahead– oh the irony!)
• When laying the groundwork for your eventual “this vs. that” question commital point, make sure you attribute all the incoming data to someone else: bonus points for attibuting the background research/material to the same person you are about to ask for a decision– they feel smarter already.
• multi-variate choices are much better in terms of quick understanding, but they usually require a whiteboard to lay out the different factors involved (i.e. cost and complexity, time and ROI). At this point, the best you’re gonna get is to have your decider play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey somewhere on the whiteboard. This is a false answer– it is still analog-y and relative to their opinion. You still don’t have a hard decision (maybe that’s enough?). Warning: do not attempt multi-variate using only verbal communication. Double Warning: don’t try this with a metaphor, as your listener will forget the question and only answer their opinion about dogs/cars/football teams/naval battles.
• Whenever possible, practice your Fractal Management.

We all get attachments from vendors via email: proposals, MSAs, SOWs, NDAs, Ammendments, Contracts, etc.  Some people leave these attached to their email– trusting that the email server won’t go boots up.  Some people download attachments to their desktop, which soon fills up the entire screen (unless you can arrange them in a nice pattern).  The real type-a nutjobs create a separate folder for each set, which we all know we should do, but we’re too busy to spend the 15 seconds.

I fall in the second category– everything goes onto my desktop until I clean it up every Friday afternoon.  The problem I have is that it requires me to open each file and read the first paragraph to know which vendor sent me the doc.  Why?  BECAUSE EVERYONE ALWAYS SENDS ATTACHMENTS WITH REDUNDANT OR NON-DESCRIPTIVE TITLES, DAMMIT.  I work at Brown Shoe.  I know that,  the vendor knows that.  Why, for hell’s sake, does the vendor from Google or Akamai or Accenture or IBM or Pete’s Bait Shop always send me a document titled “brown shoe.doc”?   It doesn’t tell me anything, other than to remind me where I work (Thanks, genius!).  I know why: because on their file system inside Salesforce or whatever, they have organized things nice and tidy, they have a doc for Brown Shoe, for GM, for Budweiser, and for the Department of Corrections (”doc.doc”).  They’re not thinking about me, the customer.  They’re only worried about brownie points for cleanliness inside their own sales department.

Please, please, please: if you’re going to send me something, title it well: “Akamai 2008 Proposal.doc”, “Google NDA.doc”, “PetesBait Price List.xls”.

I won’t even get started on the fact that these should be coming over in an ODF-compliant format…

The Average American moves every 7 years. Some people stay in one place their whole lives, which means that some of us move every three or four years or more. Within that group, some of us skip between countries. I admit to that wanderlust. I admit that I get antsy if I am in the same town for more than 4 years. As a result, I’ve got bank accounts in 5 cities across three countries. I’ve got IRA accounts from three different vendors from former employers. Yes– consolidation would probably be a good idea, but it’s nice to have that account ready to go in a foreign country when the shit finally hits the fan here in the Twighlight’s Last Gleaming.

Mint.com was made for this. It has a pretty easy interface and some cool juju on the backend to assure security. It downloads the current transaction records from your bank accounts, credit cards, investment portfolios, and savings all into one online screen. Moreover, it provides the fun Charts-n-Graphs on your spending habits that made Quicken so entertaining. This is no less secure than when Quicken accesses your accounts. In fact, it’s much more secure: the transactional records are only going one way, and between mint.com and your bank. With Quicken, those transactions are going from the bank to your half-assed ISP, to your wifi antenna in your basement, and to your windows-pc, where you’ve likely got a virus, a root-kit, and a keylogger installed by the Russian mob– not to mention the teenage neighbor who sniffed your WEP key last year and uses your network to share bit-torrents of Nelly videos.

Mint.com: thumbs up!

Linkedin.com was down for a ‘major upgrade’ a few days ago. When I saw that, I guessed (correctly it seems) that they would be moving more toward a personal network with more facebook-like elements: groups, what are you doing now, what are you reading, etc.

I for one welcome our new serious older brother equivalent to facebook. Lest we forget, Linkedin came first, but it was stodgy, the interface confusing, and prone to sychophants from the telecom industry. Facebook is moving more into Stage 5 (the overcrowded party where you cannot hear anyone and the cops are on the way), and the sheer number of chainmail apps and stupid-ass games all over the place are making facebook distasteful for anyone who was expecting a ‘real’ networking tool.

Welcome back, linkedin. For what it’s worth, browsing through people’s profiles on linkedin is a great way to learn what to write and what not to write on your résumé– It’s easy to spot the liars, the blowhards, and the self-important.

Facebook is great to mess around at the coffee shop for an hour, or to waste time on Sunday morning, but Linkedin has a potential to keep real associations together, and to help you find that next job. When I worked as a recruiter in Tokyo, every agent in town relied on Linkedin to see who knew whom, and to do a quick check on backgrounds.

Often I hear that people are getting swamped with the number of applications running around inside the corporate network. There’s the web ecommerce stuff, the wholesale management system, the warehouse management system, the retail POS, some half-assed portal intranet, the EDI talking to the ancient vendors, and all the EDI translators in between. If you squint, you can see the green-screen NCRs and AS400s in the back of the room still chugging away (on coal-fired 220v converters, no doubt). It becomes a zoo very quickly. The longer things are around, the harder this gets.

So, what’s an IT department to do? I know– let’s get an ERP. An ERP will solve everything! Order system out of whack? ERP! Warehouse management out-dated? ERP! Need closer control over your financial data? You bet! ERP!!

I am going to write an ERP, and I am going to name it “Jeebus 5.0″. I named it that for the all-encompasing, sin-forgiving, cause-every-little-ting-gonna-be-alright mission that an ERP will provide for a company. I will give it the 5.0 number because, in general, IT people like nice stable platforms, and shit is usually pretty stable by version 5, right? We’ve all seen companies with no ERP at all, and those who are considering an ERP, those who’ve blundered their way into one, and those who went hog-wild on an ERP, to the point where you needed to go through PeopleSoft just to find the cafeteria. My personal opinion could be boiled down to the following touchpoints:

• An ERP is like any large mammal: safe as long as it has a leash and/or cage that limits the overall range
• ERP stands for ‘Enterprise Resource Planning”, which usually centers around the finances and inventory control. Keep it there (see the first point) and not much further
• If you have a better app to run your website or to run the wiki, then keep the better app– don’t throw it into the ERP just for giggles (beware of sexy ERP saleswomen in low-cut red dresses promising their ERP will do everything)
• An ERP can control the core finances and inventory of a company, but it had better talk nicely with all these other apps that are worth keeping around. “Talk nicely” means something open and free, not .vbs or proprietary codes specific to a single vendor.

So, with those guidelines in place, I’ll start laying out my Db schema this weekend. Look for updates at http://jeebus.sourceforge.net

Someone I know is writing a book titled So You’re on Facebook, Now What? From what I can tell, it centers on how to build a commercial profile on facebook, and how to increase your visibility. Hmmm… I admit to having some doubts about this. We all make money on the stupid Intarweb in some way or another, but it seems to me that the social networks are like parties that progress through stages:

• stage 1: not many people - this might be lame
• stage 2: okay, some people are showing up - let’s stick around and see what happens
• stage 3: wow– there’s some cool people here, and i’m a little drunk. Fun!
• stage 4: rager! holy shit! look how many people are here! We can do anything! (let’s steal ketchup from the fridge and throw it into the street!!!)
• stage 5: waaay too many people. The cops are gonna show up, and people are pushing and shoving, and i can’t hear anything you’re saying right now. This is lame.

MySpace progressed through to stage 5 rather quickly. Facebook is somewhere in stage 4. The problem I have with this book is the purposeful, driven, crass commercial intention of it. Just like that party, imagine the college friend of yours who comes through the crowds and pushes the Red Bull stickers and is trying to get you to buy pre-paid long distance cards. Meh– dork alert. Once the businesses are actively pushing their agendas on the crowd, the sponteneity, the fun interaction, the conversation, the party, begins it’s messy end. The cool kids head for a different darker smokey club, and the only ones left are the hucksters all trying to sell each other something.

I’ve already started to kill all the goofy apps from my facebook. I only check the thing once every 4 days or so now (down from my temp addiction of 2x/day last month). It’s nice to keep a line out to my old friends, and the moment I let it get past that, it’s no better than reality TV or mindless webtrash.

My advice? Be very very careful how you sell your shit on facebook– you may do more damage to your brand than you think.  If the social network angle makes sense (some sort of friend interaction like wish lists or music tastes), maybe.  If you’re just blabbing to the masses, get out.

Mediawiki (3,174) | TikiWiki (56) | DekiWiki (9,649)

Yeap– Matt has done a phenomenal job on the spider for wikindex.com, and we now have over 9,600 wikis in the dekiwiki format, as well as expanded out the Mediawiki listings to over 3,000! Overall, traffic is increasing, especially after a big push from the stumbleupon.com link. I continue to be amazed at the number of wikis out there centered on pop-culture. I have recently found a wiki portal that is specifically aimed at (and sponsored by, I suspect) the drivel being spewed by the babysitter.

Well, it looks like my friends made out pretty good.  Yahoo announced that they are buying up Zimbra.  Good for them.  Optimally, Yahoo would use Zimbra for their webmail offering, as well as commit their designers to helping build out the AJAX interface that Zimbra has.  Yahoo has a pretty good library already, and is a proven leader in AJAX development for GUIs– Zimbra’s deployment– while nice– is a bit overweight and could use some clean up.