Email is without a doubt the most tried and true technology for both enterprise and personal communication, but it’s not without its shortcomings. Specifically, Atos CEO Thierry Breton cited email’s spam-like nature as one of the biggest contributors to “information  pollution” that’s bogging down management. His goal is for Atos — which has nearly 50,000 employees worldwide — to be a “zero-email company” within the next three years. In place of email, Breton says that Atos will increasingly encourage its employees to collaborate on instant messaging and social networking platforms.

This marks the first time an organization of this size has made such a definitive statement on email, but it almost certainly won’t be the last. In truth, the gradual shift from email to messaging and social networking platforms began some years ago, but it’s only recently that this phenomenon has penetrated the enterprise from the consumer side.

Over the past several years, the rise of social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter have taken a lot of the conversations that once occurred on email to other channels on the consumer side. While email is still a central repository for tracking updates from various networking sites, it has become decidedly less useful for interacting with friends and colleagues on a daily basis compared to mediums like instant messaging and streaming content feeds.

As is often the case, the consumer side embraced these platforms well in advance of the enterprise. Instant messaging, Facebook and Twitter have all been in use for years for personal computing purposes. As the “internet generation” has come of age, entrepreneurs have increasingly put effort behind enterprise-friendly communication and automation tools. The rapid rise of platforms like Yammer and Salesforce’s Chatter - which are exclusively geared towards the enterprise — suggest the larger rise of the “social enterprise.”

The social enterprise refers to a premium on enhanced collaboration and real-time communication in the name of greater organizational efficiency. As such, there’s no single be-all, end-all tool that will ultimately replace email. Rather, a suite of complementary tools are gradually emerging as more effective mediums for enterprise collaboration.

Some other noteworthy technologies that are emerging in place of email include:

• Process automation tools: Automating processes via business process management (BPM) tools enables automated responses and actions via automated emails, instant messages, etc. that prompted actionable messages (I.e., a “yes/no” button). This can eliminate the tedious back-and-forth associated with corporate functions like employee on-boarding/off-boarding, invoicing and employee requests. BPM has seen a spike in interest in recent years, with mega-vendors like Oracle and IBM  putting more effort into their BPM offerings, and smaller vendors like BonitaSoft (my company), Intalio and BizAgi also offering BPM suites.
• Enterprise portals: While enterprise portals have existed for some time, they’ve recently begun integrating more social features to increase collaboration between employees — often via real-time, streaming feeds with more accessible user interfaces. More and more, these portals are including plug-ins for other features like process automation and instant messaging to create a wider social intranet in which employees can collaborate. eXo and Liferay are two examples of enterprise portal vendors that have successfully incorporated a social aspect into their respective offerings.
• Semantic web technologies: This is a still-evolving area that, while it has yet to make a significant mark in the enterprise, is poised to emerge as a critical technology in the near future. As organizations continue to struggle to manage the massive volumes of unstructured data generated by internal communication, it’s important to have tools capable of properly sorting and analyzing the information it generates. Examples of this can be seen today from the likes of Microsoft (Powerset/Bing), Apple (Siri/Apple 4S) and Google (FreeBase), among others.

This is not to say that email is not still a necessary component of enterprise communication; it’s still a vital cog for many core organizational processes. However, with the rise of tools such as those mentioned above, it’s undoubtedly seeing a decline in overall  usage — particularly in terms of internal collaboration. Atos’ decision to phase out email is perhaps the most ringing endorsement yet for the notion that email is being gradually phased out of the enterprise, and it will be interesting to see how many other large scale organizations will follow in its footsteps over the next several years as collaborative technologies continue to evolve.

Miguel Valdés Faura is the CEO and co-founder of BonitaSoft, a France-based company that produces business process management (BPM) software and provides commercial services and support for the open source Bonita project, of which he is also co-founder. Follow Miguel on Twitter @MiguelValdes.

For more information about the future of collaboration tools, check out GigaOM’s Net:Work event on Dec. 8, 2011.

Image courtesy of Flickr user cambodia4kidsorg.

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• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• Working out loud: how work media and social cognition are altering business
• The Future of Workplaces

Part of the innovation in this new generation of products is that they are — largely — built on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) foundation, and getting up and running can be as fast as buying a book on Amazon. And because these applications are social at their core, they can be very viral. One member of a small company’s marketing team decides to manage a project using Yammer or Podio, and she immediately invites four other team members to get involved. This means that the tools are quickly adopted, at least in the small group level. (Note: I’ll talk with Soonr’s Martin Frid-Nielsen, Mavenlink’s Ray Grainger, and QuickOffice’s Alan Masarek about this topic onstage at Net:Work, on Dec. 8.)

The new “work media”

However, the more important side of this social tool innovation is that they are based on activity streams. Users’ activities within these applications are not simply captured in the metadata of directories or the states of information in databases: these activities — such as making a comment, adding a file to a project, or assigning a task to a project member — are published in streams, a la Twitter, Facebook, and a long list of other consumer applications.

To distinguish these modern business tools from earlier generations, I use the term “work media.” They share characteristics with well-known social media tools, but they are oriented toward getting work done. And like social media, work media is fluid, with streams of information finding their way to the individual user, who may opt to follow topics, projects, and other users. These applications share the core design metaphor of streams, though they differ widely in how streams are composed, displayed, and shared.

Open tools, closed data

Business has a bias toward privacy, and so work media tools support that tendency by — almost without exception — erecting a password barrier against access to a company or group’s information. Finer-grained access controls are provided for more specific information contexts, such as projects, folders, groups, or other “spaces” managed by the work media apps. In this way, a company can restrict access to a HR group so that only a few HR staff can see the resumes and pay information managed there, for example.

This tendency, along with the relative immaturity of the burgeoning work media marketplace, is rapidly leading us to a very strange outcome: a generation of business software — work media — ostensibly based on the principles of open social media, but which are inherently closed, and which are spawning a million information silos.

But the risks and costs associated with business information stored in these applications is much higher, at least form the view of the companies migrating onto these work platforms. So once a company commits to using a specific work media platform, they may find that the information stored in their projects becomes as fixed as concrete.

Streamed, not structured, data

Let’s lump the information managed in these systems into two piles:

• Concrete, structured, and relatively moveable information, stored in files of various sorts
• Fluid, unstructured, and relatively unmoveable information, such as internal links, social gestures and other application specific metadata

It’s relatively easy to imagine downloading all the files stored in a Yammer account, and uploading them into an IBM Connections instance. But other sorts of information — and semantics — won’t have the same ease of movement.

Consider a hypothetical work media tool — let’s call it Work Talk. Work Talk supports both milestones and tasks, and it also allows tasks to be optionally linked to a milestone. One of its semantic rules is that a milestone cannot be complete until all linked tasks are complete.

Imagine that Work Talk supports exporting all the structured information — files, user identities, and so on — and less-well structured information, like tasks, milestones, posts, comments, and the many relationships between them. Taking that information and figuring how to import it to a tool that is architected differently would be at the least a major programming task and, at the worst, an impossibility. And the semantics of milestones and tasks might simply fail, if the new tool doesn’t implement that capability the same way, even if all that information can be exported and imported en masse.

As the market matures, standards must evolve

We’re at the start of a new era in business software, and there is an explosion of new players and new ideas about how streaming information should be structured and streamed, and how the various bits relate to each other. This is much like the early days of email, when a single corporation might have several different email systems that couldn’t communicate to each other. That problem was solved in two ways: by the emergence of well-defined standards that enabled interoperability across different implementations, as well as the consolidation of the marketplace around a small number of vendors serving large numbers of users.

It’s not too early to see some market maturation. It seems that many of the vendors in the space are making highly similar products, but differentiated around specific market needs (such as integration with specific external tools), focus on specific business functions (marketing versus software development, for example), or emphasizing the size of the company best suited for the tools. I see very little activity on the software standards side, but that usually occurs as the intersection of successful applications, as happened with email and SQL. So, there is no immediate solution in sight, and I wager that a large number of headaches are going to arise from the proliferation of work media tools, especially when vendors go out of business, or when companies outgrow the tool they selected. And there is no simple advice to give to prospective or current users of these work media tools. It is inevitable that these tools will diverge in functionality, and even if two systems are very similar that doesn’t mean that it will be possible to easily and cheaply port from one to the other.

Despite these risks, I believe there are great benefits inherent in the use of work media, and because of those, the rapid adoption of these tools will continue at an unprecedented rate. Just like the adoption of the automobile and the airplane, though, we are going to see a few crashes.

Stowe Boyd writes and speaks about social tools and their impact on media, business and society. A GigaOM Pro analyst, Boyd also writes at stoweboyd.com and is working on a new book about the rise of a socially augmented world, called Liquid City: A Liquid, Not A Solid; A City, Not A Machine.

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• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• Report: High-Impact Collaboration in the Enterprise
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012

In 1991 British scientist Tim Berners-Lee posted a brief summary of the World Wide Web (or W3) project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, writing:

“The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the Web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome.”

It’s safe to say that Berners-Lee’s invitation to potential collaborators went fairly well. That initial web page has expanded to more than 19 billion pages (at the last count) and there are millions and millions of workers across the globe who rely on the World Wide Web to go about their daily lives. In those 20 years, the changes to the workplace that have taken place thanks to the Internet are nothing short of remarkable. Email is as good a place as any to start.

You’ve got mail

Try to explain the workplace B.E. (before email) to someone under 30, and you could be describing life in the 19th century for all the relevance it has to their working day. Back then, we lived in a world in which quaint technologies such as the fax machine prevailed. With the fax machine, it was not unusual to wait days for a reply.

Later, when Web-based email began to grow in popularity, it transformed communication in the workplace. You could now receive a response to a question within minutes, especially once broadband connections became more commonplace. You could send information and documents to colleagues around the world at the click of a button.

Email overload

But technology was now developing at a pace that seemed astonishing even to those who worked in the industry, and email, after a honeymoon period, hit problems. “Too intrusive,” said some. “Too much of it,” said others. “Not quick enough,” moaned the rest.

When consumer-based instant-messaging technologies infiltrated the workplace – AIM launched in 1997 and Yahoo! Messenger (then Pager) in 1998 – users were suddenly able to communicate with co-workers in real-time. Years later, these tools would often be integrated into a platform that also included voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), shared whiteboards, video conferencing and file transfer features.

It was around this time that social networks also began to establish a presence. Some of these are undoubtedly more consumer-focused, but there can also be no denying that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have had a massive impact on working life, too. The ability to communicate and share content with your extended network (and beyond) has transformed many of our traditional working practices. As well as enabling businesses to engage in two-way conversations with their customers, these social networks are now a central part of the recruitment process. Last year, I wrote a piece on how Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter can enable you to find a team of peers without breaking the bank of recruitment agencies. You can tap into your workforce’s network and find like-minded, talented people to become part of your company.

Getting ready to collaborate

The net result of all the technological developments outlined above has been to change the very fabric of how we work. We now live in a collaboration economy. To share and communicate information, ideas and innovation has never been easier, or come more naturally to the workforce. The emergence of the Web has given rise to a global working village, with location and time zone utterly irrelevant. You can work as closely with someone in another country as you would with someone sitting opposite; work from home or on the move, and even send files from your mobile handset to someone on the other side of the world.

This has all been made possible by the World Wide Web. From Skype to smartphones and social networking to SaaS, it’s all underpinned by the internet and the changes to the workplace of 20 years ago are just extraordinary. With a global mobile worker population set to hit 1.19 billion by 2013, one can only wonder what the Internet will bring us next. Bring on the next 20 years!

Andy McLoughlin, Co-founder and EVP Strategy at Huddle, can be reached on Twitter@Bandrew.

Image courtesy of Flickr user thinknew.

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Jobs has succeeded in transforming the way we consume information in both our personal and work lives. With their intuitive interfaces, sleek lines and quality craftsmanship, it’s easy to see why so many of us now carry an iPhone, iPad, or both with us wherever we go. Raise your hand if you have an iPhone or iPad? If you haven’t got your hand up, chances are the person next to you does.

The iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, nor was it the first with a touch interface, but it revolutionized the way that we browse the internet on our cells and consume data. Even if you don’t have an iPhone, your Android, BlackBerry or Windows Phone handset have all been influenced by this device.

And this brings me to our obsession with smartphones.

We’ve all been there, checking our emails on our smartphones at midnight, 1 a.m., 2 a.m., 6 a.m. We now shut the office doors and immediately start working again on the train, the bus and in taxis. We are permanently connected. According to a national survey by Telenav, a third of Americans would rather give up sex than their smartphone. They’d also be willing to wave goodbye to chocolate, caffeine and exercise before they parted with their beloved device.

UK adults and children are just as bad. UK communications industry regulator Ofcom has discovered that 60 per cent of teenagers describe themselves as “highly addicted to their smartphone.” Almost half (47 percent) of teenagers and 22 percent of adults also admit to using their device on the toilet.

Our cell phones have now transformed from a device for contacting and playing Snake to becoming a central part of our personal and working lives. The mobile workforce can now check emails on the move, hold video conferences, proof documents and log in to check their bank balance when sitting on the train or working from a cafe. Our obsession has been fueled by just the right apps to help us accomplish these tasks.

With more than 400,000 iPhone apps and more than 300,000 Android apps now available, what are the apps that today’s web workers should look at using to aid productivity and increase efficiency? Below are just some of the apps that I find indispensable:

• CamCard: This great app takes a picture of a business card and automatically adds the information to your contact list. No more rummaging through pockets trying to locate the contact details of the people you met at various meetings and events.

• Evernote: A popular tool with remote workers, Evernote enables you to quickly capture anything. Whether it’s a photo, a screenshot or a web site, whatever you capture is stored, processed and made searchable.

• Huddle: With Huddle’s iPhone, iPad and BlackBerry apps you can access my company’s cloud-based collaboration platform and manage your projects, files and people from any location, at any time of day.

• Twitter: Yes, it can be dangerously addictive, but having Twitter on your mobile ensures that you are constantly connected to the latest updates from your community and you can track what is being said about your company.

• 1Password:  How many times have you sat on your iPhone/iPad trying to remember one of the numerous passwords you have for a wealth of websites and apps? 1Password securely stores the information required and logs you into websites immediately.

• Skype: If you’re on Verizon Wireless’ network, Skype mobile gives you free Skype-to-Skype calls and IM.

• QuickOffice: Access, create, edit, and share Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.

• Expensify: This fantastic app allows you to capture your expenses and receipts from any location. You can track everything and build your expenses reports on the move.

• Bloomberg Mobile:  Keep up to date on the latest international business news, stock quotes and company descriptions, etc.

• Instapaper:  Ever found a great article that you just don’t have time to read? Instapaper ensures that you can come back to it later.

What other mobile productivity apps do you use and love? Let me know in the comments below.

Hear VMware’s CTO Stephen Herrod talk about the three key pillars of enterprise mobility — apps, data and people — at Mobilize, September 26 and 27.

Andy McLoughlin, Co-founder and EVP Strategy at Huddle, can be reached on Twitter @Bandrew. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user Symic.

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• Report: How Mobile Cloud Computing Will Change Tech

Before you get started, you’ll need to fill out a few details or sign up using your OpenID, Google or Yahoo account. Authorize the app to work with your Twitter account(s), and you’re ready to go. The Twimbow screen is divided into three main columns: “Personal Buzz” (your tweets, @ replies, and DMs), “Home Buzz” (your main Twitter stream) and search.

Color-coding your tweets

The “Personal Buzz” column is color-coded by default. As shown by the icons at the top of the column, your tweets are blue, @ replies are green, DMs you’ve sent are yellow, DMs sent to you are orange, tweets retweeted by you are pink, retweets of your tweets are olive, while tweets you’ve marked as a favorite are red. Clicking on one of those icons at the top of the column filters those tweets from the column, so clicking on the red star will remove favorites from the column.

The “Home Buzz” column contains your main Twitter stream. Similarly to the “Personal Buzz” column, it also has color coding, but you’re left to define your own system. You can define labels (such as “News,” “Friends,” “Work,” and so on) and give each label its own color. Apply a label to a tweet and it (and all of the other tweets from that user) will be color-coded. You can also filter the stream to show or hide tweets with each label.

The column to the right has a real-time search feature. Saved searches can be moved to the “Monitor” box at the bottom of the screen if you want to keep an eye on a particular phrase.

Filtering noisy tweets

As well as the color-coding, one other Twimbow feature that aims to help clean up your Twitter stream is the “noise killer,” which enables you to set up a filter to remove tweets containing specific keywords from your stream. This could be useful when an event is happening and there are tweets flooding your stream that you’re not interested in, for example (although you’ll need to make sure to remove the filter after the event has finished).

Twimbow certainly has a pretty interface, but it’s not without a few drawbacks. Despite working well on my smaller laptop screen, there’s no mobile version. You can’t check out trending topics. And while the interface looks pretty, it’s not exactly intuitive — it took me a little while to figure out how the color-coding and search columns worked, for example.

It’s not a full-featured social media dashboard

You should also note that, despite its use of columns, Twimbow is not really a full-featured social media dashboard like, say, HootSuite or TweetDeck. You can’t add additional columns beyond the three that Twimbow provides, nor can you configure how each column works, as you can with HootSuite and TweetDeck. However, as an easy-to-follow and novel web-based Twitter client, it works really well, and for a web app, it’s impressively responsive. If you’re finding it impossible to keep up with your fast-moving and noisy Twitter stream on the official Twitter website, even with the help of lists, Twimbow is definitely worth checking out; it’s free.

Twimbow was previously in private beta and required an invitation to access, but it’s now open to all; you can sign up here.

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Why? Previously, WebWorkerDaily has spoken to Yammer co-founder and CTO Adam Pisoni who explained that some executives fail to grasp the full benefit of social for enterprise. But perhaps there are other reasons social media at work has failed to catch on as speedily as it has at home that have nothing to do with the limitations of the tech itself or the imaginative failings of corporate honchos.

Writing on the IBF blog, Katrina Pugh explains that many of the corporate clients she works with fail to garner the full benefits of social media tools not because these tools are badly conceived or improperly rolled out, but because the larger corporate culture that surrounds them makes workers hesitant to fully utilize social. Without these two offline prerequisites, she writes, organizations will fail to reap the full benefits of social media:

Interpersonal trust comes from a sense that you who are asking for my help (or from whom I am asking for help) are worthy of that engagement. Worthiness might come from relationships I’ve developed with you or your team, or from an affiliation we share (part of the same company or network). I will go out into a public forum, a SharePoint Discussion or Yammer thread, and try to help you. Interpersonal trust doesn’t mean we’re best of friends. Richard Hackmann, renowned Harvard University team researcher, found that for teams and musicians, a small amount of friction generally results in a better quality product or performance. You might say, where there is trust, interpersonal trust trumps like-mindedness.

Individual safety comes from the sense that sharing will not rob me of something I value, such as credibility, recognition, or respect.  If the organization rewards me explicitly for inventing my own solutions, I’ll close myself to input from others. If the organization rewards me explicitly for being the “subject matter expert,” I’ll hold knowledge close to the chest until I know I’ll “get the credit.”  These hold-back behaviors come from outside the social media world, and spill over into that world, in the form of absent experts, opaque comments, and grandstanding.

She concludes that whatever tools or techniques you bring to a your organization, “only when leaders encourage inquiry (versus defensiveness), welcome diversity (versus group-think), and invite respect (versus judgment)” will people fully engage with social media at work.

Do you agree?

Image courtesy Flickr user Scott McLeod

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Social media needn’t be an end in itself. It’s one thing to “engage” and “lead thinking” in your social network. But social media really starts having a direct benefit when you can tap into the information it’s providing you and feed it back into your business, and your team.

One way to look at the social media picture is to ask the team members who use and manage your social media presence two basic questions.

What Are Our Contacts Saying?

The ongoing review of what contacts are saying — an essential part of engaging with social media — reveals trends that can be invaluable to your team.

What are contacts are saying about your organization, product quality, service levels, team members, marketing approaches and public presence? Are they happy to engage with you? Are they telling their contacts about you?

This kind of information can be fed directly back into strategy (for example, if customers are complaining about your phone support, perhaps you need to review call center opening hours) and your team’s task lists (if clients have identified a bug that’s not yet documented on your product site, that can be added to a team member’s priority list).

What Aren’t Our Contacts Saying?

This may seem a silly question, but with a little effort, you can identify gaps in your strategy, and opportunities to improve both your offering and your contact relationships.

How do you work out what people aren’t saying about you? Look at your competitors’ engagement with their audiences. What are customers, suppliers and industry players saying to or about peer organizations that they’re not saying about yours — and what does that mean?

Also compare the information you obtained from investigating the first question (what your contacts are saying about you) against your social media goals. If you’re meeting those goals, there won’t be any gaps between what you expect to see in your social media engagements, and what’s actually happening. If there are gaps, you’ll know something’s missing, and further research and discussion are necessary if you’re to lift your game.

Identifying what customers aren’t saying is only half the problem. The other half is your team’s interpretation of what those gaps mean, and the practical approaches you devise to address them.

Making It Work

In large teams, teams where the social media effort involves multiple parties, or teams where the person who looks after social media isn’t a leader or manager, scheduling a regular, focused discussion of these questions is probably ideal.

This kind of semi-formalized approach to feeding the knowledge obtained though social media back into business strategy allows you to understand the value your social media contacts can add to your business. It may also give you the objectivity to consider those findings — and possible responses to them — from a strategic viewpoint.

For example, if a customer complained about product quality, how does this information compare with the broader research you’ve done into customer satisfaction? What processes do you — or could you — have in place to respond to these comments? The same questions could be asked about your most loyal advocates, assuming you want to maintain that position in their minds.

How does your team understand and interpret the qualitative information that social media provides to you? What techniques are you using to feed this information back into business strategy, and/or team member to-do lists?

Image courtesy stock.xchng user DartVader.

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• Finding the Value in Social Media Data
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You don’t need to be a software developer or hardcore techie to use APIs. In fact, some web APIs, like the Twitter API, are relatively easy to use, and you can use them get access to useful and otherwise hidden data. When you start looking into APIs, you’ll also see how simple some of those web applications really are when you discover the underlying API calls used to build them.

Before you can start to play with Twitter’s API, you’ll need to know a few API basics. You can find information about constructing URLs, rate limiting, keys and more in my previous post about using APIs. Now, let’s look at a few fun things you can do with Twitter’s API.

Show User Data

The various web applications that do simple things like showing when a user joined Twitter are probably using data from the users/show API call. While most of this data can be found by looking at a user’s profile page, there are a few interesting tidbits that are only in the API, like account creation date (created_at), number of favorites (favourites_count), time zone (time_zone), ID number (id) and more.

http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.xml?screen_name=geekygirldawn

In this example, you should replace geekygirldawn with the username that you want to learn more about.

Friend Data

The statuses/friends API call is a fun way to get the data we got using at in the users/show call, but for all of the people a particular user is following. The data is displayed for 100 users at a time with the most recently followed users at the top.

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/friends.xml?screen_name=geekygirldawn&cursor=-1

Again, replace geekygirldawn with the username that you want to learn more about.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have a way to sort by oldest friends first (or at least no documented way in the API) without some additional programming required. However, adding the cursor=-1 option, shown above, does let you page through the results. To get the next page of results, scroll to the bottom of the results to find the next_cursor attribute value, and replace the -1 in the above call with the value found in next_cursor. It should look something like this:

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/friends.xml?screen_name=geekygirldawn&cursor=1320699204947613644

Follower Data

The statuses/followers API call is very similar to the statuses/friends API call, but it returns data about the people who have followed a certain account. It’s an interesting way to get all kinds of relevant data on one page about the people who have recently followed you. Like the statuses/friends call above, the data is displayed for 100 users at a time with the most recently followed users at the top.

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/followers.xml?screen_name=geekygirldawn&cursor=-1

Like the other examples, you should replace geekygirldawn with the username that you want to learn about. You can also page through the results using the next_cursor attribute described in the above example.

Important Information You Should Know

• Rate Limiting. Using this technique to get data from the Twitter API results in a limit of 150 calls per IP address per hour, which is fine for most users. However, those of us who work at large corporations where most of the company’s Internet traffic goes out under a single or small number of IP addresses will find ourselves almost immediately rate limited, so doing this from home is probably a better option. Developers get around this by authenticating with the Twitter API, but that’s a little more complicated.
• Viewing XML. Some browsers do a better job than others in displaying XML from the Twitter API in a format easily read by humans. While I use Chrome for most of my web browsing, I like to view XML / RSS using Firefox, since it displays a nicely formatted structure for the data. You can also save the XML as a file and view it in your favorite text / code editor.

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The new View Later functionality is baked into the browser UI. As you can see in the screenshot above, the “View Later” button — a clock icon — sits next to the familiar bookmarking star in the address bar. Clicking that button adds the current page to the user’s View Later list, which can be accessed from the right-hand strip on the browser. The items are displayed as a searchable chronological list; each item is displayed with an excerpt and thumbnail image for easier scanning. From the demo I’ve seen, it’s a very slick implementation:

Unfortunately, the View Later tool currently doesn’t sync with other popular “read later” tools like Instapaper or Read It Later, nor does it have mobile access, which may limit its usefulness. One of the reasons I like Instapaper is its ability to save articles while browsing on my Mac to catch up with later on my iPhone. However, as the data is stored in your Facebook account, View Later will sync between RockMelt installations on different machines, and Vishria says mobile access could come in a future version.

The browser also gets a redesigned Twitter app. It now makes use of Twitter’s Real-Time API for near-instantaneous updates, and also has a redesigned UI which makes it much easier to access @ mentions and direct messages (DMs) via new tabs. The new interface looks very reminiscent of Tweetie/Twitter for Mac; Vishria describes the changes to the UI as making the app “more Twitter-y”

RockMelt’s integrated Facebook chat has also been improved, with a new unobtrusive chat bar along the bottom of the browser window, which allows users to hold multiple chat conversations simultaneously. Chat windows can be “torn off” from the chat bar and placed onto the desktop, making the browser into a much more capable chat client.

The browser has been updated under the hood, too: It’s now based on the same version of Chromium as Chrome 10, which should make for a snappier experience.

The new beta will start to roll out to users April 1.

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The research focused on the ways influence is established through Twitter, hinting at which user categories are the most popular, as well as which provide value, and how.

While businesses can apply this information to tweak their interactions with clients, customers and the public via Twitter, the research points to much more than that: It implies that greater benefits are available to companies that use Twitter to actively engage with their own team members: companies that stop seeing Twitter as an outward-focused medium, and customers as a separate audience from staff.

A Culture of Public Collaboration

How many of your staff members actively follow — that is, engage with — your company’s Twitter feed? How many staff members’ Twitter accounts are actively followed (or engaged with) by your company’s Twitter feed?

According to the Yahoo study, “Organizations … devote a surprisingly small fraction of their attention to business-related news.” Other user categories didn’t behave like this, though. It reported that, for example, bloggers:

• retweet valuable URLs from a range of relevant categories, noting that “[In-Tweet URLs] originated by bloggers tend to be overrepresented among long-lived URLs.”
• act “as recyclers and filters of information.”
• consume large amounts of information, acting as intermediaries between the media and other users.

Do those who run your company’s Twitter account see staff as peer sources of valuable information that can be recycled for the company’s broader following?

This approach has the potential to benefit the company among internal audiences, as well as those in the public space. At its most basic, actively engaging with staff members within the public space provided by Twitter reflects the value of the staff to the company.

It reinforces to team members themselves — as well as customers and clients — that the company regards its staff as thought leaders, and while this approach can’t create a culture on its own, it can support a culture in which team members are actively recognized.

The “intermediary layer” alluded to above comprises about 500,000 Twitter users, according to Yahoo’s research, and only 4 percent of them are among the “elite” 0.05 percent of users who attract half the attention of the Twittersphere. Your company doesn’t need to be Lady Gaga to lead opinions on Twitter. But to take advantage of the intermediary layer, it does need to actively engage with peers (including staff members), filter information and retweet the good stuff.

It also needs to do that consistently. More than 270 URLs were initiated by bloggers per capita, according to the research. (By comparison, the average organization generated an average of 104 URLs per capita.)  To approach a significant level of value, your corporate Twitter team needs to consume a lot of relevant media; either direct from the source, or from other opinion leaders, including your staff.

Twitter and the Corporate Blog

If your organization has a blog, you’ll likely be tying your Twitter strategy into that, so if you’re planning to improve the value of your Twitter interactions, using them to engage with staff as well as clients, you might need to apply that same approach to the corporate blog, too. Do your staff members actively engage with the corporate blog, not just as contributors, but as audience members?

While many company blogs like to take the company line, apply the company style guide, and adopt a semi-corporate tone, some of the tried-and-tested blogging advice — writing “on the level,” telling stories, using anecdotes, and revealing a human side — may help companies to build credibility among all their audiences.

It’s one thing to have a team member draft a blog post; it’s another to see your staff daily accessing the company blog—perhaps via their Twitter feeds—then making comments, retweeting links to posts, and so on.

The company blog can be a particularly appropriate way to keep staff informed of the work of other parts of the business, and aware of the relationships the company has with its followers—provided the blog, like the company Twitter feed, is authentic, and successfully treats all its followers as collaborators, rather than “staff” and “customers”.

Does your company treat staff and clients as separate audiences? How well does it engage and collaborate with both groups through the company Twitter feed and blog?

Photo courtesy stock.xchng user a_kartha.

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CrunchConnect’s web conferencing and screen-sharing system has some useful features, including:

• Dedicated web addresses and phone conference numbers (users can also have the service call them directly)
• Option for participants to sign in via LinkedIn, so others can see their profiles; the system also displays participants’ Twitter profiles
• A “waiting room,” where participants can communicate before an event begins
• Ability for hosts to upload presentations in advance
• Ability to record meetings
• Analytics tools, to track what parts of presentations are viewed and for how long.

CrunchConnect was developed with sales in mind, so it has some SlideRocket-like features, such as being able to update presentations even after they’ve been shared. A “company” function will shortly be added, for creating libraries of slides that can be shared and updated centrally. CrunchConnect doesn’t have the sophisticated online editing functions of SlideRocket, though; you’ll need to create your presentations offline and upload them. The service supports PowerPoint (.ppt, .pptx) formats, as well as JPG, PNG, and GIF images. PDF support will be added soon.

I experimented a little with CrunchConnect as a presenter and as a meeting participant, and so far, I’ve found the web-based system works pretty smoothly. It doesn’t require any software to be downloaded, which is helpful. There’s not much documentation yet, although I haven’t really felt the need for it.

CrunchConnect is currently in private beta, but the developer has provided 500 WebWorkerDaily readers with access. You can sign up here. The service is free for now; after the beta period has ended, users will be able to choose from free and paid plans.

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There is more information available in the world than any one person could hope to consume (hundreds of exabytes of data), but most of that information is uninteresting, out of date, inaccurate, or not relevant for you. The key to reducing information overload is to more efficiently find the data you want among the information that you don’t care about. The tools that I talked about in my SXSW session are focused on discarding or de-emphasizing the data you don’t need, while highlighting the data that’s relevant for you. I wanted to share some of what I talked about during my presentation.

Individual RSS feeds from blogs, news and other sources are a great starting point for your information overload reduction efforts. Some individual RSS feeds from friends’ blogs or the top people in your field might almost always be relevant and won’t need any other work. But what about the blogs where one in five or one in 10 posts are relevant for you? How do you narrow them down to a manageable flow of information that allows you to keep up with at least the most important content?

While there are some simple ways to make better use of your RSS reader to manage information overload, the real magic is in filtering. My favorite filtering tool is Yahoo Pipes, which lets me filter an RSS feed using various criteria: URL, author, date, content and more. Some examples of filtered feeds in my reader right now include industry analyst blogs filtered to only find posts about online community; searches across social websites where my projects are mentioned; and my some blogs filtered for just the best posts using PostRank. The image on the right contains a simple Yahoo Pipes filtering example from my SXSW presentation.

PostRank is a great service that allows you to get the best posts from any feed based on an “engagement” ranking score that incorporates measures like comments, Diggs, sharing on social sites like Twitter, and more. The best thing about PostRank is that you can get an RSS feed of just the best posts from a particular publisher, and that feed then includes the PostRank score, which means that you can do even more hacking on the PostRank RSS feed using Yahoo Pipes. One useful way to use PostRank and Yahoo Pipes is to take several feeds containing only the best posts from a few of your favorite blogs, and filter those top posts to find only the articles mentioning a specific group of keywords using Yahoo Pipes. Because the PostRank feed includes the rank, you can even sort the results so that the highest ranked posts appear at the top of your feed. The image to the right shows an example of how you might do this.

Another technique that helps me to consume information more efficiently is to modify the format of many of my RSS feeds; I bring relevant information into the headlines of the feed to make it easier to quickly scan it to determine which posts are important enough for me to click on them for more details. By bringing more details into the title, I can avoid spending time clicking to get more information. There’s an example of reformatting a Twitter RSS feed in the image to the right.

The final trick is to use Web APIs to gather additional data that can’t be found in an RSS feed. I’ve written about using APIs before, so I won’t go into much detail here, but you can see an example of how I’ve used several APIs together with Yahoo Pipes to build an RSS feed of people posting links from Twitter to my blog posts on slides 17 – 23 of my presentation.

You can listen to the audio from my session and download the slides here.

What are your favorite RSS hacking tools and techniques to manage information overload?

Photo courtesy Flickr user SparkCBC.

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To start a conversation with someone, enter the Twitter handle or email address (or multiple handles/email addresses, if you want to send a message to several people), type out your message, optionally upload any files, and hit “Send and Notify.” Your recipient or recipients will be directed to the conversation’s URL and asked to login with a Twitter account or Umagram account (to keep the conversation private). Once logged in, recipients are able to reply to the conversation thread, and can also upload files. Conversations are presented in chronological order down the page. Umagram supports basic markdown syntax, so messages can be formatted.

It’s quite a neat workaround to Twitter’s DM limitations, but Umagram isn’t a perfectly streamlined solution; you’ll still need to persuade the people you want to initiate a conversation with to click on a link and sign in using their Twitter credentials, giving permission to Umagram to update their information. That may be challenging, especially if you’re trying to talk to someone who doesn’t already know you, who may be wary of clicking on links sent to them by a stranger. However, it could be a useful tool for those situations where you’re having a discussion with someone over Twitter DM and the character limit or lack of support for files is proving awkward.

You can sign into Umagram using your Twitter account here.

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The company now aims to become an indispensable “buyers guide” for the businessperson looking for social media strategists and consultants, in addition to social business software. There are currently 120 “Social Business Pro” profiles, which are designated with a red badge on their profile, often in conjunction with a yellow “All Star” badge. which designates their active participation on the OneForty site.

OneForty wants its database and online community to become the one-stop shop for anyone’s social business needs. Initially created as a consumer tool to help make sense of Twitter apps, the site has moved on to a  B2B plan. In not-so-stealth mode, OneForty has amassed over 700 guides, called “toolkits”, which are lists of apps grouped by ways to use them accompanied by useful resources to help guide any businessperson in the use of social media for their company. The general consumer is not left out of OneForty, however: there is still an option the on the home page to view the site for personal versus business recommendations.

OneForty founder Laura Fitton said her team followed the lead of its users, the majority of whom were focusing their searches, reviews and other activities on the site around creating business-oriented toolkits.

One newer area for participation on the site — useful to showcase expertise — is a Quora-like Q and A section called OneForty Answers. Future offerings on OneForty will include more content such as webinars, e-books and a blog, all designed to help people figure out how to best use social media for business. Item pages will be enhanced over time by highlighting key information for the business decision-maker, including price data.

OneForty hopes to help small to mid-sized business owners who are being inundated with solicitations from social media consultants and agencies, as well as from social media tool companies claiming to have the best solution around. Through reviews, recommendations, answers and other vetting done by the OneForty community, the site is well-positioned to be much more than just a Twitter resource.

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Recently, a recruiter asked me how I found great people to recommend for jobs, and I told him that it was because they were all people I had met somewhere that I had kept in touch with online. When the right opportunity came up, I had people that I could reach out to that I knew were likely to be a good fit because of my past experience with them in some other context. Because there are so many ways to keep in touch with people, I can maintain connections with them for longer periods of time and know how their lives and careers have evolved since the last time I saw them in person. The end result of these maintained connections is that my company can use me as a resource to help find great talent.

Gathering information also becomes much easier with these social connections. I remember doing market research before we had so much data in online databases, and to get information I went to libraries to find the data I needed. Now, I can get most basic information with a simple search query in a browser, but for certain types of information, the social networks are the best resource available. I often reach out to my Twitter followers for answers to questions such as, “what is your favorite tool to analyze x?” or “I need a device that does y, what should I get?” Sometimes I just need to talk to someone who works at a particular company, so I often use LinkedIn to find friends who work at that company or who know someone who does. Without an online network like LinkedIn, it would have been harder to find the right person to contact for information.

I can rely on my network of contacts because I’ve spent some time over the years building and maintaining the right kinds of social connections with  people. But this is where things get a little tricky: you need to spend time building those connections now to get the benefits later, and you don’t get the benefits without giving as much as you take. This means that you need to spend time answering questions and pointing people in the right direction when they ask something from you. You don’t want to be “that friend” who only comes around when she needs something. The way you build these relationships over time is by being there for people when they need you now; hopefully, someone will be there in the future when you need help. Like all relationships, it involves a balance between give and take.

This doesn’t mean that businesses should let their employees spend all day on Twitter, but it does mean that everyone needs to build time into their work for relationship building. As a community manager, keeping in touch with people is part of my job, so I spend some time using social tools, like IRC and Twitter, to keep in touch with people. But, I also know when to turn it off and focus on other work. As long as you take a balanced approach to relationship building as part of your jobs, you can still get all of your real work done today, while setting yourself and your team up to be even more productive over the long-term.

This is why I am sad to see organizations blocking access to social networks for employees. This is a short-sighted move made out of fear that a few employees will abuse it without any thought to the long-term benefits. Educating employees about productive uses of social networks and measuring employees based on what they deliver and accomplish is how you make sure that people are doing real work and not goofing off. You could block most of the Internet, and the people who want to goof off will still find a way to avoid doing work. However, if you stay focused on measuring output, you can deal with poor performers and figure out which employees are doing great work without preventing them from building longer-term business relationships that will make your organization more successful over time.

Photo by Dawn Foster used with permission.

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However, the Twitter website is rich with features that may not be easily accessible (or even available) via other other tools. Even if you do use the website, you may be used to using Twitter in a certain way, but it’s worth exploring a few other tools. Here are a few good features that you might be missing out on that can be found on the Twitter website.

1. Who to follow. I ignored the “Who to follow” link at the top of the newer version of the Twitter website, but one day I finally clicked on it, and was pleasantly surprised by this resource. The “View Suggestions” tab shows Twitter accounts that you might like to follow based on who you follow and other variables. These suggestions have been present on the site for a while, but I like the next tab, “Browse Interests,” even better for discovering new accounts to follow. Account recommendations are grouped into over 20 categories. The third tab leads you back to the find your friends feature you saw when you first signed up pulling from your address books in Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, and LinkedIn – warmer leads to people to follow.
2. Twitter for business. Looking to use Twitter for business? Twitter has its own handy Twitter for Business guide including a glossary of terms, best practices, case studies and tips on optimizing your Twitter activity. (And you should also check out Meryl’s 62 Ways to Use Twitter for Business).
3. Advertising on Twitter. You can get started with advertising on Twitter and learn more about promoted Promoted Trends, Promoted Tweets and even Promoted Accounts. And as an advertiser, you get access to Analytics.
4. Searches. When you search for a keyword or topic in the search field at the top of your Twitter page, you can save the search. These saved searches will now appear as one of the linked tabs to the right of the Timeline tab. But searching on Twitter gives you more than just a search of all tweets with your search term. You can also click on the “Tweets with links” tab to filter the search results down to only the ones with links. Or you can see “Tweets near you” for geographically close Twitters tweeting on your topic of interest. And did you know you can also find people on Twitter whose Twitter names include your search term under the “People” tab? For more in-depth searches, use the advanced options on search.twitter.com.
5. Twitter Tales. Looking for inspiration about unique ways to use Twitter? Look no further than Twitter’s own compilation of Twitter Tales, stories from Twitter users covering everything from humor to community.
6. Lists. I’ve been remiss with using Twitter lists. But I’m finally learning to clear the clutter using them. I finally created a list simply called Short List, containing the 10 people whose tweets I really want to see on any given day. I’m also beginning to group like-minded Twitterers into lists, like one on Crowdsourcing.
7. Twitter widgets. In the old days, these were called “Twitter badges” but today, they are Twitter widgets. They let you display Twitter updates on your website, and you can choose from four flavors: Profile to display your latest tweets; Search to display pre-saved Twitter search results that will update in real time; Faves to highlight your favorited tweets; and List to showcase one of your Twitter lists and the Twitterers on your list. You can set your tweets to post to your Facebook profile (but I personally say “Don’t do it”).
8. “Follow Me” buttons. Official, compact, and in available in a variety of sizes and shapes, these “Follow me on Twitter” buttons look great on any website or blog.
9. The Tweet button. A Tweet button lets others share your website or blog content. You can get the official one here, JavaScript code and all.
10. Keyboard shortcuts. Did you know there are keyboard shortcuts when using the Twitter website? Yes, there are:

It’s easy to overlook features on Twitter that you don’t immediately uncover and use frequently. Take a moment to look at other features like Trends (you can change these to more local or global with a click) and Retweets (discover who loves what you’re saying and thank them or return the favor with a reciprocal retweet). Click around on the Twitter site and see what other nuggets it’s hiding.

What is a feature on Twitter you didn’t notice at first but once you did, you loved it?

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