Category: User Experience

Instant messaging and its impact on e-mail and collaboration

Jimmy consults Dr Kawashima about his Brain Training RegimeAdam Gartsberg has blogged Mike Rodin’s Town Hall. I feel a bit like I’m reporting something third-hand but never mind, perhaps that’s what blogging is about.

There are some really interesting observations that concur with some of mine:

We think the idea of innovation is all about collaboration.  We’ve connected everyone together.  Think about how you work today, what you came in and did this morning.  What are the first things you did this morning – probably log onto Notes and bring up your buddy list.  Or maybe not in that order.  For me, it’s primarily the buddy list.  I use e-mail today the way I used [interoffice] mail when I started 20 years ago – maybe I check it once a day or so.  IM is my primary business tool.
What’s your primary mode of communication?  (Polled the audience of 200-300 people)

  • e-Mail?  [I only saw 1 or 2 hands go up]
  • Phone? [About the same]
  • Sametime?  [Almost whole room]

If this is really how this presentation went, then there is a good deal of suggestion in the question, having already told them his answer. I assume that when he is talking “Sametime?” that he is primarily talking about IM type capabilities, but I could well be completely wrong there.

If I ask myself the same question “What’s your primary mode of communication?” then the answer is “it depends”.

  • If I want a quick answer to something I’ll use an IM client
  • I have as many phone conversations as I do IM conversations.
  • Many IM conversations get converted into phone conversations.
  • I rarely send files over my IM clients because, like me, people want them in their e-mail. It’s also rare that I send a file to one person, I’m normally sending it to a group of people.

Don’t get me wrong here, IM has radically changed the way I work and I’m a big fan, but I’m only a fan of the correct use of IM. There is still a lot of life in e-mail though. Which brings me on to the other interesting part (for me):

There’s a generation coming up where these tools – MySpace, Facebook, YouTube – are central to how they live.  A friend’s daughter left for college, and knew the majority of students before her first day on campus.  People we’re hiring think this way.  When we give them an e-mail client, they think “e-mail is for my grandfather.”  It’s not how they think, not how they work.  We’re creating a set of tools for the next generation of workers.

I was doing some problem solving on my son’s PC yesterday (with iTunes). While I was there I was a nosey parent and decided to look at his e-mail. Turns out that he hadn’t checked his e-mail for more than two weeks. There was a good deal of new e-mail in there, but it was nearly all SPAM. I’ve written before about this generation and their expectations of the workplace as have others. I’m still to understand how we create a workplace that has all of these tools, but is still productive. There is a difference between work and play. When you work you have to produce something, when you play you don’t. Employers aren’t going to pay people to play without it producing anything. But provide some of these capabilities is exactly what we are going to have to do.

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Identity Theft Experiences

La PaludI now have two experiences of identity theft.

They both involve cars.

In both instances I was only aware that part of my identity had been stolen when the authorities came looking for me.

The first time I came across the issue of identity theft was a few years ago now.

I was sat at my desk when the PA for the most senior manager resident in that building phoned me. This was unusual but not completely unexpected. When she said “Can you come upstairs immediately please!” I was a starting to get worried. My worries were confirmed when I walked through the door and was introduced to two police officers from CID.

Their first question was exactly what you would expect it to be “Can you tell me what you were doing on the xxth of xxxmonth?”.

Like most people I had absolutely no idea off the top of my head. I excused myself and went to retrieve my diary. It turns out that on the day in question I had traveled back from Washington DC overnight, landed in the UK in the early morning and then gone home to bed.

The whole story is quite a long one, so all truncate it to keep it short.

It turns out that a car identical to mine had been used by a gang of individuals who had stolen a load of laptops from a hotel in London. When I say identical, I mean identical, color, model and registration plate.

The time between my plane landing and the time of the robbery gave me enough time to get to London and commit the crime, a time when I had no alibi because I was alone.

How do you prove you weren’t somewhere, unless you can prove you were somewhere else. In my case I couldn’t prove where I was, because I was the only one there. That was at least what I thought at the time, it turns out that I picked the kids up from school that day and others remembered me doing it.

I no longer have that car, but I do wonder whether the new owner has ever had any more trouble from its other identity.

Fortunately the CCTV that had captured my car also captured the gang, and I didn’t look anything like any of the gang members. I never got to see the CCTV but I did spend a few hours helping the police and having my photo taken.

My second experience of identity theft arrived today in the form of a bill from my car leasing company.

Attached to the bill was a Penalty Charge Notice which stated that I was in London a few weeks ago and stopped illegally in a box junction. 

This time I was sent photographic evidence and apparently my car morphed from being a VW to being an Audi somewhere between my home and London. The number plate is mine, but the car isn’t.

This one is, at least, easier to rebuff but it doesn’t stop the fact that a car is driving around London with my car’s number plate on it. That part of my identity is no longer exclusively mine, it’s been hijacked. There is no knowing what traffic violations will start to arrive.

In a sense this is trivial compared to how bad it could be. It’s just hassle sorting it out. As an example of how vulnerable our identity is it should make us all think. It also makes me wonder about how much of my identity is being used elsewhere around the globe without my knowledge.

How much of my identity do I just give away without even thinking about it? If you knew where to look on the Web I suspect you could find out enough about me to be convincing enough if you wanted to impersonate me.

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Vista RC 1 – Upgrade – Foolish or Lazy

Acorns by EmilyI decide this morning that I would upgrade my Vista Beta 2 build to RC1 on my Tablet. That’s right – upgrade. I was speaking to Steve yesterday and he started from scratch, so I decided to try the other path (that’s my logic for being lazy and I’m sticking by it).

It’s been running for an hour so far.

Not sure yet whether I’ve been foolish. I’m normally a bit wary of upgrades because you can never be 100% sure about what you’ve got, especially when upgrading a beta to a release candidate.

What have I lost if it all goes horribly wrong – a few hours of computer time. The upgrade doesn’t need watching and I have other equipment to work on while its running. I can always start from a clean install at a later date.

As a further complication, I thought I would see if it was possible to complete the upgrade without plugging in a keyboard – so far so good.

“If a man is lazy, the rafters sag; if his hands are idle, the house leaks.” Ecclesiastes

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Geotagging inside Flickr

Sudbury HallThe other week I wrote about third-party extension that utilized Flickr to provide geotagging support – well now it has been built into Flickr. Unfortunately the photos for my region of the world are terrible because they are using Yahoo maps, but at least it’s part of the product. They are supposed to be making them better. It still impresses me how seamlessly the web service providers can make these changes.

All I have to do now is work out the process for getting the geotags into Flickr in such a way that I can use any maps. The other great thing is to be able to see other people’s flicks taken at the same spot. I think it involves using the same old mechanism for tagging and then importing them into the Flickr capability.

If you want to see my map it’s here.

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Green IT

TramwayWe are continuing to see all sorts of movements in the Green IT’ arena. Over the weekend Greenpeace issued a report which positioned each of the top vendors and their ‘green’ credentials. Collaboration Loop commented:

Over the weekend, Greenpeace, which monitors such things, released a report that ranked the very devices we use every day for knowledge sharing and collaboration “on their use of toxic chemicals and electronic waste.” Greenpeace also ranked leading manufacturers’ decisions to actively recycle their products in a safe manner. The results, if accurate, were shocking. Using a scale of 0 to 10, no device maker ranked higher than 7. Nokia and Dell both received 7s, “barely acceptable,” based on the fact that both companies have decided to reduce the amount of toxic chemicals in their devices and also to publish a timeline for future reductions. Three major manufacturers, Apple, Lenovo, and Motorola, received failing grades.

This has provoked a lot of other comment.

There was also some interesting comment on the promotion of Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs at Wal-Mart which was started by Fact Company (via RPM)

Jonathan Schwartz has been banging the drum for some time. It does look, though, that Sun are starting to see some traction for their ability to deliver low-power equipment.

I have been involved in a number of evaluations of equipment and software and never have they directly considered power or toxic waste issues – it looks like that’s about to change. I was contacted today by a colleague who is interested in how we construct a desktop service that is ‘green’. There are a lot of interesting elements to that question, the starting point would appear to be power consumption.

One example is the impact of software on power usage. It’s one thing understand the power rating of a piece of equipment, it’s another understand the impact of piece of software or system. If a piece of software stresses the processor more than another then it uses more energy software should really come with a power rating too.

Another interesting thing is the cost of services like file services. Is it more power efficient to have a file server spinning fast disks all day for hundred of users, or to have a local hard-disk do that work.

And then there is the issue of power rating the whole, a desktop infrastructure doesn’t just have a desktop and a network, it has a directory and file services, and print services, and backup services, and management services.

There is also the issue of location. A desktop which pumps out heat in California needs to be cooled (most of the time), a desktop which pumps out heat in Scandinavia reduces the heating bill because it is warming the space. Using a PC as a heating device is not an efficient use of energy, but it’s certainly less of an issue that the cooling required in California. Thinking about it, why do we put data centres in warm parts of the world where it costs  more to cool them than it would in a cooler part of the world?

It’s certainly time to change the evaluation criteria.

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You're a Predator – You're Supposed to be Lazy

LionI’ve read a few posts recently (here and here) encouraging people to work to be lazy.

Some people seem to love being busy on repetitive tasks. This has always baffled me. Why do something more than once if you can automate it?

Ask me to do any tasks and my first question (normally only to myself) is ‘why?’ I want to know why because I want to link it to a reward.

These two needs (to automate and to see the reward) are deeply engrained within our predatory conscience.

Wildebeest start the day grazing, they spend the rest of the morning grazing, in the afternoon they do the same, and for evening relaxation they do a spot more grazing.

Lions start the day lazing around expending as little energy as possible waiting around for the food to come to them. If the food doesn’t come to them they form a plan to go and get some food. They could chase the first beast that they come across, but they normally don’t. They could repeat the task over and over again until they manage to catch something, but they don’t. They use their brains.

Eagles spend more time sat in trees than flying. They normally only fly to get food. They remember the good places to get food and visit those places more frequently.

For both the lion and the eagle the reward is directly linked to the effort. A wildebeest, however, follows the routine.

The lions use the wildebeest to do the repetitive task of converting grass into food. The wildebeest automates the task for the lion, all they have to do is catch the wildebeest which I am sure requires less effort than grazing all day, and is certainly more interesting.

I would much rather be a lion or an eagle than a wildebeest. I am a predator, I only want to expend effort when it is linked to a reward and that requires me to use my brain. If getting the reward requires something to be repeated I’d rather something else did it for me, I’ll make the most of their efforts.

The modern IT infrastructure has given us the ability to automate all sorts of repetitive tasks, but many of us haven’t used these capabilities to their full potential. It’s time to become more lazy and to get all of those repetitive tasks automated.

I believe that the next wave of IT will radically change the way that businesses work and reconnect many of us directly with the rewards. This reconnection with the rewards will directly influence the amount of repetitive tasks that we do because we will only do the ones that contribute to the reward. But we still need to go out and hunt the reward down. For those of us sat in corporate land hunting sounds scary, and that is the saddest part of all.

Anyone joining me on a hunting expedition?

Concept of the Day: Visual Illiteracy

Crozon ChurchIn a post about the use of PowerPoint during the Iraq War, Visual Beings used this term “Visual Illiteracy”.

Some days a phrase gets me thinking – Visual Illiteracy is a new one.

Visual Illiteracy is of course the opposite of Visual Literacy of which there seems to be a lot written.

There’s even an International Visual Literacy Association.

Take your pick of definitions, they all seem to be saying very similar things: the ability to communicate and understand visually rather than in words.

I suppose this fits into my brain series. The right-brained people seem to be the ones who are more likely to be visually literate. Visual literacy is going to be a skill which will be invaluable to people who are needing to be more creative and more conceptual. It seems to be something you can learn.

Having done a small amount of research I am staggered by how many words have been written about a topic that is all about visual. Apparently there is a taxonomy of visual literacy?

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Writer Extensions – already

SkimmingOne of my worries with Windows Live Writer was whether people would be motivated to extend it to include the functionality that I wanted it to have.

Well two of my requirements have already been met.

There you go, just like that. Although Beta code, both of these projects go beyond the capabilities I already have in BlogJet. FlickrWriter allows me to search by tag which Blogjet doesn’t. Tag4Writer provides an interface, BlogJet requires me to go into the code.

And yes I’ve used both of them to create this post.

Via Tim Heuer

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Even more , on More on Windows Live Writer

Sweet Peas

My last post made Steve think I wasn’t impressed with Windows Live Writer.

I wasn’t wowed, but I am still impressed.

The first things I tend to see in any new product are the things that it doesn’t do compared to my current capability, that is what my last post was reflecting.

I am impressed with the cleanness of the WLW interface.

I am impressed with the way it deals with posts and drafts, retaining a local copy.

I am impressed by the way it properly formats my posts. It’s nice to be writing in the same colours and fonts as will appear on the blog. It’s even nicer to be writing in a screen that is the same width as the blog without having to guess where things would actually appear. For those of you looking on the web you will notice that the paragraph spacing is much batter than in my previous posts.

I am impressed that they have written a product that covers ore than just Spaces.

I am impressed that they have created a plug-in capability and SDK.

The thing that concerns me about the things I think are missing is whether I believe Microsoft have a motivation to put them in, or whether a plug-in movement will be built which will add them in. Microsoft has little motivation to put Technorati tag support in, or Flickr support, or a broad Ping Server list.

But I am still impressed.

Trying Windows Live Writer

Lilacland: There must be something in here to sort Jimmy's hair

Thought I would give Windows Live Writer a go.

First impressions – it’s BlogJet with bits missing. Some of the screen are even in the same order, it’s a bit too close a likeness sometimes. The similarity to BlogJet is be interesting in itself though – I like to use BlogJet. BlogJet costs a small amount of money, so a free alternative is interesting.

I’ve already found a few places where BlogJet is definitely better. I add Flickr pictures into my posts which is best done using some code cut from Flickr. Switching to the code page is easier in BlogJet because it’s just a tab at the bottom of the screen, it’s a bit more complicated in WLW. You can use F12, but as I’m not likely to live most of my life in the tool I suspect I won’t remember that.

When working with code BlogJet highlights incomplete code, no such joy in WLW.

I was living in hope that Windows Live Writer would have the Microsoft Office wiggly line for spelling mistakes, but unfortunately not. You need to do the spell check. As others have mentioned Spell Check is Shift+F7, I have no idea why, F7 doesn’t do anything? Once is Spell Check there is no “Ignore All” option either. The Office Grammar checker would be even nicer, but I suspect I’m pushing for too much there.

BlogJet doesn’t do a good job of dealing with Tags, but at least I can create an “Auto Replace” which replaces a keyword with a set of code. Using this code it’s then really easy to create tags. There is no such option in WLW.

WLW allows you to add ping servers, but doesn’t have any in the default.

Given all of the effort Microsoft has put into smilies in other products I’m also a bit surprised that they haven’t put smilies into WLW. BlogJet smilies are great.

For some reason it can’t delete a post it creates in order to understand the make-up of the blog – that’s what this post is about. I thought I would leave it there as a reminder. This is a niggle really, I was just pleasantly surprised that WLW even considered blogging tools other than Spaces.

One thing I have notices, and it’s only a small thing, WLW does a proper selection when you double-click, BlogJet always selected the space following the word.

It’s still a Beta so hopefully we’ll see some changes.

Flickr Eco-system

Skimming

You know that a service or technology has made it into the mainstream when there is vibrant and active eco-system surrounding it.

It seems that every time I look into it someone has built something new to enhance, support or simply have fun with Flickr.

This week there has been three:

  • Localize Bookmarlet is a geotagging enhancement that allows you to geotag your photos really, really easily. Geotagging is great for remembering where something happened. See the link in the description in this picture of Jonathan Skimming for an example.

  • Flickr Inspector is a piece of fun. It shows the characteristics of a particular Flickr user; groups, sets, favourites, etc. It then gives the flickr user a score because people love to be able to give themselves a score. Here’s mine.

  • Graham Chastney. Get yours at flagrantdisregard.com/flickrProfile Widget is doing a similar thing to Flickr Inspector but this time it’s using the information available to create a nice banner for either a user or a group.

It’s these kind of enhancements that make people passionate users of a service and creates a self feeding eco-system. As other Web 2.0 type services make it to this point we are in for a very interesting future.

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Web 2.0 Service Assurance – or Insurance

Plane Spotting

In his latest post Stu discusses an interesting approach to resolving some of the assurance issues that we are going to face when Enterprises use Web 2.0 services. I briefly discussed some of these assurance issues in my post about Enterprise IM.

Stu’s idea is that services could be ‘insured’ by an external party that is already trusted. It’s an interesting approach and there is some precedence for it. When I deal with a small retail organisation online I look for some form of assurance before putting in my credit card details – safebuy is a good example of this. It’s easy to get into a cycle of “but who assured them?” but there is no ultimate assurance it’s just about building trust.

I don’t need quite the same level of assurance from a larger, well know, organisation because I know that they are trustworthy already. They have already built trust and aren’t going to risk it, it’s the new people who have a problem. Flickr being bought by Yahoo makes it more trustworthy. Services delivered by Microsoft or Google already have a level of assurance.

Anyway, I’m off at a slight tangent here. getting back to the subject at hand.

If an enterprise is going to place its corporate data into a web service what assurances do they need? Well it’s a sliding scale, and that helps the new starters. Enterprises can build trust over a period of time, trusting them with the low value, not so sensitive information first and then building up to the more sensitive stuff.

It helps, of course, if the service doesn’t actually need to keep the data, it’s only there for a short period of time – webex being a good example.

Another way of building assurance is through audit; being able to come along and to check. How do you know if the service provider is following good security processes? The only real way is to go and see. But if some external, trusted organisation, undertook the auditing for everyone things would be so much better. It wouldn’t please everyone, but it would please most.

Perhaps that’s where the traditional service providers come in. I see two ways of them getting engaged.

They could partner with a specific set of services and build a set of ‘branded’ (and hence assured) services. Adding a layer of integration to make it even more compelling. In this model you would go to the service providers site and use what appears to be their service, but  really it’s just a collection of other peoples services. In terms of functionality there would be very little to choose between this and the collection of services that someone could put together themselves, the difference would be in the services (support, contractual, assurance, financial) that is provided. While this sounds like a nice idea, it also has loads of problems. The major problem being that this model is effectively the model that we have today, a model that people aren’t happy with because it restricts flexibility and adaptability too much. The service providers would have to be able to move very rapidly.

The other way the service providers could add value would be to just be service assurers. The level of assurance would depend on the service. People wanting to use ‘assured services’ would gain a level of trust in the service being provided but would still have all of the flexibility and adaptability. The challenge here is that as the market matures around the services the need for an assurance agent becomes diminished. Why pay for assurance if you have successfully used a service for several years without problems.

The other issue to layer onto this is the changing nature of enterprises and the move towards evermore independent working – but that’s a World is Flat discussion which I’m not quite ready to launch into yet.

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