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"I can’t think of anything that demonstrates the sovereign nature of the self better than a blog.” - Doc Searls
About the Author
Stowe Boyd is a well-known media subversive,
and an internationally recognized authority on real-time, collaborative
and social technologies. His new blog is Message.
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Monthly Archives
August 28, 2003
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I had the chance to catch up with Ed Simnett (Lead Product Manager for the-technology-formerly-known-as-RTC, now Microsoft Office Live Communication Server), yesterday. I have sniped Microsoft a few times about the name change, since RTC had become engrained in the general market buzz about instant messaging, but the thrust of the first release is strongly linked to a close and deep integration into Office, so the name really makes sense.
The vision that Microsoft is pursuing regarding what I call "Presence in Context" is compelling.
I receive an email from someone, and the presence status of that person is shown to me within Outlook, and rather than replying, I simply click on the presence indicator and start an IM session with the email's author. Or I am in the context of a Sharepoint project workspace, and the presence indicator of a report's author shows that she is on-line: one click later, we are conversing, and editing the document together in real-time. Or I am editing a shared Powerpoint file, I have a question about a comment that someone left on a key slide: I see he is on-line, and click through to talk.
In this sort of presence-threaded environment, every object, every document, every folder, every comment, every appointment is associated with an implicit buddy list. Every context offers immediate access to the community of those people who are somehow associated with it.
This is a departure from the 'buddy list' or chat room concept of presence, which is associated with first generation instant messaging applications. In the second generation, in solutions like Office Live Communication Server, presence information will form a fundamental part of the environment, like air. You will still use your statically defined buddy list for some purposes, but it will become a secondary mechanism. Every document represents a potential chat room with its reviewers and authors only a click away.
Presence is the killer app: it is the driving wheel for real-time messaging. Bringing presence into every context is going to rework how we work, and how businesses operate. I can't wait.
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| Category: Business
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Corante is a Research Sponsor of the Instant Messaging Research Forum, an on-line community of interest. There are a number of reports and white papers provided by various sponsors, and I hope that in the upcoming weeks and months we will develop a lively interchange between the members of the Forum. Participation is free, so take a look.
To browse the Forum, click here.
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| Category: Sponsored Posts
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I chatted this morning with an old contact, Erik Huddleston, the founder and CTO at BetweenMarkets, an Austin-based software company. Their focus is on improving business partner trading relationships, through what they call Trading Partner Business Intelligence. The skinny is that they have developed a way to describe the meaning of all the information flowing from partner to partner as part of the value chain. These can be related to the specific parts of business processes, or business goals. As a result, the appearance (or absence) of specific information can be interpreted relative to its true business impacts. Pretty heady stuff.
Erik says they now do alerting through .NET alerts and email, and haven't yet integrated IM into the picture, although he has designed the hooks to be able to do it, and all the necessary information is present in the data model -- user identities, roles, etc.
The principal marketing technique is viral: as one partner adopts the technology, they bring partners in, who do the same, and so on. What is also interesting is that those suppliers who have adopted the technology are moving to differentiate themselves because of the technology and the resulting efficiencies related to its use. A winning model.
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August 27, 2003
Posted by Stowe Boyd
While many companies have deployed enterprise instant messaging solutions for intra-enterprise real-time communication, the great majority are still relying on the so-called "public" networks like AOL, Yahoo, and MSN (they aren't public, but it feels like they are). However, there are security issues that arise when using these networks, in terms of the vulnerabilities associated with potential damage to company assets through viruses or file sharing, and the potential for confidential information passing through the "public" networks in an unencrypted manner, with the potential for exposure.
I know of only a few companies that are focused on offering a solution to this later problem, namely, encrypting (and decrypting) message content through the "public" networks, such as Endeavors (www.endeavors.com) and Zonelabs (www.zonelabs.com), who recently acquired IMsecure, a start-up founded to solve both sorts of IM security issues. Zonelabs is an endpoint security solutions company, and (as far as I know) the first one to offer a comprehensive IM security solution.
The IMsecure products provide an encryption capability, along with securing inbound security threats, so that I can securely communicate through AIM, MSN, or Yahoo. The free edition provides the encryption capabilities, so there is no cost to have your business IM traffic secured through encryption. The company expects to incorporate the IM security functionality in its core security products in subsequent releases.
So, through the courtesy of the nice people at Zonelabs, there is no need to pooh-pooh the public networks as insecure for real business communication anymore.
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| Category: Technology
August 25, 2003
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I recently has a long conversation with Oracle's Steve Levine and Sunir Kapoor, who serve as VP of Marketing and VP of Engineering respectively in the Enterprise Messaging and Collaboration business unit -- two of the folks behind Oracle's Collaboration Suite. I was pushing to find out why they had decided to go to market without including instant messaging in the suite. The answer was not at all what I had expected.
First of all, Oracle's plan has been to push aggressively in the email side of the market. This makes sense on a market level since Microsoft and IBM are both in the midst of a major reshuffling of messaging technology. The release of the-technology-formerly-known-as-RTC (now Microsoft Office Live Communication Server) is scheduled for Q3, and this serves as a forcing function for an Exchange upgrade. Likewise, IBM's gyrations around Notes (basically declaring it a legacy technology that has only a few years of life left) and the murky transition path to Lotus Workplace create a decision point for those invested in IBM's messaging solutions too. Oracle feels that its time to push to capture share of market, and that IBM and Microsoft are looking so hard at each other that Oracle will be able to swoop in and rapidly become a strong number three player, maybe even number two (look out, IBM).
But why wait on instant messaging?
It looks like Oracle is planning on catching the two majors in the enterprise instant messaging space by deploying a deeply integrated instant messaging capability as part of release 3 of Collaboration Suite (first half of 2004), instead of launching a loosely integrated instant messaging application. By deeply integrated I mean that presence and real-time communication will be implemented as core services way down deep in the Oracle communication stack, so that all the other elements of the Suite can exploit them.
Note that this 'lowering' of presence management and real-time communication is just what IBM has gone through with the reformulation of the Sametime application into presence, instant messaging, and web conferencing services, and likewise forms the basis of Microsoft's real-time collaboration strategy. So Oracle plans to leapfrog directly to an architecture where instant messaging -- or more specifically, presence information -- will be a cornerstone of collaborative solutions. In particular, Oracle intends to integrate presence into the rules engine within the Suite's workflow services. This means that routing of time sensitive information can be controlled in real-time based on the presence and availability of those in the position to use it right now, as opposed to using static roles or identities.
Microsoft and IBM are making this transition, too, and I have spoken with folks in both those organizations that get this vision. However, the effort involved in transitioning from the first generation instant messaging application architecture to a second generation presence and real-time communication services architecture is significant, not only for the vendors, but for the companies using the technologies.
Oracle plans to avoid that hassle, for itself and its customers, and to jump one square ahead, smack into the second generation on the first time out. They see that when presence and availability are incorporated into the core information routing of collaborative services, we will have a true real-time revolution in enterprise information technology. Oracle is unique in the market because their first release of instant messaging technology will be based on the insight that the real payoff of IM is not on-the-fly chat, but deep and tight integration with core enterprise information flow.
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| Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I have long been interested in the apparent overlap in RSS newsfeeds and the possible application of instant messaging to alert blog readers to new entries. It seems I am not alone in that regard.
I recently spoke with Howard Liptzin, of Tipic, a European player in the instant messaging space. The company has developed an XMPP-compliant instant messaging product which interoperates with Jabber and other XMPP solutions.
But the reason for my call wasn't instant messaging, per se; it was the announcement around Tipic's new blogging solution, Mo'time, which is a simple but powerful hosted blogging solution, much like Blogger or Typepad. What caught my eye is the integration of instant messaging as an alerting capability. As Howard puts it,
"The guiding vision behind Mo’time has always been to give users more powerful tools to let them feel that they are actually “on the air” with their blogs, and that the blog itself is but one facet of the experience. Everything about the platform is designed to heighten the user’s experience of being connected to a community in real-time, using tools that have been proven to be the most popular with current users -- instant messaging, web logs and wireless devices.
Thus the architecture was conceived to coordinate our members’ subscriptions to the blogs that interest them (including their own) with an Event Dispatcher that will feed news of updates or comments to a user-preferred delivery device. We created a browser-based Jabber (XMPP) compliant instant messenger (that pops up only if the user activates it) to be the primary recipient of event alerts while the user is online.
The alert comes in with the name of the author, the blog, the first few lines of the content and a hot link to the source. The Event Dispatcher can also send out email digests and Mo’time users always have a Web-based digest of “what happened while I was out?” one-click away. It’s a next-generation aggregation system."
The idea of persistent chat rooms -- like Yahoo Chat, for example -- is similar to the persistence around blogs. How many times when you were reading a blog have you wondered who else was there, virtually next to you, reading the same story? Posting a comment is not quite the same as conversing with a concurrent blog reader.
And as a blog author, I would like to see much more integration of IM with blogging: for example, a one click ability to post an IM session to a blog. Some folks find IM interviews difficult, but I have grown used to the medium, and actually favor it over telephone calls, where people think they are speaking grammatically but they aren't (which you learn when you read the transcript). Also, the lag time between an IM session and posting a story might be as short as a few minutes, while transcribing telephone recordings may take days.
Howard says that Tipic is committed to developing these sorts of instant messaging integration for Mo'time. I can't wait to see it...
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| Category: Technology
August 21, 2003
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I was having a conversation with Antony Bryden of Visible Path today, and one of the features of that company's social networking solution led to a joke. Because most solutions (like Ryze, Spoke, etc.) lead to a spam-like barrage of emails from users of the solution to potential buyers or contacts (although that's not how VisiblePath works), Antony suggested that someone will soon develop a service to block such contacts. Courtesy of Joi Ito, I see that Greg Story has parodied these solutions with Introvertster. LOL.
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August 13, 2003
Posted by Stowe Boyd
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
I saw that FIMA has announced a public website. At first glance, it seems pretty skinny on information, except the obvious bias toward interoperability: "Most organizations would like to be able to standardize on a single Instant Messaging (IM) client on their desktop. Multiple solutions take up valuable desktop “real estate” and are costly to support. Businesses will ideally make their technology choice based on cost, functionality and existing user base at other organizations.
However, the enterprise IM marketplace is evolving very rapidly, there is still no clear winner in the IM protocol race and, as a result, there is no true interoperability between the different products (although plenty of tactical gateways are starting to be built). As a result, businesses are faced with a number of challenges, probably more so in an industry such as Financial Services, where IM is rapidly becoming the communication channel of choice due to its real-time and presence features." For those interested in a little more meat, check out an issue of Message in which I interviewed Ursula Mills, Co-chair of FIMA.
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August 12, 2003
Posted by Stowe Boyd
My newest "Message is the Medium" column is up at Knowledge Management Magazine's destionaKM, called Contact Unmanagement. I profile Plaxo, which is an Outlook-integrated peer-to-peer contact management solution.
Plaxo begins with contact unmanagement, an insidious and viral starting point for what could rapidly become social network unmanagement. Where better to manage the flow of social capital than directly in Outlook? Imagine the point perhaps not too long in the future where the majority of Outlook users have opted to install the free Plaxo solution. (In my case, 7% of my contacts are already using Plaxo.)
I bet Plaxo will soon offer new fee-based services, such as social networking wired into Outlook. That global, peer-to-peer social network is just crying out to be leveraged in more sophisticated ways. And (oh, by the way) those competing services don't offer the initial hook that makes Plaxo so appealing: they don't automatically keep your contacts updated.
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August 05, 2003
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I was having an interesting email exchange with Carl, from Instant Technologies, and I thought we should let others in on it. Carl is a former Lotus staffer ("Loti") and his firm has received a lot of attention, praise, and awards for their technologies integrated with Sametime. The following is a transcript (slightly edited) of our IM session.
boydstowe: Can we talk now?
Tyler Carl: sure
boydstowe: So... I have heard that the organizational and technical shifts inside of IBM/Lotus are having some major repercussions. What is your perspective on that?
Tyler Carl: Well, I think a number of things have been happening at IBM/Lotus
boydstowe: such as
boydstowe: ?
Tyler Carl: the key being that Lotus is no longer really Lotus, but more of a brand within the software group, and a development lab of collaboration technology
Tyler Carl: more and more the Lotus marketing efforts are being moved into the core IBM teams.
Tyler Carl: this can be seen as a good thing as it does mean there will be less conflicting messages coming out of IBM
boydstowe: Yes. And the whole shebang is being consolidated into WebSphere, more or less
Tyler Carl: yes very much so
Tyler Carl: Lotus has been given Websphere Workplace
Tyler Carl: which is the environment that IBM is pushing as the place where people will work
boydstowe: Isn't that consolidation necessary given the coming "war of the stacks" against Microsoft and Oracle?
Tyler Carl: well it depends
boydstowe: IM can't go it alone, can it?
Tyler Carl: not at all
Tyler Carl: the issue arises when all the world doesn't move to IBM's portal
boydstowe: I see
boydstowe: Then the Sametime ascendancy is threatened?
Tyler Carl: IBM is so focused on the success of workplace that if it doesn't happen IBM will be in a tough spot
boydstowe: I see
Tyler Carl: Well up till now Sametime has had a fairly easy ride with most competitors focusing on consumer IM
Tyler Carl: IBM/Lotus pretty much ahd the corporate space to themselves
boydstowe: well, lilke 50% of the market
boydstowe: But isn't this the same challenge that MS and Oracle face?
Tyler Carl: well Micrososft has less of a challenge
Tyler Carl: as their strategy is still tied to windows
Tyler Carl: and it's going to be quite a while till that goes away
Tyler Carl: Oracle on th eother hand has a very big problem
boydstowe: Like what?
Tyler Carl: no one recognizes them as being a thought leader in collaboration in any sense of the word
boydstowe: But they are very aggressive
Tyler Carl: so they will have to do an awful lot to educate the market around this.
Tyler Carl: They are aggressive, but they are unproven
Tyler Carl: from the point of view of an independant software vendor
boydstowe: and they are challenging folks around total cost of ownership for email
boydstowe: which is a commodity, right?
boydstowe: and then they plan to roll with workflow, content management, IM, etc
boydstowe: all 'at a price'
Tyler Carl: email is considered a commodity by the email vendors, but I am not sure that corporations that purchase email are at that stage yet
Tyler Carl: well IBM now sees email as a commodity
boydstowe: yes
Tyler Carl: but for many companies, they still feel like they can't easily switch
boydstowe: Why not?
Tyler Carl: if they're running exchange they're probably using some feature in outlook that only runs on exchange servers
Tyler Carl: and the same can be true for people that purchased Notes for email
boydstowe: Mostly that's not the case, as I understand it
Tyler Carl: I would not be so sure
boydstowe: re: Exchange anyway
Tyler Carl: simple things can stop movements to other systems
boydstowe: mostly foks run in the standard config
Tyler Carl: for example with exchange you have the ability to pull back an email after it has been sent
Tyler Carl: you can't do that with notes or pop3 or smtp
Tyler Carl: so there are little features that users get used that often aren't discovered until moves start
Tyler Carl: now in the area of IM, we will see a move to standards in much the same way email did, as people need to interact with other people in different organizations
Tyler Carl: at the moment it looks like that standard is going to be SIP
Tyler Carl: now Microsoft although late to the party have a slight advantage over lotus in this area as they are building "live" from the ground up as a SIP server
Tyler Carl: IBM although they have been in this space for a number of years, are going to have to do some work to trully SIP enable sameitme so that SIP clients can connect to the server, currently lotus SIP support is limited to SIP community to SIP community connectivity
Tyler Carl: concerning Oracle, their current collaboration offering doesn't yet include IM, so it will be interesting to see what they come up with, but they will have a tough fight as for many companies the choice for IM is going to be very much along the same lines as their choice for email, with many companies that chose exchange choosing "live" and those that chose Notes choosing Sametime. And those that chose Oracle email, are there any significant accounts, maybe choosing Oracle Im
boydstowe: I have some insight to what Oracle is up to with IM, but let's leave that and get back to IBM
Tyler Carl: yep
boydstowe: Smooshing Lotus into IBM seems to have had some morale issues.
Tyler Carl: so IBM and Sametime
Tyler Carl: well Loti always felt different to IBMers
boydstowe: yes
Tyler Carl: they always considered themselves more creative and flexible
boydstowe: and IBM was slow and less creative
Tyler Carl: I think now Loti are being hit by the process of a really large company and many are finding that difficult
Tyler Carl: well when it comes to client software, IBM has a veyr poor track record
boydstowe: There's a lot of fallout?
Tyler Carl: well I think there is a lot of Apathy
boydstowe: capital A Apathy
Tyler Carl: from what I can see, many Loti are losing the will to fight
boydstowe: hmmm
boydstowe: well IBM better get on it.
Tyler Carl: I think they hav ehad a hard fight against competition such as Microsoft, but now they are fighting IBM too
boydstowe: MS and Oracle are moving fast
Tyler Carl: yes they are, and they are also dedicating more resources
Tyler Carl: for example
Tyler Carl: Microsoft has more postings on their job site for RTC marketing, than the IBM/Lotus team has in total
boydstowe: I thought IBM was investing $1B in collaboration technology this year?
Tyler Carl: I think Microsoft is realising how important this technology is going to be
boydstowe: they are dead on there
Tyler Carl: well collaboration is more than just IM
boydstowe: I agree
boydstowe: but RTC is more than IM too
Tyler Carl: and there is also the effort of moving all the existing lotus technology to J2EE
boydstowe: yes
Tyler Carl: so that investment may not be in "new" technology but in rebuilding existing technology
boydstowe: So what do you predict for the coming year?
Tyler Carl: well I think RTC will arrive with a bang
boydstowe: kablooie for Sametime?
Tyler Carl: MS in true MS style will launch and will have many partners in many different industries endorsing their product
Tyler Carl: well I would not say kablooie, but it is IBM's to lose
boydstowe: sound and fury? smoke and mirrors?
boydstowe: will MS have the meat?
Tyler Carl: I hope they [IBM] get back some focus, dedicate some more resources, and don't become too blinkered by workplace, and forget about where most of their existing customers do their work.
Tyler Carl: IF MS doesn't have the meat it doesn't matter
Tyler Carl: they only have to do just enough to cause issues
Tyler Carl: they will tie the product into everything they sell
boydstowe: And slow down the ballgame for ST?
Tyler Carl: Office, Outlook, Windows, Dev you name.
Tyler Carl: it will slow down sales [for IBM] yes
boydstowe: Carl, thanks for your time. Anything you want to add?
Tyler Carl: Well I hope that IBM/Lotus realise what they have in Sametime, and start to focus on what is important for customers, and not what is important for IBM marketing slides.
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August 04, 2003
Posted by Stowe Boyd
WSJ article this morning re: contact networking solutions,WSJ.com - Six Degrees of Exploitation? (the hyperlink won't work unless you have an online account with WSJ). Clay Shirky is quoted, saying that earlier versions of these solutions were too aggressive in forcing people to share info, basically "cracking people's heads open to see what's inside."
Mentions Spoke, Visible Path, but omits Plaxo, that I just wrote about at Knowledge Management magazine, a piece that should be published today.
Does a fairly good job of explaining how Visible Path can automatically determine how familiar you are with a contact: "Visible Path's "Relationship Mining Engine," for example, considers a contact closer if the employee has the contact's cell-phone number as opposed to just an office number. It also checks to see if a contact regularly responds to the employee's e-mails -- a sign of strong links -- or just receives it. Names on an instant-messenger buddy list are automatically considered strong links. So are repeated face-to-face or telephone meetings that show up in a calendar."
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Rafe Needleman kicks the tires of Traction "A Better Way for Businesses to Blog", which I have been digging into for the past couple of weeks. I had a number of long conversations with Jason Frankel at Traction, after reading a mention that Clay Shirky wrote (I think at many-to-many).
The technology is much more advanced that Blogger or TypePad, and includes a lot of functionality that goes way beyond the typical micropublishing style that we have grown accustomed to. Several of the application area that the company has pushed into -- such as competitive intelligence -- have shaped the feature set and pushed it into a new category: blog-based content management.
Other blog solutions (most notably pMachine) are likewise scraping the edge of this emerging category.
I keep wondering why the biggest document and content management companies remain asleep at the wheel while these upstarts are redefining the way that businesses will communicate.
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August 01, 2003
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Read Jon Udell's piece: iChat AV, iSight, and FlashCom. I am happy that iChat AV -- audio visual services linked to the iChat network -- seems to work as advertised. But Apple doesn't solve the interoperability problem any better that AOL, Yahoo, or MSN.
I want to be able to chat (with or without video and voice) to anyone with an IP address on the Internet.
Leaving my tired diatribe aside, I am planning to get a webcam when I get back from the beach, and to launch Stowe TV!
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Glen Hellman posted a comment on my recent entry re: Ikimbo. We had breakfast the other day, and Glen is very upbeat about the opportunities for Ikimbo which has just raised an additional $2M in venture funding. He is continuing to push ahead with the Agenda product line, an application that extends IBM Sametime. Agenda provides a means to structure real-time response to real-time events.
Agenda is a pretty cool idea, if I do say so myself. In the interest of full disclosure, I confess that a/ I worked at Ikimbo for two years, until leaving in February 2003, b/ my name is one of several on the patent application for the Agenda idea (although I have no idea about the status of the patent), but that c/ I have *no* financial interest in Ikimbo at this time. So when I say its cool, I am just patting myself on the back (we won a Lotus Advisor Award in January), rather than self-dealing.
The challenge with Agenda is -- as I told Glen this week -- the complexity of integration with the enterprise information infrastructure. On one hand, Agenda is integrated with Sametime, but not the myriad other IM solutions. And integration with -- to take only two sectors -- even a few CRM players or SCM players is a truly daunting task. I feel certain that whatever else Glen does, he will focus on a smaller number of integration points that Ikimbo attempted in the past.
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