FutureOfWork « Skype Journal

Should the CWA organize Skype workers? Facebook workers?

Phil Wolff 6 February 2012 4:35 am

The Communication Workers of America convened this week, rallying around their legislative agenda. Do you think Skype@Microsoft would be a good organizing target? Live talk is still fleeing to over-the-top services, outside the direct control of Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Comcast.

Could CWA find fresh blood at Microsoft’s Skype, Google’s Motorola, Facebook, Aol, Yahoo!, et al? What workplace problems could collective bargaining solve for workers? Can the more white-collar and tech-friendly unions function in and relate to Silicon Valley and Redmond culture, rapid business tempo, labor-ignorant tech media, and free-agent labor markets? Can they adapt to how these organizations are distributed across cities, states, and countries? I think unions inspired to action by Occupy Wall Street demonstrate new life and leadership. They may be ready for the challenge.

If they want in, they should start now. It takes time to learn why those building our new conversational media seek collective power at work.

future | FutureOfWork

Phil Wolff’s 57 Scurrilous Skype Predictions for 2012

Phil Wolff 3 January 2012 5:20 am

The Future road sign - next exit

Every year I see into Skype’s future, foretelling with unconvincing accuracy, cynicism and hope.

Platform:

SkypeKit licenses open up for servers. Blue Jeans Network already cut a private deal to run Skype on their servers. Skype will open this up widely, with a few strings.

Skype launches SkypeKit hosting. Why set up your own server farm when you can use Skype’s?

More developers come to market with Skype inside. Seven smart TV or over-the-top TV hardware add-ons will announce they come with Skype inside at CES 2012 in January.

Skype introduces its voice user interface API. Taking lessons from Nuance and Siri, Skype defines a command vocabulary for Eesti and 20 other languages so you can dial, answer, and mute calls without using a keyboard, tablet or mouse. No voice-to-IM transcription at launch.

Skype for Cars. A US 4G wireless operator will announce hands-free skyping standard in a partner auto company’s 2013 car dashboard system. Recalled when dead car batteries are blamed on Skype.

Skype Desktop API remains a bastard stepchild, without full access to Skype video and screensharing features.

SkypeKit supports Skype Premium features like Group Video and new presenter/moderator features. Skype reports developer-related revenue for the first time to set a baseline.

Skype’s first Microsoft devcon isn’t Skype-only, piggy-backing on other MSDN events. Skype’s devrels team has to earn independent Microsoft developer cred from scratch.

Skype clients:

Skype for Metro, as Skype for Windows gets a dose of Metro chrome.

Skype for Windows gets chat style formatting features from the Mac. Still no rich-text or html browsing and inline objects.

Skype for Mac gets better. The five most awful things about Skype for Mac will be improved. Slightly.

Skype introduces emoji, the emoticons widely used throughout Japan.

Skype for Kindle Fire 2. As Microsoft allies with Amazon.

Qik ends its life as a brand. Skype will finish migrating popular client features to Skype mobile apps and scaling features/services an order of magnitude or two.

Skype for iOS gets better. Major technical and UI overhauls. Injections of Qik experience. Client will finally load a power user in two seconds, ready to chat and call at least as convenient as FaceTime. Skype’s iPhone and iPad apps will go from useful to delightful.

Microsoft Integration:

Internet Explorer. We’ll see further integration with IE. Click-to-Call will continue to highlight phone numbers, making them clickable. New actions will include adding a Skypable link to your Skype contact list, making Facebook contacts clickable, and enabling Facebook video chat. When IE supports WebRTC/RTCweb, Skype will also support browser-based apps.

Windows. Skype for Windows will ship with the consumer build of Windows 8. Unless the lawyers nix it.

Windows Tablet. Skype for Metro works sooo much better than Skype for iPad.

Sharepoint. Unlikely to see synergy in 2012. Perhaps at the user and department directory level?

XBox. Skype for XBox should be Skype’s best living room app, more intuitive than the apps build for televisions if only because it will support game controllers and Kinect and game designers will know what look and feel will work for gamers. (I might buy an XBox for this, maybe even a TV too. Do I need a TV to use an XBox?) Will Skype build the client? Probably they’ll help the Entertainment Division to build their own. Will the XBox teams open an internal design competition to explore a broad solution space? Here’s hoping.

Microsoft Office bundles Skype. Word, Excel and PowerPoint come with Skype extensions, making phone numbers and Skype names clickable.

Outlook and Exchange start Skype interop without third-party apps. Call a contact from within Outlook. Look up workplace contacts in the enterprise directory.

Skype for Bing advertisers. When you buy ads on Bing, you’ll see an option to make your phone number or Skype name clickable. It may be free, since a raft of up-selling opportunities can follow if advertisers and shoppers further adopt click-and-call behavior.

Windows Live Messenger. Messenger will interop with Skype by year end at least as well as Skype does with Facebook. I expect federated presence, IM, voice and video, though maybe not group video. Messenger-Skype will raise non-trivial identity challenges.

SkyDrive. Skype clients will support file transfer and filing using cloud storage services, starting with Microsoft SkyDrive. Send from or save to SkyDrive with your Skype contacts. It’s a fast and cheap MSFT loyalty feature. Will they follow with integration to Box, Dropbox and other popular services?

Presence. Skype needs dramatically better presence and status messaging. Perhaps Microsoft has a service or five that Skype might use to share availability, user profiles, and mood messages?

Lync. Microsoft’s workplace telephony products will be be folded into the Skype division. Work will start in building the Skype stack into their products. Rebranded as Skype.

Skype’s Performance:

US$1 Billion in sales, broken out in MSFT’s form 10-Q coming Thursday, 19 Jan.

$100 million in advertising, ten percent of Skype’s total income. Driven by a mix of click-to-call from browser plug-ins, Bing-driven links, and in-app brand partner messaging.

Falling termination revenue per user (SkypeOut to phone numbers) even as more people use Skype. Dollars per minute continues to fall to zero, even as cost per mobile MB rises.

Skype Premium service revenue grows as small businesses pay for group video conferencing, choosing Skype’s convenience over GoToMeeting’s features, WebEx’s reliability, and Google’s informality.

35 Million Dialtone: Peak concurrent users will top 35 million.

210 Million Monthly Active Users late in 2012.

More than 1200 people work for Skype. Joining Microsoft just increases the need for engineers, product managers, developer relations and marketing communications staff. Skype’s Palo Alto offices overflow, even after a second buildout.

Skype still doesn’t offer emergency services. Seven people die while someone fails to reach police or an ambulance over Skype.

In Skypelandia in 2012:

Tokbox gets first paying customers for new premium video chat APIs.

Google+ lets you record and save video hangouts to YouTube.

The US Congress discusses voting on bills via Skype in an election year.

Schedule your Google Hangouts in Google Calendar.

Apple squares off against Skype as FaceTime expands to every desktop and mobile device.

Apple adds FaceTime to iChat.

Invite people to a Google Hangout in Gmail. And Orkut.

Amazon partners with a VoIP company to offer scalable hosted cloud telephony like Voxeo or Twilio.

A political candidate holds 40 town halls in one week, attending by Skype video. Four of the gatherings have problems with the connection.

Twilio and Voxeo pilot hosted video chat APIs.

#OccupySkype protests local jobs lost to remote work.

25% of all PBXs shipped in the Americas and Europe come with ViPR features turned on, quietly shifting millions of B2B calls from plain old telephone services to VoIP.

Chinese government agencies deploy stronger surveillance- and censor-ware with the TOM-Online version of Skype.

The US Department of Defense further restricts the use of Skype to non-secure networks and communications.

Cisco buys RIM and folds it into the Flip division.

The Chrome browser for desktops and Android will drive 50 million new Google Voice users.

The Vatican’s broadband chokes when a million people try to call after a rumor spreads the Pope’s Skype name.

Google Voice launches in 10 more countries.

A 50th developer deploys Asterisk as a video conferencing switch.

Police negotiator talks with cornered kidnapper over Skype.

2012 runs a whole day longer than 2011, but feels shorter.

A Skype developer showcases a teledildonics product at the January AVN Conference in Las Vegas.

Microsoft declares company-wide support for NSTIC, forcing Skype to create a 21st Century identity system.

Skype dialtone soars when LinkedIn pilots Skype and SkypeOut links in posts and job ads.

The Slow Startup movement earns counterculture credibility as Lean Startup matures.

Google lets you save video Hangouts to YouTube.

AT&T buys capacity piecemeal after the T-Mobile deal died. Lots of small-company consolidation.

Sprint’s mobile infinite bandwidth offer stops at 4G.

Workplace deskphones lose share to iPad apps and docks with handsets.

Anonymous attacks the Skype network.

Cisco ships a Skype appliance for enterprises.

Five of the ten best selling games come with in-game voice conferencing, serving a Billion minutes of talk in 2012, none of those minutes through Skype.

Phil Wolff designs and positions realtime collaboration products for effective people. Phil advises the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium and is a director of the DataPortability Project. Email editor@skypejournal.com, Skype evanwolf, tweet @evanwolf, G+ or call +1-510-444-8234 to talk with Phil. Skype Journal is independent of Skype.

collabonation | Collaboration | FutureOfWork | language | net-work

Work Design: Translating the web a few words at a time

Phil Wolff 9 December 2011 3:21 pm

Luis von Ahn presents the Duolingo project. Like Tom Sawyer persuading the neighborhood kids to paint his fence for him, Duolingo exchanges language lessons for help translating the web. Duolingo builds on predecessors like reCAPTCHA, which uses the free labor from proving you are human to translate old books, Duolingo addresses a massive task, breaks it down into small fragments, and aligns the task with a strong motivator. Big project, tiny tasks, strong motivation.

This design looks obvious in hindsight. I think it is harder than it looks.

Selecting the right problem from the universe of problems is hard. You need a problem that lets people feel good about participating, aligning with common values. You need a problem that is already understood by the public or that can be explained in a few words. Your problem should have measurable value in time saved or in money. And the problem should have a major component that can be solved by humans.

Breaking down knowledge work to 5 to 30 second snippets is a fairly new skill, although industrial engineers have designed simple repetitive snippets of work for factories for more than a century. Now we must learn to decompose to exploit what the human mind does well, leaving the rest to algorithms.

Motivation is the last leg of this triangle. We don’t have prior art or proven models to discover contexts that marry the human task to incentives. We have a few examples, like getting access to something valuable, learning a language, or running a cool screensaver. In each example the contributor benefits are immediate, in your face, and powerful enough for high completion rates.

The last project I saw that worked like this was 1-800-GOOG-411. GOOG411 was a directory assistance robot; you’d call for the phone number or directions of US businesses. It used caller voices and behavior to build a vast corpus of speech and search data. Google used the data to engineer its transcription service and to learn about mobile-local search. I loved it; it usually had better answers than expensive phone company operators.

Big project, tiny tasks, strong motivation.

YouTube video: TEDxCMU — Luis von Ahn — Duolingo: The Next Chapter in Human Computation.

You know cyberspace is better than sex when…

Phil Wolff 7 December 2011 6:33 pm

You know the line about men and women thinking about sex n times per day? My digital life is more on my mind than sex.

I left my phone in the car. My folks and I arrived in Fairhaven, a neighborhood of Bellingham, Washington, to shop for children’s toys and browse the Village Books store. iPhone in coat, coat locked in car, I went iPhoneless for two hours.

A half-block from the car I had my first phantom limb experiences. I saw an abandoned London red phone booth and reached for my phone to take picture. I settled for a camera but I wouldn’t be able to twitpic that photo or share it with my telephony buddies.

Over the next 120 minutes I wanted to:

price compare books via Red Laser,
endorse an oil and vinegar tasting boutique on Yelp!,
check on expansion packs for Cataan (found something complex to level the playing field),
photograph some beautiful chutney at lunch,
look up Washington State’s counselor licensing (saw an office building full of therapists),
log how far off-diet my meal sent me,
check in from Village Books,
look up that indie-book-seller coalition they belong to,
read about their anti-Kindle campaign,
download the Fire & Ice four-pack to my Kindle app,
snapshot the cover of the last Gaiman book for friends in a science fiction Skype chat,
ask Quora a question about the DIY book industry,
remind myself to pack warmer next time,
read more about Washington State investigations into Whatcom County budget magic,
bookmark a book on business modeling for a friend,
check the hourly weather for that evening, and
peek at my sister’s family Amazon holiday wishlists.

That’s at least 18 reflexive reaches for my iPhone. 9 an hour, every 6 or 7 minutes. According to one recent study, this is more often than we think about sex. And this was just a casual family holiday stroll through a suburban shopping district.

Many of us are getting used to augmenting thought; in our ongoing internal dialog, conversations with others, shopping and working. Life is better with apps and live data. Heck, we think more complete thoughts, plan our future better, and interact with others in more informed ways with our digital life. Each time we reach, we’re getting mind candy, positive reinforcement. Our operant conditioning is strong.

So disconnecting causes withdrawal symptoms. How long offline does it take you to stop reaching for your laptop, tablet or mobile? For the conditioning to break down? Could observing a digital sabbath give us more freedom and control over our reflexes, more power to alter and adjust our behavior? Or should we not bother? Should we accept this new twitch response as an improvement?

This mind enhancement comes with strings and risks.

Does this new conditioning tie us to one company more than others, like mobile operating system publishers?

How can our new behavior shift power among corporations, governments, and individuals?

When you reach for your brain-augmentation-device, are you missing things because of that reach, causing new problems? Can the impulse to reach cause distracted driving, even without the gadget at hand?

At what point does personal dependence become a public necessity, like water, air, safety, and roads?

Can this behavior be exploited like sex? Sexy advertising bypasses our executive cognition and taps something more primal. Are printed www links and QR codes a first stab at triggering our digital reflex?

So here’s the test: Without hyperlinks in this post, how many times did you think to click on something? More times than you thought of sex? Aha!

design | FutureOfWork | Skype | Sweden

Culture: Photos of Skype’s Swedish brewery office

Phil Wolff 30 June 2011 1:27 pm

Photos of Skype’s Stockholm office in an old brewery by the architect. High Ikea, modest budget, open plan, balcony, brand-color accents, subtle we’re-in-the-audio-video-business iconography. 29,000 square feet (2700 square meters). Modern interior contrasted against classic exterior. Does the eye candy help people reach higher levels of personal productivity, social cohesion, and collective effectiveness? Does the layout support agile processes, virtual teaming, and wirearchic leadership? Will Skype’s codecs taste like hops or malt?via GigaOm, via Daily Icon.

Business | enterprise | FutureOfWork | ooVoo | USA

US House of Reps permits Skype, ooVoo for constituent visits a year later

Phil Wolff 28 June 2011 9:15 am

The U.S. House of Representatives (the lower half of the United States Congress) approved the use of Skype and ooVoo today. Thousands of electeds and staff can now use video calling do the people’s business. The Committee on Administration opened its public Wi-Fi networks to these services after a year of debate and discussion and an intense bout of security testing in the last few weeks. The House’s secure local area networks and secure Wi-Fi networks remain off-limits.

A year is instructive. Organizations with more than 1000 employees typically adopt technology more slowly and deliberatively than small ones. They are more familiar with security and business risks and consequences, so they are cautious. They are responsible for fixing things and supporting users, so they have procedures and methods for managing IT lifecycles. In this government’s case, they must also be careful to follow laws and ethics guidelines for procurement. Stacy Pies and the rest of Skype’s government affairs team has been working with Members of congress, their staff, security and IT people for years.

My take away: technology consumerization and video calling’s intrinsic value brought Skype and ooVoo in the door. Skype GA’s ability to cultivate relationships over years, understand specific workplace subcultures, adapt to changing organization priorities, and to apply resources when needed helped internal champions close the deal.

books | FutureOfWork | review

Book of the Day: Windup Girl

Phil Wolff 24 June 2011 7:04 am

Today’s book is a biopunk science fiction novel, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, in honor of the Foresight @ Google 25th Anniversary Conference Celebration & Reunion Weekend, starting tonight. These adventurous scientists, futurists, technologist and investors are my peeps and I’m looking forward to the reunion. To the book…

I loved The Windup Girl for its story telling. The world-building reminded me of David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo series for its rich detail and near-future near-familiarity.

Paolo tells a contained story; the cast of characters is short. But his setting, Bangkok later this century, reveals choices and assumptions we are making today. Use up civilization’s petroleum and coal and you take away computing, transportation, manufacturing, automation, and communication. Continue today’s industrial agribusiness and you get bioengineered seed stock rationed by monopolists.

I hang with folks like John Kelly. John uses scenarios to drive strategic thought. His news stories from possible futures inform choices leaders face on the job now right now. The Windup Girl brings us its own questions. Civil rights for genetically modified employees? Market opportunities for the developing world when the whole world is the developing world? International enforceability of patents and other IP vs. the ability to feed billions? Rewriting cultural imperatives into the human genome? Plagues and invasive species that make food stock animals and pets extinct? Paolo decorates his sets with these themes.

If you’re reading this, you’re likely part of today’s service/knowledge/information/entertainment economy. Exactly how much of our work is relevant in a world without electricity, computers, or phones? Where food must grow locally to avoid transport costs? Where goods are made and sold locally? Paolo challenged some of my most basic assumptions about life in a generation or two.

A very good read but it’s too much to hope for a sequel. After this, I’m rereading his first novel, Ship Breaker.

3 Sweden rethinks web video customer service

Phil Wolff 7 June 2011 3:04 am

Mobile operator Three partnered with design studio B-Reel to bring the high-touch experience of in-store selling to the efficiency of centralized service. Three Sweden calls the service 3LiveShop, a blend of call center software, CRM, video calling, multitouch user interfaces, heads-up display, and in-store retail culture. It looks gorgeous.

Conversion rates in retail stores are very high, and are painfully lower in online stores. The Fireclick Index reports 74% of online shoppers abandon carts with products before checkout; only 2.3% of shoppers buy. This adds up when the lifetime value of a customer is high and switching costs are low.

Three things inspire me.

That a large phone company executive gave real budget to such a crazy idea and let it come to market. Was this a corporate culture hack or the product of a vibrant innovation system?

That the design process focused on both users: the sales rep and the customer. Too often design favors one or ignores the other.

That the results found human eye contact and rapport were as crucial to success as navigating all the information overload. Video is the real value add, building trust and keeping attention. Touch means operators can respond quickly, within the timeframe of a live conversation.

Here’s hoping a future phase gives some of the touch-screen magic to the customer, for some deep co-creation and collaboration. And that the Swedes get the go ahead to roll this out to the rest Three.

P.S. They built the user experiences in Adobe Flash. Why not Skype? Skype is already a partner with Three.

First, Skype requires each party to a call to use Skype-provided identities. That just doesn’t work for walk-in-off-the-street relationships. Selling starts off anonymous (or at least pseudonymous) for both the customer and sales assistant until you are ready to pay.

Second, today’s Skype doesn’t offer a way to build a video call into a browser-centered retail experience. Even if the developers chose to build the CRM station with SkypeKit, the customer would still have to download a full Skype client or a customized SkypeKit app. That’s serious friction, an unwanted step.

Third, early versions of SkypeKit’s private beta license requires you to share business secrets with Skype about your use of SkypeKit, and give Skype veto power over release of your “Plugged-into-Skype” product or service. That’s a lot of outside control to cede when you can easily, cheaply choose other tools.

Business | FutureOfWork

Phil Wolff: Three minutes on the future of work

Phil Wolff 17 April 2011 5:53 am

An excerpt from a longer conversation about the future of work, hosted by Skype’s Living Workplace minisite. A few points I make:

The unit of work engagement used to be the job for life, then a career with a few jobs. In 2020 many more people will work at the task and gig level.

Gig work brings “free agent” culture to offices. Office designs look more like co-working spaces, two steps up from Starbucks.

This means we need tools for finding work at the gig level.

New organization structures: Wirearchy and project cultures are the new defaults; hierarchy is applied as needed. Free agents form tribes to find and offer services, reducing market friction and using trust networks to avoid needless risks.

To help with this, we need peopleware for Ridiculously Easy Group Forming.

This will lead to a two-tiered workforce: a few core permanent employees and a large ocean of contractors.

Details, context and examples to come.

Why Monstrous Company reverted to Skype for Mac 2.8

Phil Wolff 31 March 2011 12:26 pm

Jason Asbahr is CEO of iOS game publisher Monstrous Company. Design defects in Skype’s persistent chat drove his whole firm to switch back from Skype for Mac 5 to the older 2.8. Still has love for Skype’s group video chat and hotspot payment services.

Developer Zone | Developers | FutureOfWork | Technology

Assembla on distributed pair programming

Phil Wolff 25 March 2011 8:52 am

I posted 8 Skype hacks for decentralized Agile teams earlier this week. Assembla provides tools for programmers and posted about their mostly positive experiences with distributed pair programming. They tweaked the experience to avoid synchronous (live) work, supporting different time zones.

Business | Developer Zone | Developers | FutureOfWork | Skype

8 Skype hacks for decentralized Agile teams

Phil Wolff 17 March 2011 6:45 am

Great session at the Bay Area Agile Manager’s Meetup last night. A frequent question at these meetups is how to adapt agile software development practices, including scrum, to distributed teams. These processes are intensely social, usually with physical barriers lowered so co-located teammates can see the card walls and each other. Nobody had universal answers or a comprehensive theory. A few Skype suggestions:

Dial in. For team cohesion, offsite team members video Skype to the daily standup meeting. [I forget which scrum veteran told this story; thanks!] You can extend this to the other scrum meetings: sprint planning, sprint review, and sprint retrospective. Video, with a good speakerphone, is almost like being there. Skype’s new group video conferencing lets you bring nine off-site people into your meeting.
Remote pair programming. In pair programming, two programmers work together at one screen. One codes, paying attention to the mechanics of code construction while the other reviews the work and navigates within the broader context. The two produce more relevant and higher quality code than they could separately. How can we get the benefits of pair programming if the two are at separate computers? I’ve never tried this but it should work: Turn on Skype desktop screen sharing during a voice call with your programming partner. You’re both seeing the same things and can talk to each other. You might even be in the same room but give yourselves elbow room.
IM team backchannels. If your team doesn’t have an IM backchannel, it should. Skype’s persistent chat means your conversations continue, even when other people are offline.
Translation bot. I’m only assuming your backchannels are in your company language. Take advantage of the free Chat Translator and Speaker for Skype, which pipes your IMs through Google for live machine translation.
Ambient video wallpaper. Open up a full screen video call on a large monitor (or television) and just leave it on. Skype uses this to connect two offices in different cities at two water coolers. It offers for a sense of being connected and the opportunity for chance conversation. No reason not use them to bring remote/home workers into your workspace. (Just remember to dress for work at home.)
IM notifications and alerting. The Skype Public API makes it easy to write apps that will pipe notifications from code repositories, test frameworks, and work tracking into Skype text chats. Ping me if you’d like an introduction or referrals to programmers who can guide you through getting started.
Avoid distractions. Skype offers the ability to turn off bells, beeps, and bloips for each chat room. The /alertsoff and /alertsoff IM commands give you control. Skype says:

“/alertsoff” Disable message alert notifications.

“/alertson [text]” Allows you to specify exactly what needs to appear in a chat for the chat to pop up. For example, /alertson London will only alert you when the word “London” appears in the chat.

P.S. A quick poll showed Pivotal Tracker is the community’s second favorite story status tracker. First is physical post-it notes or cards on a wall. The user experience was so delightful that whole teams used the tool without fuss, including non-techie types and scrum newbies. It’s hard to beat adoption.

P.P.S. I have a notion to generate Skype conference rooms for each story using the Skype GoLive chat command and a unique story code/number. Could be automated but I’m petrified of the easy interruptions GoLive brings.

Let me know if you’ve tried any of these methods and how they worked for you. Perhaps they’ll find their way into common agile life.

confabistan | FutureOfWork | Skype

My virtual office hours for March, with Skype or maybe TokBox

Phil Wolff 14 March 2011 10:26 am

I’m trying out Ohours this month, a few hours you can schedule to talk with me. Any topic. Anyone. Free, of course. Let me know what you think. Today’s times are here. If this works out, I might make it a standing feature of my work week.

Business | design | FutureOfWork

The Future of Work: Play

Phil Wolff 17 January 2011 6:36 am

Here is Nicole Lazzaro of XEODesign presenting her Four Fun Keys. You apply them to create games’ four most important emotions:

Hard Fun: Fiero – in the moment personal triumph over adversity
Easy Fun: Curiosity
Serious Fun: Relaxation and excitement
People Fun: Amusement, hanging out with friends.

As we bring game design to work design, we craft work experiences that build on the emotional patterns that create satisfying play. See you next month at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Social, Interest and Purpose: The Three Graphs

Phil Wolff 7 December 2010 8:21 am

Nathaniel Whittemore wrote last week about the intersection of the social graph and the interest graph. He argues the two graphs are so different that businesses should craft different strategies for them. There’s a third graph; I’ll add that in a moment.

Whittemore’s four points:

The Interest Graph is Different than the Social Graph. The social graph is the people you know, existing relationships, usually based on prior experience. The interest graph are the people who share an interest with you, whether you know them or not.
The Interest Graph and Social Graph are good for different things. The social graph helps you cultivate your relationships. The interest graph helps you pursue your tastes, passions, and topics that matter to you.
The portion of both your Interest Graph and Social Graph that you care about is much smaller than the whole. Sorting out who matters to you in which context is not easy at scale.
The Interest Graph is going to reshape your Social Graph. People from your social and interest worlds cross over in both directions; some people live in both.

Talk with people in our networks can be a good thing in and of itself. It’s part of how we think aloud, but with others. It’s how we leave our mark, in a small way. It may be how we keep friends and belong and learn and make sense of our world.

Permit me to suggest a third graph: Purpose.

You’ve been on mailing lists with a lot of talk and no action. Friends who can’t muster up the focus to grab drinks. Work groups that never arrive at a decision. Fan clubs that talk about their hero but never got their web site up. We make fun of talk’s inconsequence, like in the beautiful My Favorite Tweets song.

And then… Sometimes talk leads to action. Volunteering. Giving money. Signing up for a project at work. Doing the laundry. Inviting that cute someone to dinner.

Purpose is the third dimension. Having someplace to go and the will to go there. Purpose, goals, common cause, intent, drive. Purpose is an human attribute or attitude that turns talk of shopping into buying, flirting to dating, griping to protesting. Purpose turns talk into results.

As you explore the future of work, look at your purpose graph as the people with whom you share a purpose. Some will be people who share your interests. Others you will know and trust. The folks in your purpose graph are the people with whom you can work to accomplish your goals. Collaboration starts with intent.

People who design tools for getting things done should be looking for the indicators that people want the same things and are prepared to do something to get them. The better you match people, the sooner you give them the tools to turn their drive into action, the more active you’ll see their purpose graph.

There’s more to it, of course. What’s the next step for you?

Lyrics:

Posting and blogging and chatting and tweeting
While both pretending we’re part of this meeting
I friended you and then you followed me
We began networking socially

Sharing and commenting, poking and liking
Even while showering, even while hiking
Having no message won’t stand in our way
We tweet to say we have nothing to say

Facebook and Flickr and YouTube and Twitter
Our productivity’s gone down the shitter
FarmVille and Fish Life and Mafia Wars
Now we’ve become social media whores!

Posting pictures… sending quizzes…
Seems it never ends
And when we both post fifty times every hour
We really piss off our friends!

Is our common purpose to have your customers collaborate compellingly? Chat with me on Skype. Call me at +1-510-316-9773, follow on twitter @SkypeJournal (just the posts) and @evanwolf (everything). Visit our Skype Journal private technologist roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

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