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:: 2003/02/21 ::

A Comment on File Sharing in On-Line Communities

Microsoft's Threedegree's (see Microsoft Pitching New IM System to Teenagers) includes the concept of a "jukebox" which can accept uploaded files from community members, and can "play" them, but blocking downloading. In principle this will minimize piracy (at least until people figure out how to rip the streams).

The "jukebox" metaphor may be the answer to a "plaza" for on-line communities, a question raised in IBM Community Tools: The Soul of Real-Time Communities?. Various sorts of information can be uploaded by community members, including documents. However, the docs cannot be downloed, and only 'played' -- the meaning of which will vary by doc type. Obvious examples are rendering a word doc or PPT, playing an MP3, and displaying a gif. The jukebox could include --- if it is to be really usable -- an application sharing interface, as well.

:: Stowe Boyd 2/21/2003 10:32:33 AM [link] ::
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IBM Community Tools: The Soul of Real-Time Communities?

I discovered the IBM Community Tools launch in the press recently (see IBM Building Real-Time Communities), and searched to see if there was more info at the www.ibm.com website. I discovered that the tools are freely downloadable (from here), so I installed the software, and fiddled around.

There are five basic tools in the suite -- which also supports integration with a standard "newsgroup" database of conversations, which in my case came up in Outook express. The five are these:
1. FreeJam -- a group chat capability, which is built on top of Sametime.
2. PollCast -- an ingenious polling utility that supports yes/no and multiple choice queries, with automatic tallying of results.
3. Teamring -- instant web presentations (I have been unable to get this to work, yet).
4. W3Alert -- a broadcast tool, alerting the community with whatever text is entered.
5. Skilltap -- An expertise database and profiling system -- allows questions to be posted to the community and handled in real-time. Users can search aginst the database of already answered questions (FAQ database), or get response from on-line community members. Once information is provided, the responses are rated on a 1-5 scale. Presumably, expertise ratings are being compiled in the background.

As I said, I only fiddled a little while, but here are a few observations:

Every community needs a plaza. With the exception of the 'recent broadcasts' window that the toolset includes, and perhaps the newsgroup, there really is no 'place' linked to the defined community. What is missing is a room, or place concept, where you can see a/ who in the group is on, b/ recent activity (broadcasts, newspostings, recent questions), and community information (purpose, grop moderator, calendar, docs). Why not include some light form of Quickplace here?

Need more than a Read-me to get started. IBM will have to provide more help for those getting up and running, like a detailed flash demo. It took me a few minutes to configure the newsgroup to authenticate me, for example.

Documents want to be shared. Leaving aside the observation that Webring didn't work for me, people still need to transfer ("share") docs, and store them in repositories. But not here? Once again, another argument for Quickplace to be integrated.

Q&A is the soul of a community. IBM is dead on in this regard. The most critical aspect of community growth is the creation of trust networks -- knowing who is to be believed -- and the inclusion of an expertise feedback system with the Skilltap tool is brilliant.

:: Stowe Boyd 2/21/2003 10:08:44 AM [link] ::
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Struggling IM Players focus on Indirect Channel

The frozen economy is having an impact on the wonderful world of instant messaging (see Reuters Struggles and divine stories).

No surprise that the smaller IM players -- IMLogic, Facetime, Omnipod, Ikimbo -- are trying to create indirect market channels. A recent Instant Messaging Planet article (see Got Channel?) treats this in some detail (and includes a quote from me, in my former role as EVP at Ikimbo). Building an indirect channel can be a force multiplier for a cash-strapped software company that doesn't want to employ a horde of steak-eating bag carriers.

The problem is -- as most software execs know -- no one can sell your product as well as you do. Channel partners are not as committed -- in general -- to your products, and have a kind of split brain problem, since they often sell and support other technologies as well.

Building an indirect channel that works is hard, in some ways harder to get started that direct sales. Ultimately, indirect channel partners have to have all of the following key characteristics:
1. Strong commitment to the partnership -- this must be indicated by a serious investment of time and money to the partnership -- getting technical and sales folks trained, marketing investments, and so on.
2. Differentiation of the partner company based on the technology in question -- if the software is not central to the company's business, it is a sideline, and that leads nowhere.
3. Many throats to choke -- there need to be peer-to-peer relationships at every level in the partnering companies, NOT as commonly discussed, a "single throat to choke." Having a single partner channel manager is not enough. This also effectively limits the number of serious strategic partnerships a company can afford.

Whether the players in the IM space are making these kinds of partnerships -- or just marriages of convenience -- remains to be seen.


:: Stowe Boyd 2/21/2003 08:55:33 AM [link] ::
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divine on the verge of Chapter 11 -- The end of Mindalign?

Numerous news stories about divine's financial implosion (see divine Inc. Weighs Filing Chapter 11) speculate that the company -- which has lost $1B dollars since its inception as a start-up incubator -- may be headed for bankruptcy.

Parlano, the original developer of what is now divine's Mindalign instant messaging system, has been absorbed into the company's product lines. But its possible that in a bankruptcy the product could be spun out or sold off. However, its not clear to me that there is a need for small players in the rapidly consolidating corporate instant messaging market. Some larger player -- Microsoft, perhaps -- might want to acquire the product just for its customers. Reuters (who has its own problems -- see Reuters Struggles) has melded Microsoft and Mindalign technologies in its Reuters Messaging product, for example.

:: Stowe Boyd 2/21/2003 08:30:36 AM [link] ::
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Google Buys Blogger: Indexing the Blogosphere

Google snapped up Blogger, one of the most popular blog services, with over 200,000 active blogs and 1.1M registered users. Dan Gilmor writes that this represents "a huge boost to an enormously diverse genre of online publishing -- also known as ``blogging'' -- that has begun to change the equations of online news and information."

The interesting angle is that Google is already indexing weblogs from Blogger and competitive services, such as RadioLand and Movable Type, so there may seem to be some cozying up problems in the heretofore egalitarian and humanistic ecosystem that is -- or was -- the Blogosphere.

But indexing Blogger's -- and other services' -- blogs is the tip of the iceberg.

Just like all other communication media advances -- like radio, the Web, newspapers -- the pioneers scramble to build something neat out of nothing, the idea catches on, and then -- wham -- the money guys pour in and the market rapidly consolidates. Winston Churchill commented, at the turning point in WWII, "this is not the end, this is not the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning." The next step will be Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL scooping up the other blog service leaders, and creating a patchwork of competing, non-interoperable services. Ah, the laissez faire economy!

Still, blogging is a cool model for information exchange and communitarian thought, so even the onslaught of corporate giants won't hold back the rising tide. They will figure out a way to monetize all that blog energy, though, that's for sure. I know I would pay more for better authoring tools -- I can't even get comments to work on this site -- because the informal volunteer infrastructure of the Blogosphere is too rickety. But firms like Google will rapidly straighten that stuff out -- for a monthly fee of $14.95.


:: Stowe Boyd 2/19/2003 07:20:32 PM [link] ::
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IBM Building Real-Time Communities

At the recent Partnerworld conference, IBM has announced its Community Tools offering, incorporating Sametime, MQ Series, DB2 and Websphere technologies (reported by Line56 in Broadcasting With IM).

The intent seems to be to build a knowledge base from a community through expertise profiling and indexing of real-time answers, in essence building a community's FAQ on the fly. "In its first use, the applications draw on the 50,000-member "iSeries nation" user group used by more than 200,000 customers," Line56 reports. Getting such communities takes a long lead time, but then the value of the collective knowledge captured can be enormous.

IBM is investing a $1B this year on collaborative tools -- expect great things.

:: Stowe Boyd 2/19/2003 05:17:37 PM [link] ::
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Reuters Struggles

A few Guardian pieces on the Reuters financial mess (Agent of its own misfortune, and The rivals - now showing at a big screen near you) suggest that the instant messaging battle between Reuters and Bloomberg is central to the Reuters loss of £493m.

Reuter's recent activities around instant messaging -- they have licensed technology from Microsoft -- is an effort to leapfrog Bloomberg and others. This activity will be pushed, even while the company wrestles with cutting 3,000 jobs worldwide, and junking a technology consulting services attempt.

However, the loss of Reuters seats to Bloomberg seems to be largely due to perceptions of righer features in the Bloomberg service.

A towering irony is that the announcement about Reuters' starkly bad financial sitaution was sent via Bloomberg's instant messaging system:

"Leigh Webb, a marketing analyst at WestLB Panmure, scanned the Reuters results and relayed the gloomy news to clients waiting for the lowdown on the once venerable group's disastrous full-year figures. In a grim irony for Reuters, he sent the bad news via a system that has contributed to the company's decline: the Bloomberg instant messaging service. Over 180,000 stockbrokers, bond traders and analysts worldwide use the system. The number of subscribers to Bloomberg screens - a direct rival to Reuters' trading products - rose 5 per cent to 171,350 last year. According to yesterday's results, Reuters lost 17 per cent of its subscriber base in 2002. Indicating a trend that has been repeated throughout the City, Mr Webb says more than 100 Reuters screens have been replaced by Bloomberg machines at WestLB's London offices."

There is no doubt that instant messaging is the highground in the battle between financial information services. I plan to profile these offerings in an upcoming report. Stay tuned!

:: Stowe Boyd 2/19/2003 05:01:43 PM [link] ::
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Microsoft Pitching New IM System to Teenagers

Microsoft is trying to get their arms around what teenagers are doing with IM. A Seattle Times piece this week, Messaging system is geared to youth by Kim Peterson, states that Microsoft's NetGen division is brewing up a system called Threedegrees, meant to appeal to the teenagery groups that swap spit and music files online.

Instead of supporting file transfers -- so-called file sharing -- which allows easy pirating of MP3 files and other digital artifacts, the system supports a "jukebox" where files can be transferred, and "played" for the group, but not downloaded.

But, of course, kids could transfer the files thorugh other means, right? But the intention is to create a new model of sharing experiences, socially, without having to duplicate copyrighted information. Not bad. Although Microsoft still has a bitrate problem -- the played music is only 64 kbps -- the idea has real promise. Its amazing what you can come up with when you actually interact with the users closely -- which is what NetGen is all about.

:: Stowe Boyd 2/19/2003 04:24:13 PM [link] ::
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