2009 November 11 (Week 46: Wednesday) · Leave a Comment
So Twitter and LinkedIn are interconnecting. What is the background to this and where is it leading?
Twitter
Twitter seems to have caught many people’s mindshare because it is fundamentally different from most other services; its asymmetric “follower” relationship is more complex and flexible than simple connections on LinkedIn or friends on Facebook. Other services are now following(!).
Personal fun is not the whole storey; some major businesses are using Twitter for customer service. Dell, BT, and PayPal have all been reported to be benefitting from its use. And let’s not forget that the current President of the US is unlikely to have been elected without his use of social media.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn began as a fairly straightforward and solid service for keeping track of colleagues. As LinkedIn is used mainly by people for professional purposes, the relationship with Twitter is particularly interesting and potentially complementary.
Collaboration
This partnership may be the first significant example of collaborative connection between social networking/media services.
In the end, it is probable that they will all need to take part in some form of open interconnection or they will be isolated from the mainstream.
Future directions
Today’s social media feels like the early days of email when people were on CompuServe or AOL or some other “walled garden” system and only communicated with others on the same service. Eventually, that situation dissolved into general purpose internet email, as the commodity aspect of each service’s communication became subsumed into a layer accessible to all.
Management of addresses is the usual constraint on its rate of adoption.
These are interesting times for individual and organizational communication!
Categories: modelling · social media · social networking · software
2009 October 28 (Week 44: Wednesday) · 5 Comments
Shift of emphasis
After a long drawn-out build-up, lasting decades, it feels to me that we are finally tipping over into a new era of models for systems. Whether thinking about communities of people, about business processes or about social networks, the shift of emphasis is at last now leaning away from “things” and towards the “relationships” between those things.
It is tempting to say: “It’s about relationships, stupid!” (pace James Carville).
Passed the midpoint
Maybe this is because the characteristics of those relationships have been so simple and/or similar that there was not a lot to say about them.But now we are seeing a much richer set of types of “relationship”, or will the terminology be “link”, do you not sense that the transfer in mindshare has passed the mid-point?
Needless to say, there is great deal to understand about this move.
Stay tuned!
Categories: Uncategorized
2009 October 8 (Week 41: Thursday) · Leave a Comment
As a follower of GTD, I am fortunate to receive many things, including the Productive Living newsletter. This particular edition included some “food for thought” about decision making, which I found extremely nutritious!
Information and accuracy
It brought to mind two things that I have often thought, and perhaps there is a link between them. Keep reading →
Categories: aviation · learning · personal management · training
Tagged: GTD
2009 June 10 (Week 24: Wednesday) · Leave a Comment
Lately, I have been thinking about the adoption of technologies by organizations.
Fred Wilson’s blog post raised related issues for consumers and stimulated a lively discussion about what characteristics are important to adoption. My interest is similar for organizations, but is more related to the channels of communication used for this purpose then in the characteristics which determine selection. Keep reading →
Categories: learning
2009 June 4 (Week 23: Thursday) · Leave a Comment
My interest in learning, and in the ways in which we can enable it, makes conversations like this really interesting.
This is my (very rapidly composed) take on it. I write it here because my intended comment in that conversation grew in size so fast that, before I could get it out, it seemed to have become too large for a comment; that, also says something about the medium/channel communication!
So here goes … Keep reading →
Categories: learning · modelling · software
2009 May 16 (Week 20: Saturday) · Leave a Comment
As a fan of David Allen’s GTD for more than 3 years, I am always interested in his observations and explanations, especially when they pop up in new places.
So, for a UKite, it is particularly interesting that David has published Be creative amid chaos in Wired UK. While my personal application of the GTD approach continues to be variable and, often, too tentative, it forms the basis for much of my thinking and implementation of what I do. Keep reading →
Categories: personal management
2009 April 2 (Week 14: Thursday) · Leave a Comment
“That makes no sense!” … ”How can that possibly work?” … “There is no way that I am trying that!
Are these the kinds of comments you have heard from beginners at … well anything that they consider “counter-intuitive”? Keep reading →
Categories: aviation · children · learning · modelling · training
2009 March 24 (Week 13: Tuesday) · Leave a Comment
Tonight, I watched most of the UK Channel 4 Dispatches TV program “Confessions of a Nurse”. The web site for the program is here and it can be expected to be available to view on their “Catch Up” service before too long. Keep reading →
Categories: Uncategorized
2009 February 11 (Week 07: Wednesday) · Leave a Comment
O’Reilly are publishing a new book “97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know”. This caught my attention for a variety of reasons. One is an interest in trying to get to the bottom of what the issues commonly labelled as “software architecture” are really all about! Another reason is that there are a couple of contributions from Kevlin Henney, with whom I have worked and who frequently comes up with a “different take” on any situation. Keep reading →
Categories: modelling · software
2009 January 19 (Week 04: Monday) · Leave a Comment
Among the reactions to the article on sequences of learning is a post from Brett McLaughlin on the O’Reilly Radar blog, that poses questions about the design of the sequence.
Learning is important to us all in so many ways; so learning (yup!) more about learning seems to be particularly important! However there are a considerable range of contexts in which learning occurs; and sometimes this causes the generic lessons to be more difficult to uncover. Keep reading →
Categories: learning · modelling · research · training
