Finding the Value in …er More Social Computing Architecture Ponderings

I’ve often thought that one of the worst possible fates that could befall someone would be to know the truth about something with absolute clarity, but not be able to have anyone else see it.  I feel a little like this having spent the last couple of years saying social computing only makes sense in the context of a broader enterprise architecture only to have people finally really start talking about this after yet another microblogging solution got announced last week.

So let’s take a minute to talk about how all these various microblogging “…er” products can actually lead to business value.  Most of these products are designed to let users type in short text messages which get shown to other people who are “following” the writer.  Sometimes the messages contain links or files.  Sometimes the messages relate to a group and all group members see the message.  That’s it.  That’s pretty much what they do. 

Here’s the good news.  Many end users will get the concept.  And some people will really get into the concept and generate a lot of activity (These stats reported about Twitter show 10% of users create 86% of activity. http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/ )

Here’s the not so great news.  According to analysts who have surveyed a lot of companies who try these “…er” products, usage tends to die off if they aren’t integrated with the rest of the existing business processes.  You probably saw that amazing revelation coming, didn’t you?  The truth is that the people in your company already have plenty to do.  They didn’t come to work today saying, “Wow, I really have nothing to get done, and I think I’ll spend the whole day playing around with some new technology.”  (If they DO say this, you have a different kind of problem…)

So what does any of this have to do with architecture?

1. Microblogging/status updates are just one specific kind of user-generated event or action 
2. Users who are doing productive work create lots of events 
3. The real value in social computing comes from intelligently using this event data  
4. Your architecture needs to collect, store, radiate, display, collect feedback on, analyze, and understand the context of these events 

1)      Collecting events relies on a combination of “owning” a lot of places where events happen and providing an easy ways to access events from other locations.  In NewsGator Social Sites, we see all the activity happening in SharePoint and we provide feed, email and API endpoints to bring in events from other systems.

Storing the events is pretty self explanatory, but the architecture needs to be able to deal with large numbers of actions.

Displaying events covers not only interfaces in the social computing solution itself but APIs and clients for viewing from things like iPhones, Blackberries, desktop clients, email programs and IM solutions.  It also includes capabilities like filtering and interacting with the events.

The feedback with events that includes commenting or “liking” not only provides a valuable mechanism to allow a lightweight conversation, but also creates a logical mechanism for alerting users (i.e., your event has been commented on) or highlighting particular events (like you see in the default Facebook view).

While there’s no doubt that the actual lightweight text communication that the “…er” solutions enable has value amongst all the typical communication channels available in an enterprise (phone, email, IM, discussion forums, etc), the real value typically comes from doing deeper analysis on all the events.  If you truly want to understand patterns of behavior or truly discover expertise, than your architecture needs to capture a broad array of events and have a way to distill them into some more core concept like expertise. 

Context is the last critical architectural element.  Context includes concepts like security – i.e., is an event public or private to a particular audience?  But it also includes concepts like whether the event originated from an individual act or something done in the context of a group or community and having a clear definition of what the event was.  Context allows for both privacy and filtering.

All of this is not to say that microblogging is not a valuable capability.  We have greatly enhanced Social Sites in this area, and I can’t wait to let people start using all the cool new features next month.  But in terms of enterprise social computing architecture, the “…er” solutions are really just a small subset of the total events that need to be handled.  So in terms of getting value out of enterprise social computing, it’s not the “…er” part that matters – it’s the “…re” part – as in “architecture”.

If you’ve read this far, it’s probably because you’re one of those people who has already been saying social computing must be part of the overall architecture for enterprises.  Hopefully, this little blog post gives you the comfort that you’re not the only one who has that clarity of vision.