by Bill Ives
February 15, 2007 at 7:39 am
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0
Here is a take on the early adoption stages of a familiar technology. Perhaps you have already seen it given the speed of viral communication on the web. It is not completely inaccurate in spirit since it took almost 2000 years after text was created to come up with the concept of an index to promote random access, something we take for granted with this technology. It has also been claimed that these tools were not used silently until the middle ages. St. Augustine, for example, did not want to read after his fellow monks went to bed for fear of waking them up. If this is correct, the concept of silent reading took over 1500 years to evolve. Of course, the first text documents simply recorded the oral tradition – e.g.. Homer. It took a while to get to content specifically created with text in mind.
So it may take users a while to understand the creative possibilities that the paradigm shift that Enterprise 2.0 offers. Some of the best web 2.0 applications started with this in mind. For example, MySpace had a strategy to not have pre-conceived notions about how users wanted to interact with the site. When users started creating group profile pages around interests and associations, MySpace accepted this behavior where Friendster did not.
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Interesting point about MySpace Bill. That was pretty much what we did with out tools at the BBC. Keep it simple until you see hat people start to do with them.
Bill, Missed you at the San Diego conference but thanks for keeping us alert to the best of the web and interesting insights here starting with the video.
As for your MySpace observation. It seems to me the notion of managing for “emergence” to which Euan has alluded in describing their practice at the BBC, and that Andrew McAfee talks about in his ant colony post, is a REALLY hard mindset change for people and organizations to make as they strive to utilize social media.
http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee/index.php/faculty_amcafee_v3/the_mechanisms_of_online_emergence/
Thanks to both Euan and Jenny for your comments. Here is the main source for my MySpace comment. I should have linked to it. http://www.startup-review.com/blog/myspace-case-study-not-a-purely-viral-start.php It is an interesting site that has a number of web success cases. Letting the users set the requirements as always been a major success factor in enterprise KM implementations, at least the ones I know about. With rapid iternations in web 2.0, commercial web ventures can do the same thing. The failures in both cases are more likely to come from top down, here is what is good for you, efforts. It seems like common sense and the idea is usually on most best practices, but as Jenny said, it is not easy.
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