A Matter Of Degree

Boston Area Events This Week: SharePoint, Azure, Mobile, Big Data!

There's a lot going on this week in the Boston area tech scene, and I wanted to highlight a few of the upcoming events:

Monday, 12/12/11 - The Boston Area SharePoint User Group will meet at a rescheduled time.  Richard Harbridge will present "Is Your SharePoint Really Healthy? What’s The Right Prescription?" at 6 pm.

Tuesday, 12/13/11 - Five of my colleagues at BlueMetal Architects will present on Using Windows Azure to extend your applications to Mobile devices.  The evening starts at 5:30 pm at the NERD Center in Cambridge; the BlueMetal sessions start at 7 pm. 

Thursday, 12/15/11 - the Boston SharePoint Salon will tackle the topic of Big Data - at Tico, on 222 Berkeley St. Boston, from 7 - 9:30 pm. 

And if you're tired of Boston...

Friday, 12/16/11 - this is the last day to save $450 on registration for SPTechCon San Francisco in February, and if you use discount code VANBUREN, you'll receive an additional $200 off, for a total discount of $650. Conference information here.  I'll be presenting in three sessions: one on SharePoint Maturity, one with Derek Weeks on Business Process Maturity, and one with Chris McNulty on Data Visualizations in SharePoint. 

Balance Your Media Diet, or Who Has Nine Hours For This Stuff?

Over the weekend I was looking at Pam Dyer's "65 Terrific Social Media InfoGraphics."  There's a lot of thought-provoking material here and I highly recommend checking it out. 

There was one infographic in particular that I couldn't get off my mind - it stayed with me for a few days until finally I had to try to exorcise it with this post.  It's "Balance Your Media Diet," about halfway down the page of the full post.

I'm totally behind the graphic's base concept - based on the familiar Food / Nutrition Pyramid, it's simple and spare, nicely designed, and I love the idea of having a Recommended Daily Allowance around all the different kinds of media we're consuming/producing every day (although I realize this infographic represents the reported average rather than a recommendation).  (Original below - click to enlarge.)

 
 

However - NINE HOURS PER DAY?  Who is this person?  Does he outsource a lot of tasks like housecleaning, cooking, and lawn care?  Does he have kids?  (Even half a kid?)  Does he work from home?  Or if he goes to an office every day, does he have his monitor turned away from the entrance to his cube?

I couldn't resist the urge to update this infographic for my demographic, based on what I know of my friends' and colleagues' usage of current media options as well as my own.  Below please find a version specifically tailored to Thirtysomething Working Parent in the Northeastern United States (again, click to enlarge):

 

If I'd had the time and artistic ability I would have liked to represent the individual with a female rather than a male.  Note the "lack of time" theme reinforced in that last sentence.  Note also, all the sneaking.   That would be an interesting dimension I'd like to overlay on this graphic - overt vs. covert usage, as well as willing vs. unwilling usage (I'm thinking here of the TV monitor over the gas pump that blasts the "news" while you fuel up). 

Just needed to get this out of my system - thanks for reading, and please feel free to drop a comment about your own media usage - does it reflect the original pyramid?  Mine?  Something different?

 

Microplaza - a tool to filter your consumption of Twitter content

I've been trying out Microplaza - a site that displays links from Twitter.  My contacts tweet a lot of URLs to good content, and now I can see just these link-tweets, sortable by time and popularity.  The neat thing is that when one of my contacts posts a link, I get to see all the other folks who posted it too, which gives a larger sense of who's thinking about what.

At this point you need an invitation to try the service.  To get one, follow microplaza on Twitter, or ask me - I have 5 invites to give out. 

See the TechCrunch article that turned me on to the product here.

Software as a Service, and Surprises

Yesterday morning as I was getting ready to leave for work, my husband came into the kitchen, iPhone in hand, and said to me, "Updater!" 

"Huh?"

"So many updates - what are you doing?" 

All he knew was that overnight, "something changed," and now he was seeing updates he'd never seen before - activity from my Delicious, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, and Flickr accounts, as well as posts to this blog.  Turns out he was talking about the New Facebook, though he didn't know it.  I hadn't changed my level of activity, or considered any of this activity to be a secret, but when it was aggregated in one place and switched on overnight, the sheer volume of it was shocking to him.  That morning, the phrase "web 2.0" was introduced in our household, spawning a dialogue about the demise of face-to-face interaction and local community (his angle) and the human drive toward (and tremendous advantages to be reaped from) sharing and learning through networks (mine).

The destruction/evolution of our society aside, this conversation seemed significant to me because it was such a powerful example of the way the software-as-a-service model which we're adopting more and more can deliver some pretty disruptive punches. 

The online apps we use all the time release updates often with no warning; we might wake up to a different interface than we used the night before, or an unwanted new feature (the Twitter "Hot Political Topics" bar, anyone?), or more radical changes if the app went from beta to the next numbered version.  For the developers, it's all about improvement; but for human end-users, change usually isn't comfortable. 

That's one thing if the agreement is between an individual and a provider, and the service is free.  At the enterprise level, it's another. The upsides and downsides of SaaS are much discussed, but mostly the discussion centers around economics, flexibility/scalability, and security.  I haven't found a lot of consideration given to the need many user communities have for communication, marketing, training, and overall hand-holding as software evolves, and how likely (or unlikely) the SaaS providers are to handle this need. 

Do you have a Software-as-a-service story to share on this subject?  I'd love to hear it.

Props to my colleague Mike G. for planting the seed that grew into this post.

Mesh - for when the word "web" is already taken

A client turned me on to Live Mesh today - a Microsoft product which promises to "put you at the center of your digital world, seamlessly connecting you to the people, devices, programs, and information you care about—wherever you happen to be."  Upshot: you add the devices you use (computers, mobile devices), add files, and then you can access those files from any of the devices. 

 

It's designed for collaboration (you can share a folder with others, similar to MS Groove or to the now-defunct Tubes), and as with Windows Live Spaces, you'll see updates about what has recently changed within your mesh.   Unlike Windows Live Spaces, you can't post a public file for consumption by anonymous end-users; it's an invite-only model.

It's still in Tech Preview, which means the feature set is not, ehm, complete:

   

Also, mobile devices can't be added yet.  When they can, things should get interesting!

More Information:

LiveMesh Team Blog

xobni - five minutes and I was hooked

I learned about xobni from a colleague last week, and downloaded it today.  Xobni ('inbox" backwards) bills itself as "the Outlook plug-in that saves you time finding email conversations, contacts and attachments" and / or "a more socially aware email environment."  I would prefer to describe it as "the free Outlook tool with addictive metrics."  Once it started analyzing, showing me, for example, who among my contacts is quickest to respond to me, I was fascinated.  Then when it gave me the option to send said contacts their stats, I was hooked. 

The design is bright and appealing (maybe a little too appealing - compared to the bland light-blue-and-white Outlook color scheme its orange, black and purple tones make it difficult to look away or ignore the pane) and I found it user-friendly and intuitive.  After eight hours I'm thinking of my correspondents in terms of their xobni rank ("Yeah, he's my number three") and trying to figure out imbalances ("Why am I sending her two emails for every one she sends me?").  It interfaces with LinkedIn.  It bubbles-up attachments.  It threads conversations.  It hasn't broken anything on my pc, although the comments on this post about xobni's business model indicate that it may cause problems with FireFox.  For my setup, there is no downside and a tremendous upside.

I would rave more, but I've got to go reply to an email from my #1.

Twitter as Headline News

I just had an insight about why Twitter is good.

Another friend of mine just started blogging, and as I subscribed to her blog in my blog reader, I was dismayed at the prospect of adding one more stream of information to the pile that I already don't have enough time to post comments on, or even read.  I'm glad that we all have the means to publish our journals, our photos, our videos, but my ability to keep up with it all won't scale.  I can't even find the time to read the national news most days.

But I do read headlines.  And if I could get a daily digest of my friends' and colleagues' lives and insights, on a single page, 140 characters at a whack, I would read that religiously. 

It shouldn't be an aggregate of their recently-published blog or photo titles; that wouldn't be the same thing.  I don't want to read text that describes or refers to other content.  I want exactly what Twitter asks for - "what are you doing?"   

FriendFeed gets close, and I like the image thumbnails, but all the different kinds of information in one pile slows me down - e.g. I don't want to mentally filter out everyone's del.icio.us links while I'm looking for the meatier stuff.

I never thought I'd be advocating a Max-Headroom-style blipvert in the place of real content, yet here I am.  I can't keep up with unlimited information.  Sign on to Twitter and help me out?

Excellent free file sync tool for Windows, from Microsoft

Today I was looking for a file synchronization tool for my PC and found SyncToy, a free tool from Microsoft.  The user interface is clean and attractive, and the tool is really easy to use.  I tested a sync from my laptop to a LaCie external hard drive, and was very pleased with the results.  I'm a little surprised they didn't call it SyncPoint, but no complaints!

New Web 2.0 Visual Arts Site - Pixish

Just launched - Pixish, a site where people who need creative work and people who produce it can find each other.  I like the concept, but will they be able to get enough designers & other commercial folks to come here instead of scouring Flickr for images to use?

 

The beginning of the end of Flickr?

Enden er nær!, originally uploaded by le petit danois.

Much commotion and protest on Flickr over Microsoft's takeover bid of Yahoo. Link to Wired article... I have no opinion yet although I did join the "MICROSOFT: KEEP YOUR EVlL GRUBBY HANDS OFF OF OUR FLICKR" group to which I was invited over the weekend...