Mike Vizard and Steve Gillmor discuss Enterprise Twitter. Recorded on Tuesday, July 1, 2008.

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Steve Gillmor: Hi, this is Steve Gillmor. Welcome to the Gilmore Gang. The Gang today is Mike Vizard. Welcome, Mike.

Vizard: I’m a big gang. I’m going to rumble.

Gillmor: So what’s going on?

Vizard: What’s going on? In general, or just this week?

Gillmor: Well, right now is there anything interesting in the world of technology for you?

Vizard: From my perspective, it just feels like all these cloud computing initiatives are getting a little realer from a corporate point of view. You’re starting to see some services that are pretty robust and easy to use. So it just seems like I’m seeing a lot more weight behind cloud computing and a lot more open-mindedness on the side of IT people in terms of how they are going to use the cloud.

I’ll give you an example of just something that struck me today that I wrote a post about. But this morning I was at this Motorola event down in New York City down at the Harvard Club down there. They were talking about all the wonders of this new rugged mobile device.

And one of the things that just came up in conversation was how do you use a service like Twitter to drive mobile field applications? So the concept was pretty simple when you think about it.

You would have a bunch of people subscribe to Twitter. They could all be working for the same corporation. Every time they went out on a call or every time they did a delivery they just send either a smart phone to send back a message to each other and update each other through Twitter then not have to have any major corporate infrastructure to be built just to support that.

So when you see people at Motorola talking about Twitter it gives you a sense of hey, there is a little bit of a sea change happening here in terms of at least how some of the leading edge thinkers in corporate enterprise are starting to think about clouds in general.

Gillmor: We’ve got some people in the chat room, one of whom is over in some European country today. I’m not sure which one — Aron Michalski. I would bring him in. In fact, maybe in the future we’ll start to bring in some of the people that we see who are listening.

But the whole idea, the reason I mention Aron is that he is pretty strung out around Twitter and using it in pretty much any kind of mobile context because he’s always traveling. His job takes him on the road constantly.

It makes me wonder whether or not we are going to continue to be talking about this at this level of, “Gee, is Twitter going to be a robust enterprise application?” or whether we’ve already crossed over and are simply talking on a much more pragmatic level.

Vizard: Yeah, I think we are close to that tipping point. Even if Twitter goes down from time to time it’s still “free” and still easy to use. So I think people are going to take that path of least resistance that provides to get the task done and get the job done.

So I believe that people are probably already using it in their ad hoc communication for work. I think we are probably on the cusp of looking at it from a more organized perspective where it will become a departmental standard at the very least. Maybe over time, people will just say, “Yeah, send me a Twitter about that when you are ready to go.”

Whether or not that has the support from the back end CIO infrastructure with policies around it may not be relevant. I’m sure there will be security issues attached to it. But they are the same security issues that you see when people use Gmail or anything else outside the corporate environment.

Gillmor: Do you think people are using Gmail inside the corporate environment now?

Vizard: Yeah, I totally see that. I saw some survey last month. I think it was from one of the security companies. They asked people what they were using for applications.

Gmail and the collaborative applications were way up in the 50% range because they are not using it as their official standard. But they are using it for ad hoc collaboration. So there is a lot more use of Gmail applications in corporate America than most people realize or want to cotton on to at the moment.

Gillmor: You have been in this business a long time. So have I for that matter.

Vizard: You’ve been in it longer, man.

Gillmor: You can pull the age card if you like.

Vizard: [laughs]

Gillmor: The thing with which I am constantly struck is the issue of so-called products. We talked about this yesterday and got into an argument with Dana Gardner. He hung up on me.

So I guess it’s somewhat volatile to consider that there is no such thing as a product anymore in the Internet world. It’s really a bunch of features that conspire together or are orchestrated together into an environment that people use.

It’s sort of halfway between — I think it’s the revenge of Windows, which inexorably sucked up products or features and loaded them into the operating system until no company could survive against that Microsoft onslaught.

I think you’re in a new generation with Web apps, which is doing the same thing. I don’t see any products on my desktop. I see a bunch of capabilities.

Vizard: And sets of services. I think that even the vendors want it to go that route and users will go with them as well for the following points.

From a vendor perspective, loading everything up and just dump it out there in these big massive packages that get updated once every three years creates a logistical nightmare and problem where users don’t see all the features and don’t use all the features because it shows up in a mass quantity of crap.

Then the second end of this equation though comes down to I’m really subscribing to something now with software. So really when new features come out I want them to be delivered in an iterative kind of way where I can consume them and not get lost in the masses.

The vendors also like the idea that I’m more engaged with the product as a result, from the customer’s point of view. It’s part of my working life and processes. I will adjust my business processes anymore evolutionary way than try and do some radical shift in a three-year upgrade cycle.

So I think it’s just good for everybody. So I don’t think there is a need for products. This of course creates a problem for the marketing folks because a product release is the “event.” It is a big part of their marketing exercise. Then they have to rethink how they are going to go have a “conversation” with the end customer if there is no point of release date thing to kind of focus everybody’s attention on.

So they are going to have to figure out how to make the marketing storyline, continuous with the streaming of the code that people are upgrading in an iterative fashion. Does that make sense?

Gillmor: Yeah, but there is still the analog to a product rollout. For example, there was this product that launched today. I think it’s called “GNip” or “Nip”. I’m not sure how you pronounce it.

It’s basically a ping server for Twitter, masquerading as a separate product, which incorporates a bunch of different services and takes the load off of their being — broadcast it, if you will, to their subscribers by alerting the subscribers when there is new information.

As opposed to everybody coming in and making API calls to these various servers there is one company that is going to provide a Grand Central Station in the middle. This may be reminiscent of course to some of the BtoB plays in the enterprise messaging space off a few years ago.

So this was announced. I believe Dave Weiner wrote a post yesterday broadly hinting about some sort of abstract idea of a technology. Of course today, surprise, surprise, here’s the announcement.

TechCrunch had it. RewriteWeb had it. A bunch of different sites had it. It’s a classic kind of marketing game.

Vizard: But is it, in your mind are you going to see that as a separate product when you go to use it or is it now just an extension of Twitter, but you don’t really care where it came from?

Gillmor: Well, I think that’s the rub is that most people are actually — whether they bury it way down or put it in the lead, this is infrastructure for Twitter.

Vizard: So do you think there will be a lot more of this type of infrastructure for Twitter and that’s how we will “shore up’ Twitter, with a lot of third-party services that were designed to potentially buttress it?

Gillmor: Well, we’ve got this thing with FriendFeed. Have you played around with that yet?

Vizard: I haven’t really had a chance to go look at FriendFeed all that closely although I’ve been following much of the conversation.

Gillmor: Right. So FriendFeed has been drafting off of Twitter, not in terms of its fundamental concepts but in terms of its — as Twitter goes down, FriendFeed has become a rallying point for the discussion and eventually people migrate away from capped weather. I don’t think a lot of people are going to be successful in migrating away from Twitter.

But it does create this new service that people start to focus on. There is more and more activity there. They start to have the same kinds of scaling issues that Twitter has and then we start all over again.

So I don’t think there is going to be a competitive service to “GNip” necessarily except for some small vendors like Microsoft and Google.

Vizard: So does my service need a service so that when I send a message it will go both to FriendFeed and to Twitter?

Gillmor: Yeah, that’s exactly what is going to happen. But the point that we are sort of debating here is, if there is a debate — is what is the definition of a product, and whether or not the resonating event, such as the announcement has been reduced to microseconds.

This thing was announced at 9:00 Pacific. That was two hours ago. Already I don’t think anybody cares.

Vizard: It’s also extended with the beta, right? So you get a lot of these products now and I think Google started this whole exercise most. Maybe Microsoft started it before them.

But the beta period was so long. So many people are using the beta. So what’s the point of the actual “announcement”? Then beta was so virally distributed that there was no event. It just kind of rolled.

Gillmor: Right. But this isn’t a consumer facing announcement. This is a service facing service.

Vizard: Same thing with corporate though or any types of applications. Take Microsoft’s virtualization stuff, which — tada — went to manufacturing earlier this week, which means it will officially ship in about 30 to 45 days I would say.

Big deal. We have been talking about virtualization for Microsoft every day now for the last year. So what’s the point of the product per se? Is it a product or is it a feature of the OS anyway?

Gillmor: So what is your take on the aftermath of Gates retiring? Is this going to resonate? What’s going on in the mainstream publishing world, as far as that event?

Vizard: I think the mainstream world used it as an “event” to do a retrospective. The coverage should have been more forward-looking about what does it mean to Microsoft and the future.

But I don’t think a lot of people have a good handle on that yet. I’m not sure Microsoft has a good handle on that. So everybody focused on the last 20 years, 25 years of Bill. You saw a lot of the stories were just a rehash of this, a rehash of that. It was like reading the end of year New Year’s Eve coverage telling me what happened in 2007.

It was like I saw all these stories. Not one of them had a particularly great insight. Not any of them had any additional info. So it was kind of like we were just using it as a — I guess they felt obliged to write something.

I’m sure he’s a great contributor. But a day later is anything different? I don’t think so.

Gillmor: So what exactly, if you were addressing a journalism class, what exactly would you be telling people is the reason you are in the technology business and why you think that it’s something that they might want to pursue as an interest?

Vizard: Well, it’s the pace of change in this space. If you like coverage of technology and you like business, that’s nice. But the technology space in general has a pace and a shift in the landscape that’s dynamic.

So if you’re a journalist you want to be where the rate of change is. That rate of change that’s in the technology space has all kinds of downstream effects on all kinds of different businesses and consumers. So it really is a touchpoint for not just what happens inside a particular technology space, but more importantly how that technology gets used to transform something.

So you are always at the 50 yard line of change. That’s the best seat in the house for a journalist.

Gillmor: All right. But you have been approaching Twitter with a nuanced eye. Is this giving you any kind of sense of where the network is going in terms of these kinds of services?

Vizard: Yeah, you’ll see a much broader array of these types of services as you go forward. Whether or not it’s an identity management service or whether it’s going to be any type of new phone company-like service for a unified communication setup, more and more things, more and more “services” that used to be features of applications are going into that cloud.

I think there is a — we are probably over the tipping point in terms of when people are accepting the usage of that. But I think at some point we are going to wake up in the next six months and look back and go, “Hey, something significant really did happen in the middle of 2008. It kind of changed the way we think about using technology.”

Gillmor: But are we going to have to do what I do most of the time, which is just sit here and stare at my screen and wait for the information, or is it going to be somehow orchestrated in a way that is going to be useful to me in terms of time?

It’s great when something happens and you respond to it, assuming the track is up and running and we actually have some services that work. It’s fantastic when you are interacted with it. But what about the rest of the time? How do you get anything else done? Or is there anything else to get done?

Vizard: Well, I think we all have our day jobs and we all still need to get all those done.

Gillmor: But, I mean is this a day job? Isn’t this the new day job?

Vizard: Well, I don’t think you get paid for just reading. You have to produce something. If you are outside of journalism, you still have to do your job in manufacturing or marketing or wherever you are to get paid. So I don’t think those people can sit around and watch Twitter all day and just wait for inputs.

But I do think that services will get smarter. And I think that there is a role still for personalization either on my client or in the cloud somewhere that’s going to help me make sense of all these services and give them some classification, some prioritization.

So that, who knows, maybe it will be like my phone. When it rings I can tell who it is by the ring. I’ll be able to say based on the priority that this message has or some kind of audio signal or whatever it might be that something important has happened that’s worth interrupting my current task versus something that’s just of interest to me that I will look at later.

Gillmor: So, this is where I see FriendFeed currently offering the ability to begin to understand who these people are. In other words, building up enough, what I call gestures to be able to suggest the interest on the part of me, my console or an affinity group made up of me and people with whom I have similar interests.

How that person plays into that environment, in other words, the credibility of the authority or the reputation or just the plain virality and interest of that person or those ideas.

Vizard: And you will be able to assign priorities as opposed to just waiting for the service to assign that to you.

Gillmor: Right. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be explicit gestures. It can be implicit ones, where they are built up over the number of times that you act, that you click on somebody’s information stream for example. That would build up votes if you will.

Vizard: Then maybe over time, search will get a lot smarter and be able to say, “There is a message that has come in. It’s not from a source that you have made any signal to but a quick search of that document shows that it’s very close to a lot of other documents that you have spent a fair amount of time with.”

So maybe that will push it up the alert stack so my communications do not always get limited to the “friends” that I have. I can still have an opportunity for what I like to call “accidental learning.”

Gillmor: Right.

Vizard: Because somebody sent me something.

Gillmor: Right. Discoverability of course. I think however that because of these speed of this and because of the fact that it is a real-time network of people that people are a higher order bid, if you will in terms of aggregating those discoverability signals from documents or from the information itself.

We have to have some sort of way of being able to trust somebody. I don’t mean them stealing something from you but more that you trust whatever it is that they are communicating has a certain level of interest to you that pushes them up the priority stack.

Vizard: Right. I was reading this morning. I finally got around to reading Nick Carter’s thing in the “Atlantic” about “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” I guess he can’t focus on reading long books and long articles.

I think Google is making us stupid but not for the same issues that he is pointing out. I’m just pointing out that the search vehicle is kind of blunt and everybody games the results so that when you go searching for something you kind of get a limited look at what is actually totally out there.

It’s too hard to decipher it. Then I worry with Twitter we will have the same construct happening with communications where it will be just limited to a subset of people who happen to be extremely verbose on Twitter. But then I can’t sort through the signal to noise ratio to find the real values.

Gillmor: Well, again I think that this is where a FriendFeed starts to make an impact, not necessarily as a separate service but as a cooperating service. The idea that FriendFeed has these so-called extended conversations, or sometimes I call FriendFeed “ex-FriendFeed” because you see this bubbling up of resentment and anger and confusion about stuff, which Twitter to some extent masks because of its brief quality.

Vizard: Right.

Gillmor: It is a little more personal. If you took that map and applied it not necessarily to FriendFeed but back to the Twitter stream I think it would have some interesting results.

Vizard: Maybe FriendFeed becomes Twitter helper.

Gillmor: I think it is. That is how we are using it right now as we try and wait for Twitter to restore its health. At the same time maybe — for example yesterday FriendFeed launched an iPhone version of the product. So it’s much more usable, particularly for people of my august age, who can’t see the small font of the regular website.

It has had a dramatic effect just in the 10 minutes or so that I have used it, which is that it begins to focus the information that I am getting from Twitter and puts it on a level playing field with the information I am getting from Twitter.

Did I say FriendFeed? That’s what I’m talking about. And Twitter is what it looks like now more.

So what happens is that if you were to mesh those two services together it would be difficult to tell the difference between them. Those differences would be reported by each of the services. That recording or those characteristics, that behavior would tend to provide essentially two levers in terms of a console that you could tune up or down.

We’re starting to see that with a number of individual services, which allow you to basically come in and suggest, “OK, I’m interested in this person. I’m not interested in that person.” and so on.

In the chat room, Aron Michalski is suggesting that we have something called Summize, which is a product which has been helping bridge the gap between where we are without Trac on Twitter.

You have not been using Trac yet have you?

Vizard: Not in a hard-core way.

Gillmor: Because it has been down. But how do you use Twitter?

Vizard: I’m tracking, the last time I checked about, oh, I don’t know about 16, 19 people.

Gillmor: But you are using it through the web client?

Vizard: Yeah.

Gillmor: OK. So there are several types of clients. The one on which we all started to focus was through Gmail, and Gchat so that it was a real-time stream. Now that is the part of Twitter that went down about a month ago and hasn’t come back yet because it is probably the most complex set of uses of the entire system and therefore puts tremendous spikes into the system. That would be my amateur guess as to why they haven’t been able to bring it back.

Vizard: I can still find value in Trac without that.

Gillmor: Well, it’s essentially search. And it search is what Summize does. It allows you to search on your own name or on the name of somebody in whom you’re interested. So it’s kind of like a look back into history.

The interesting thing about what FriendFeed is now offering this capability is a similar kind of search. Since they both have or will have API access into these types of services, it becomes a relatively simple thing to orchestrate the two together into a single feed of information.

Vizard: At some point, if the APIs are open wouldn’t just a standard Google search through that API work just fine?

Gillmor: Yeah. I mean Google has no magic dust here. Everything that’s on Twitter and that’s being admitted through RSS or over the web page is eventually trackable by Google. There is no specific secret sauce that they have.

It would be much easier for the receiver to do the search directly on the API of the surface that you are trying to orchestrate. So I don’t know how Google plays into this at this point. Maybe somebody in the chat room might suggest.

Vizard: I am thinking about this and I wonder about how I guess my life is structured. So there is going to be Twitter and I may have, let’s say I’ve got my job. Then I have professional associations. And I’ve got friends. And I’ve got family.

Do I really want to go through one console to manage all that? Or would I rather have some bifurcated console that lets me view those four windows separately because that’s how I manage my relationships.

So wouldn’t I want a Twitter console that reflects my “musical” reality as opposed to just one massive set to stream that seems to be coming through?

Gillmor: Yeah. I think the answer is yes. Here is why.

The second view, the more bifurcated view, that’s what I would call the multi-lever approach. Basically, you can skip from one to the other. If you look at the information screen from Reuters or Bloomberg or whatever, you see that you can jump from a wide view, which incorporates everything, to close-ups of specific things.

Even at that level of granularity, which isn’t all that significant the actual gestures that you make to choose between those services are also really valuable indications of what it is that you are interested in.

So after a period of time, it’s my belief that the information that you get from looking at multiple views will stitch together a single view that has the largest percentage of that kind of information.

Vizard: All right. So what needs to happen to get to those expanded views, and then some hierarchical view on top of the expanded views?

Gillmor: All right. Well we are talking at this lifestyle level, which I think is exactly appropriate. I think what we are doing is we are coming to grips with the fact that this technology is going to be a significant part of our daily life.

Vizard: Yeah, I think we are past the “whether Twitter matters” conversation. I think that we passed that two months ago, but everybody kept having it.

Gillmor: Yeah. And will continue to have it because Twitter is trying to maintain a lock on their architecture and their cloud so that they can monetize this at the end of the day. So these people are not going to let go of this wave of momentum.

Vizard: Right. But there will be this alternative FriendFeed universe. There will probably be multiple alternatives down the road.

Gillmor: This is the song that everybody keeps singing. But I really don’t think that’s true. I think FriendFeed is, if you look at it from just a little bit higher than the details, I’m suggesting we have three views here.

One is our personal view of, “OK, what are we going to do? Which service or feature am I going to use that’s most successfully going to solve all my problems?”

Then there is the second view, which goes up a little bit, which is, “Gee, I’m spending a lot of time here. This thing is down. This one is up. How do I pull these things together so that I can get the best features of all of those services that I’m aware of?”

Then above that, is the shakeout of these services where they combine and align on an economic level, to create these uber-feature service products — god help us — that people can actually sign on to. That’s when you see the sort of aggregation of these things into the major players’ architectures.

Vizard: I guess the one thing I would like is a one-click hovering track button capability so that when I finally did notice somebody’s conversation was interesting usually it’s like the third element of that conversation. I’d like to be able to just, with one-click kind of have it all pop up to me in one single thread that I can understand what the whole conversation is about instantly.

Versus I find myself having to try to backtrack my way through a couple of posts to find out what this guy is on about.

Gillmor: Yeah. But multiply that by 30 people.

Vizard: Yeah. I know.

Gillmor: Which have 30 kinds of pictures about what they are interested in, sort of like an affinity group that emerges that exists. But you somehow surface through some sort of swarming characteristics. Those kinds of signals are already evident in the way that these people are using this stuff.

So if the overall product was sensitive to that exact kind of drill down, about which you are talking and was able to surface that for and market the fact that, “Oh, we are more interesting, a higher percentage of the time. You really should acquire this service because…” etcetera.

Isn’t that what Twitter did to RSS in general, which was to basically suck up the core, the richest, most interactive, most real-time signals about what’s going on and basically get there ahead of everybody else, including Google Reader, et cetera?

There has been a real falloff in terms of Google Reader usage by this early adopter crowd that’s commensurate with Twitter working. As Twitter stopped working, people started going back and looking at Google Reader again with one eye on the door, just waiting for Twitter to come back up so that they could go back to doing it more efficiently.

Vizard: Yeah. Twitter is kind of like the telegraph of the modern age here where I am sending you a short little notice telling you that something’s happening. And if you want to read the RSS/Web-based long form of it, be my guest.

But I don’t know. I don’t have to send you the whole thing. You don’t have to spend your time sorting through the elegance of a post to figure out whether you care about it or not. You have kind of made that decision by Twitter and then you are committed or not committed accordingly.

Gillmor: Right. So, if you were to wrap up that statement that you just made and then as Aaron Mikulski is suggesting, if the service is robust and reliable, more people will use it, enterprise might use it.

I don’t think that they might. I think that they must use it.

Vizard: Yeah. I think IM kind of took the whole collaboration equation out of the enterprise bag as it were. The days when enterprises were dictating what thou shalt use for an application have fallen off a little bit.

They have fallen off dramatically because you go and walk around. You see people using Google apps. You see people using Google IM. And yeah, we’ve got policies that say don’t do that but at the end of the day people are working on it their personal machines and they are working from home.

So this stuff is out there. And it’s already in the enterprise. So the question now becomes A) how do we use it to drive productivity, because that is the number one reason we have technology. And then 2) is how do we do that in a way that we can educate people not to be stupid with it and put wholly sensitive data out there but still get the leverage of having a relatively easy to use, easy to set up framework for collaboration?

Gillmor: So I would suggest that there are enterprises already using this.

Vizard: Yeah, totally. I know. I have seen them.

Gillmor: Yeah. Yeah.

Vizard: Some of them are using it with a conscience policy or corporate acknowledgment. I think that’s a low number. But I think within those corporations there are large numbers of people who are using it policy statements be damned.

Gillmor: So I think we are in agreement then that there are people in the enterprise who are already using this at a significantly intense level.

Vizard: Yeah, absolutely.

Gillmor: OK. So at what point does the noise go away about how this is not robust enough? It’s like saying the LIE is not robust enough because there are all these potholes there. Yeah, but in fact, there is no other way to get from here to there.

Vizard: Right. The next closest thing that people have is, “Let me set up a SharePoint portal and I’ll get in line for IT to build that out for me. Sometime in the next four months, we might have that capability. But by the way, we can’t really communicate in real time and once I stick a file in SharePoint nobody can file it anyway.” So other than that, it’s great.

Gillmor: Right. And in the meantime, the company goes out of business because people who are using swarm technologies are getting the job and the work and the money.

Vizard: Yeah, well there becomes a perception of fewer people are doing more, faster than somebody with a larger infrastructure and theoretically more money.

I mean, I don’t think they would go out of business but they start to see an impact on productivity per employee and revenue per employee for sure.

Gillmor: So maybe the enterprise solution to understanding Twitter is to develop tools to be able to measure productivity that take into account the subterranean usage of these types of technologies.

Vizard: Yeah, I don’t think that’ll happen anytime soon. I don’t think we have the tools to measure the productivity of the stuff that’s above the subterranean level.

Both those tools may not be worth the time and effort. I think right now we are kind of in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” kind of state as it relates to a lot of these Web services that are out there. People are getting things done.

We are going to have fewer people as the population ages. IT is not looking to have a big fight over this. There will be a cottage industry around data loss prevention and encryption around key digital assets that prevent them from going out on these types of protocols or whatever.

But at the end of the day, people are going to say, “I’ve got X to do. I’ve got to get it done by this date and I need all the help I can get.”

Gillmor: And they will just pick up their 3TI funds and just do it anyway, if they try and wall it off.

Vizard: Yeah, and if you do successfully wall it off, what are they going to do? They are going to say, “You know what? I think I’ll go work for a company that makes my life easier and be able to do my job.”

Gillmor: All right. Well in the spirit of time sensitivity, I’m going to call this on account of insight. I want to thank Mike Vizard and everybody in the chat room. It was a really interesting discussion, which you can see if you go to ustream.tv/channel/newsgang-live.

Thanks to Joey Schuman for the video. And thanks to everybody who showed up, especially those that didn’t. We’ll see you again tomorrow. This has been The Gilmore Gang. Bye-bye.

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