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Crumbs, I wasn’t expecting this. I mentioned in my last post about my misgivings regarding the practical design and usability issues around Google Wave beta. But the last thing I was expecting – at least so soon after birth – was ‘calling it a day’. This points to the fact that Google’s team has probably known for sometime that the basic framework was relatively unusable – and perhaps misconceived from the beginning

Anyway, you wont find me knocking them for trying out innovations like this in public – then also calling it a day in public. That’s how such a powerful global corporate presence should do it in the 21^st century. Think of ‘concept cars’ – they never made it to the road but many innovations therein found their way into mass production vehicles that did.

So well done Google for thinking of it, trying it out, and stopping it. Onto the next WOW idea please!

For months and months colleagues in the new media industry have been banging on about the latest BIG NEW THING just round the corner waiting to pounce and take over our collective consciousness (Twitter was the last one remember). This time it is Google Wave. This was previewed last year in a presentation now famous in Geekdom by the incredibly gifted development team also responsible for no less than Google Maps!

Google call it a ‘personal communication and collaboration tool’. A sort of mix of Facebook, Twitter, Email and Google docs, but with most of the action happening in real-time. Imagine seeing people’s tweets, emails and updates as they write and then being able to join in. (This takes time to explain so if you are interested here is one of the better talk-throughs).

Well its not quite here yet, the beta is not due until later this year. Yet there is already considerable polorisation of opinions about its value, ranging from a ‘this is the future’ Twitter-Killer ready to replace your email through to an ‘expression of the very worst that the social web has to offer’.

At present only a select few are testing Wave and most of these are computer technicians. I know quite a few of these and their comments tend to be quite similar, “I am finding it all very complex to use - but when I get my head around it I think it will be awesome. However the flow of information can be overwhelming”.

Now that quote is from a very talented technical director for a media company. I see him most days immersed in a wall of green code - you know, one of those guys in Hollywood movies that switch off power-stations from their laptops. This is the crux of the problem I have with the Wave - if HE of all people finds it complicated and overwhelming, then heaven help the rest of us!

A core foundation stone of Web 2.0 is that the tools are comparatively easy for ordinary digital consumers to learn and manage information - RSS , easy to use widgets, simple task flows. This platform shows a great deal of promise - and Google do say that it is definitely a work in progress - but if they don’t hugely simplify the user experience to fit closer to how human consciousness works with information and people, it will end up as just a highly innovative concept that got half-way towards a really game changing meta-application.

Remember, Google took over the web partly though the hyper-minimalist simplicity of the likes of the Google home page and more recently Google maps which are a dream to use, so I have some confidence that they have the insight and skills to get this right.

With much of the focus on Twitter recently I think it is important not to lose sight of some of the less instant but hugely valuable thinking behind ‘communities of practice’. If Twitter is the ‘fast running and shallow’ these communities are at the other end of the spectrum - they develop slow… but deep.

Communities of Practice (CoP) are typically described as “a group of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and… deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis.” This stuff is vital for anyone who is interested in working out the puzzle of how we can harness the latent knowledge and creativity of our organisations. ‘Cultivating Communities of Practice’ is a manager’s version of the academic predecessor from Etienne Wenger. Probably the best read available for those keen to know the deep magic and success factors of social communities of practice. I consider it a must for those involved in digital engagement.

Strangely, even though written at the turn of the millennium with the Internet revolution in full swing - albeit pre-Web 2.0 - it does not include nor case study online social networks or virtual communities. Luckily Wenger’s attention has since turned to online social systems and together with Nancy White (who really does get the difference between the new 2.0 communities and the old ‘gated’ style) is about to launch ‘Digital Habitats‘.

I had numerous people email me this news item about Second Life this morning. It is one of the frequent articles talking down or trivialising Second Life, the online virtual world. Maybe it is because 3D worlds are more obviously connected in people’s minds to gaming environments, but it seems to take more than its fair share of criticism from people who really don’t ‘get’ it.

I find the best way to understand the value of metaverses like Second Life - and what works and doesn’t work - is little different from the social web as a whole. Once you have got over the WOW factor of developing your own avatar and the ability to walk, fly or teleport to an almost infinite number of environments. If by then you have not engaged in any meaningful dialogue, relationship building, or found another source of self expression, connection or ongoing interest, then like thousands of others you will probably end up thinking ‘what is the point of this?’

However if you have participated and become an active member of the community with the extra dynamics that a 3D virtual world provide (for example proximity and simulation) then your experience will be completely different.

As a tax payer, I am glad that government departments are experimenting with comparatively very low cost systems to investigate if there is value - financial or otherwise - in engaging with these large scale communities. I remember the very early days of the Internet and have seen how what seems extraordinary and exotic today, can become commonplace and essential tomorrow. If they don’t investigate emerging platforms we will soon be moaning about why the public sector has again fallen so far behind the technological curve when it comes to the dramatic gains in productivity, efficiency and capability experienced by increasingly web savvy consumers.

Second Life requires a powerful PC with an advanced graphics card and decent broadband connection. It is not easy compared to the likes of Facebook - Second Life has a notoriously steep learning curve, especially to master the valuable physical and community building tools. There is still some considerable way to go yet.

But despite this the 3D web is coming whether we like it or not, and the smart people are learning early lessons on Second Life in anticipation of other more accessible and usable alternatives already in development.

Double click to go full-screen.

This neat little piece from Jive is for the launch of their new edition of Clearspace now named Jive SBS (Social Business Software) and is certainly putting the cat amongst the enterprise 2.0 pigeons! This is one of the first enterprise level systems that has a truly credible suite of usable social media tools with an engine integrating them all together. There are many other options emerging on to the market but for me Jive SBS is clearly in the lead with full marks for digital engagement tools - a very powerful offering.

A high percentage of large scale organisations across the world have their electronic communications systems entwined with either Microsoft, IBM or Oracle. Despite this, Jive software has already been adopted by 15% of Fortune 500 companies - and this before the recent update.

Due to legacy systems there will still be a strong preference - especially from IT departments - for using Microsoft’s Sharepoint 2007 (MOSS) platform. Sharepoint has some powerful and highly configurable Web 2.0 tools to add to what is still essentially software based on a document management model.

However, Jive SBS is corporate software for the Facebook generation where software is a commodity and the challenge for implementation has people, community, engagement, collaboration and personal choice centre stage - not the technology.

Just as we started to get used to iTunes being the Grand Central Station for the majority of digital music purchases for the foreseeable future, barging uninvited into Apple’s party comes a quite stunning application called Spotify.

Spotify offers free and legal access to a huge library of music. All you need to do is create an account and download the player, available for both PCs and Macs - even the iPhone. There are other tools provided such as the ability to collaborate when creating playlists, and importantly for business they are now adding podcasts, but it is its simplicy that counts.

I have been using the application as I work on my laptop for a few weeks and find its ease of use truly compelling - it really does have an (original) Google like usability.

A sociologist once explained to me that friendship and community have natural ‘limitations’ relating to scale. Due to both the natural capacity of human beings and pure mathematical implications of the increased complexity of our lives by adding even say just one person to a few close friends or relations.

If I remember correctly the approximate boundaries were: family intimacy – two to six; group – maximum of 12, and community or village – up to 120. While you can’t apply it as a strict formula, I’ve often found it a helpful guide.

For example, when doing multi-disciplinary design workshops I try to limit participants to 12. Beyond that number the natural pressure to form sub-groups increases dramatically and the coherence of the meeting starts to degrade.

The next step up is around 120 people. This is the realm of ‘village’ or ‘community’, where you could class those people as close acquaintances. That means know their face, remember their name and have made some kind of connection or conversation with them. Beyond 120 it is hard to keep up even this level of relationship, again simply because of the limitations of our memory, time and attention.

Recently the research emerged again in an article in the Economist, this time being applied to online social networks. They even quote the 120 figure - saying that on Facebook members with more friends than this are just ‘broadcasting’ themselves.

“We are what we share” or so Charles Leadbeater would have us believe. His new book WE-THINK shows us how radically the internet is changing the way we work.

Human beings have networked since our species emerged, but suddenly there is now a device that can redefine ‘the network’ and how we interact with each other - right across the planet. We are still at the early stages of working this all out, but it is clear that the new culture is all about using the internet to collaborate, to think of ideas together, to share information and knowledge and to do that in a way that enables us to create things - such as an open encyclopaedia e.g. Wikipedia, open source software e.g. Linux, or citizen generated news services e.g. OhmyNews in Korea.

Charles predicts disruption ahead as large command and control hierarchical organisations clash with those growing up with the networked lateral economy, where people are used to looking to each other to get information and share openly. He sees we are moving out of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s consumer world of ‘I want: I want’ into a new ‘I can: We can’ culture, based on the web’s everyone can participate and have a go ethic. Good stuff eh?

Perhaps most importantly, he sees the imminent explosion of the mobile internet across developing countries as a real sign of hope, predicting radical new forms of organisation emerging as creative people and communities harness the new technologies to help solve their problems in undreamed of ways.

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