Instead of interacting with the pictures you took during the weekend, I explain, you share what document you edited or a transaction you took in your sales system. This gives you and your colleagues the ability to take action on that information in real-time.

But even if the conversation progresses to that level of granularity, and the person I’m talking to agrees that activity streams represent a better way to consume business information and connect with colleagues, I’ve been often dogged by one important question, “Well, what you’re saying might be true. But in the end, how isn’t this just another tool for me to deal with at work? As it is today, I can barely get through my e-mail, which, as you point out, stinks.”

Overall, it’s a question that the Enterprise 2.0 industry — software companies that sell social technologies to businesses — has handled poorly. Even today, we still see blog posts that call for the end of e-mail or bombastic presentations that call upon companies to cast the “dusty” systems of record that they invested millions on into the corner.

We need a more pragmatic approach that tackles the “why isn’t this just another tool?” question more substantively. The phrases like “this is like Facebook for your company” or the “why aren’t your tools at work like the ones you have home?” are tired, old and not good enough. They especially don’t work in communicating the value of enterprise activity streams.

Ultimately, the real value with activity streams will be to provide a social layer on top of your current business systems. Before many companies get there, however, they need some more practical reasons why they need activity streams in the first place.

So let’s get a few things straight:

1. Admit Activity Streams Are Another Tool (It’s OK That It Is)

From a purely practical standpoint, various activity streams, and social software in general, are extra tools layered on top of the current systems a worker has in place.
This is inherently true because we’re not replacing systems of record; social software should be designed to complement them and make them more useful. Activity streams don’t replace your e-mails; it makes the e-mails you receive more relevant. As system updates flow to you and pass downstream more efficiently, and you put filters in place to catch what you want to examine later, your communications (including e-mail) can be for more focused and relevant.

2. When Done Right, Activity Streams Quell, Not Add To, Information Overload

The New York Times has been running an interesting series called “Your Brain on Computers.” In a recent article that detailed how much we tether ourselves to the devices and systems around us, we saw just how acute the information overload problem is at work.

In 2008, people consumed three times as much information each day as they did in 1960. And they are constantly shifting their attention. Computer users at work change windows or check e-mail or other programs nearly 37 times an hour, new research shows.

Activity streams take information overload by the horns and pare it down to size by putting your employees in control of the information they consume. Rather than tab toggle to various applications all day, you can select what information from those systems you wanted pulled to you. You can check on it at your convenience, and it’s not pushed to you against your will like e-mail.

Filtering by tags, groups and transaction types from a system will create control that e-mail notifications (a popular refrain for Activity Stream skeptics) only does minimally, and badly.

3. You don’t have to stare at activity streams all day

Geeks stare at activity streams all day, but normal people don’t. Too often, we try to push the value of Activity Streams (and to a degree microblogging) by presuming in our argument that things would be better if people watched the stream all day. This is simply not realistic.

Someone who isn’t on Facebook all day still gets immense value from it, and the same is true with enterprise activity streams, mainly because:

1. Activity streams encourage relevance. Today, if you went on vacation, you can return to work and go through all the e-mails you missed, but you’ll be limited to what information you were addressed on, and a good portion of those messages will be largely irrelevant. With Activity Streams and microblogging, you can seek out keywords and tags relevant to your job, and find out what happened while you were away that really mattered (you can also look at ranked content).
2. Activity streams aggregate information from systems. Similarly, you don’t need to go to each system of record to see what you missed while you were away. Instead, you set up filters and aggregate the specific information you want from each of these systems, as well as the information generated by colleagues that matter to you.
3. Activity streams and microblogging are reply-optional. The reply expectation we have with e-mail doesn’t apply. Although Activity Streams are persistent in their real-time nature, you can passively examine the information that’s relevant to you as many times a day as you find valuable. This, again, speaks to the power of pull (versus push).

4. They’re Cheaper and Easier

Some of the biggest winners in the move to enterprise activity streams are casual (or non) users of traditional enterprise systems. Today, to get information locked in an ERP or CRM system, you must be a licensed user of that system or be on an e-mail list that pulls certain information from them (that, most likely, someone other than you decided might be relevant).

Now, since companies have the ability to utilize open web standards to pull vital information into an enterprise activity stream, a company’s employees can get more from their systems of record, without having to be trained on one of these complicated systems.

Everyday, we post content that conveys what’s on our mind, shows where we’ve been, or offers a glimpse into a particular moment in time. It could be a photo album you took on a trip to Big Sur, or a status message describing the jubilant moment of a walk-off home run at Fenway Park. If someone wants to ever say Facebook or Twitter doesn’t matter, they should look no further than these moments people capture. Because for every stupid YouTube video we might upload, there is also a piece of content that rings with meaning and depth.

Each of these information artifacts, piece by piece, tell a story about us. And right now, there’s no good mechanism that allows you to capture, make sense and arrange those moments in a digital scrapbook (at least, there’s not a tool that mainstream web users can see in front of them). As Scoble noted, blogs and e-mail don’t work well enough for this endeavor, and they certainly aren’t visually appealing enough.

Today, we can go back and find things we posted, but the experience can be overwhelming and inefficient. Search — and now social search — allows you to go back and find things you shared with friends, but you will likely have to sieve through tons of irrelevant content that might share the same keyword (especially on Twitter). On Facebook, it doesn’t seem to go very far back in time (I’d still like to know how far back it goes — I can’t find a reliable figure).

Some have contended that Clay Shirky’s theory of Filter Failture would solve the information overload problem that some real-time Web services create for people. Twitter hashtags, for instance, allow you to wall off tweets that people tag (#), such as #redsox or #sfgiants. But even though you have a filter and set up a column for it in a third-party service, the stream of information cascades down and eventually out of sight. Filter tools don’t stop the stream; they just slow it down for your eyes a bit. The real-time information stream of a Facebook or Twitter homepage keeps going. On and on. Relentlessly. Persistently. And that, I think, is the opportunity for real-time curation.

If things like tags and columns act as filters, real-time curation tools should act as a stopper or cork. A curation mechanism should let you bottle up moments that make sense to you. Unlike search, it doesn’t have to be linear, relevant to an algorithm, or relevant to anyone other than yourself and the people close to you.

But in order for real-time curation to be beneficial to normal people, I think it must have some common attributes and avoid some old traps for organizing digital information.

1. Let’s call it something else. I don’t think archive is the right word (too boring), but real-time curation is too abstract for normal people. Normal people who use social networking services don’t even call those sites “real-time” technologies. Something down to earth like “scrapbook” might work, but there’s not shortage of people in the tech community that love to coin phrases, so we should expect a better naming convention to emerge.

2. It must be easy to do later. The notion that normal people will want to do the heavy lifting for curation in the moment is unrealistic. While we can already “favorite” or “like” things on Facebook or Twitter, if you do that enough, it’s still creates a crowded laundry list of content that takes forever to sort through later. We need an easier way to save things to arrange or scrapbook later.

3. Facebook matters more. Since Twitter is not the stream of the mainstream, Facebook should realize that it has a tremendous opportunity to be the digital scrapbook of people’s lives. The information people share here is more scrapbook-worthy than most of the stuff they share on Twitter because the network people keep on Facebook is more private, the content mediums they employ more diverse (not only textual). Unfortunately, memories on Facebook today float downstream and eventually of out sight. The only thing Facebook has an organized system for is pictures.

4. Frame it as an opportunity for people who don’t blog. Most of my friends don’t have blogs, at least ones they actively update. They don’t care to hack that much prose all the time. But they don’t find it difficult to write a status message or upload an album. Real-time curation should be marketed as an opportunity to chronicle those events without blogging.

5. The big guns shouldn’t leave this to third-party developers. Facebook, Google and Twitter must do this themselves for it to be popular. Saying “look at how our developers leveraged our open APIs to build real-time curation tools” is a sentence that won’t see the light of day with 95 percent of social networking users. Of course, they might wait for a third-party developer to figure it out and then copy build it themselves.

So this is, by nature, a catch-up post, and naturally it’s on the big thing that I haven’t written on, Google Buzz.

To me, Google Buzz is like the guy who arrives to the party at 2 a.m. and expects everyone to roll out the red carpet so he can hold court. Despite the hour, and because of his street cred, we begrudgingly mix him a drink and hear what he has to say.

The problem?

Google was a little too fashionably late for its own good, and many in the party have already hedged their bets with someone else. It might just have spotted Facebook an insurmountable headstart.

The problem with Buzz is not the technology, which to me seems pretty good. I especially admire the fact Buzz is so open and it takes a much more holistic view of the Web than Facebook. The issue is that Google faces an adoption problem of entering this late, and that’s even with the trove of Gmail contacts it brings to the table.

Sure, Facebook is closed, but when has it hurt them? Although Facebook always goes the proprietary route, it works because they build pretty darn good technology that’s immediately accessible to regular people. This is why Facebook’s News Feed is more popular than Twitter and FriendFeed. It’s why Facebook Connect adds mainstream sites every day while Google Friend Connect is mostly adopted by small and obscure blogging sites.

Two years ago, for many, the idea of letting information flow to us in real-time was too overwhelming. For these people, they were comfortable with their primary online communication mechanisms of e-mail and instant messaging. These folks didn’t even use RSS; they visited websites manually. So when the idea of real-time was being shoved down their throats by one percent of the Web populace (and the media who follow them) before they were ready, it’s no wonder they rebelled. They hated the first big Facebook redesign (but learned to live with it), and failed to stay on Twitter for more than a month.

And that’s where Google missed its opportunity, and I’m not even sure good technology can fix it.

Google could have been the natural conduit to bring the real-time web to these consumers in an easy, palatable way, but it decided that we would continue to live primarily in a search-centric and e-mail based world for a couple more years (and hey, why not hope for that? It does those technologies better than anyone). It let Facebook take the mainstream eye balls for the real time web. The Facebook News Feed and design was far from perfect, but it was good enough. Meanwhile, you still had a large swath of people who couldn’t be bothered by the fun and games of Facebook, and who found Twitter too limiting and geeky. They would have been game for a real-time Google offering, but it didn’t come.

So in the absence of that option, about 400 million of them caved and joined Facebook anyway, and now their social stream is there.

So on one hand, my overriding feeling about Buzz is the hackneyed “too little, too late.” Again, this isn’t because the technology isn’t good. Rather, it’s because social networking users, who were once fickle (see: Friendster), are now becoming complacent and comfortable (see: Facebook). That complacency could have massive consequences on the social Web.

/cgl

As someone who loves the written word, my Gmail account has allowed me to retain valuable correspondences that I’ve had with friends, family, and the women I’ve loved. They capture interesting periods in my life that I wouldn’t necessarily share on my blog or a social network. Some of these notes, in fact, I will be the only person to ever read. Some contain prettier sentences than anything I’ve ever written for any public audience.

For some carefully selected stuff — especially some long form e-mails that read like formal letters — I will archive it in a safe place for my family to access if something ever happened to me. These correspondences give context around my life, details that I never would have shared publicly but that I’m happy for them to read. This isn’t borne out of a bombastic notion that my life is some sort of dramatic saga. It’s more that I’d like for them to understand my thinking around certain decisions, the thoughts behind those successes and failures. I want them to learn from them, so their lives are even richer than mine.

But some of the less intimately private moments are very much worth capturing as well, and unlike Google’s innovative search and labeling in Gmail, most consumer social networks — namely Facebook — are failing to preserve and recapture these bits of information that, collectively, tell a larger story about one’s life. Facebook’s philosophical approach that the Web is more about connecting People than Information made a fine marketing alternative slogan to Google, but it wasn’t pragmatic enough. People also want access to the things they shared later on, sometimes much later on. (Even some of us real time technology fans).

The world isn’t just about pictures, which is the only thing Facebook seems to catalog about us with any method that allows for meaningful discovery in the future (and even then, it’s not easy to scroll back in time). Facebook’s real time search, meanwhile, should really be called “things that happened fairly recently.” It only allows you to row a mile or two upstream, but not that far into the past in any meaningful way. Worsening the problem is the fact the syntax or prose contained within old status messages (even if FB search culls that far back) will be too generic for an algorithm to find reliably. It saddens me, because a collection of those words might be something very beautiful or interesting in their totality. For example, it’s going to be hard to find a status message you wrote New Years eve two years ago, and compare it to one from four years ago. All these snippets, holistically in some way, tell a story just like those e-mails. And right now, it’s all being lost.

I’m sure there are some tools in the Facebook developer ecosystem that help with this problem, but I think it’s too important a thing for Facebook to outsource or divorce from its out-of-the-box service. I also think Facebook is missing a critical opportunity for increased user lock-in that it already seems to enjoy (as I’ve often said, Facebook will never be a Friendster).

Facebook may have saved all these messages — at the very least for economic reasons. However, even if Facebook launches something tomorrow that allowed us to capture and tag new content with greater granularity and purpose, I worry the stuff of the past is lost. This is a tragedy for people who have been on the service a long time, especially those of us who joined it in their prime years. Apart from pictures, the great stuff we posted flowed down the real time stream and into an Ocean of databases for ad research, and I can only hope I’m able to find them again someday.

/cgl

notes for real-time web meet-up

But the Real-Time Web Masters of the Universe are trying to reform our tabular nature. First, it occurred with widgets, information boxes and customized homepages. Suddenly, we could create nice window panes with helpful information that kept you in one place longer. If you found something interesting or urgent enough, you could click on it to launch a tangential tab and address it.

Then, Facebook and Twitter did something crazy: It combined disparate people and information — things that typically demanded their own tabs — and poured it all over us in one fluid current. It cut down the number of tabs because you can consume, publish and “like” information all in one area. Those companies’ ecosystems have flourished to customize the experience with filters, allowing people to cut huge steaks of information into manageable bites. Other start-ups, like Threadsy, are following suit.

The Web’s new aversion to tabs — coupled with a general lack of bandwidth to handle our real-time activities — has been so severe that it’s migrated us from the cloudy browser back down to the dusty desktop. The prevalence of Adobe AIR apps, which now many can’t imagine living without, signal an ironic twist for an industry once obsessed with the idea that everything should be in a browser.

But as we combine all the capabilities these tools provide us, we must do so carefully; we must be mindful of our innately tabular nature and past mistakes driven by tech companies’ insatiable thirst to be the all-in-one gatekeeper. As people, the idea of having information flow to us in one spot sounds appealing. But sometimes, we might just prefer to separate it, even as we’re consciously aware that it takes more time. Finding the golden mean between flow and tabs will be essential for the future of the Web, to keep it a place that complements, rather than disrupts, our lives.

The Difference Between Tabs, Networks and Flows

Tabs are not networks; they are a thing that walls off action. It’s easy to confuse tabs with networks because certain actions frequently get executed between you and the same set of people. Flows, on the other hand, radically combine the actions of your tabs and your networks (people) that operate within them.

Contrary to what some believe, the emergence of flow-based information streams wasn’t enabled by a social revolution to undermine hierarchy. It was an evolution based on the untenable nature of our tabular lives. Toggling has become too difficult. At 11 a.m., I have a meeting with my boss. At noon, I have to drive my friend to the airport. At 1 p.m., I have a meeting with a customer. Addressing this back-and-forth isn’t just a matter of calendaring; it should be a matter of managing flow. Unfortunately, most people still tab-toggle between phone lines, e-mail accounts, social networks, or calendars to interact with the people and information they need to achieve each of these tasks. Each toggle doesn’t seem like a lot of time or effort on its own, but taken in total, it adds up.

The results from this approach are plain to see: You’re late for the meeting, you miss the plane, or you’re not home in time for dinner.

Flow can address this problem by helping you pull the people and information you need to address each of those actions to the best of your ability, as quickly and efficiently as possible. That said, we shouldn’t overlook how challenging this will be for most people who live tabular lives. As much as I respect Clay Shirky’s notion that filter failures are a bigger problem than information overload itself, I don’t buy it entirely.

Even in an ideal world where we enjoy better filters, we will still suffer from both information overload and (due to the prevalence of social networks) people overload. At a certain point, people might prefer a full-blown visual or physical separation — much like they were accustomed to with tabs — instead of a filter.

Why Tabs Are Still Valuable

Despite the time sink they can create, tabs and tabular actions encourage innovation. We would be wrong to replace tabs with flow entirely. If success is only measured by how something fits into a massive flow aggregation, we could miss out on some great ideas. And open standards and APIs can only help so much to prevent this problem, too. In fact, the idea that open standards might save us is a pipe dream. As Tim O’Reilly pointed out this week, the Web’s power players will hinder such an effort for competitive reasons. Consequently, the decision to keep some aspects of our tabular life might be a commercial reality as much as it is a remnant of the way in which we compartmentalize people and information in the real-world.

Flows represent a tremendous opportunity for us to respond faster to change and better understand the world around us, but we should always make time to go into a tab every once and awhile to try something new.