I think it’s time for a new solution to the problem of collaborative development communication.

I use Twitter for my news source. I believe strongly that it is a more powerful news medium than anything out there. The reason for this is similar to why Google’s PageRank has been so successful. It tapped into the best source of web site judgement at the time, people’s opinions and use of other websites, as shared by their personal websites. The power of this, I believe, was that you had a human intelligence refer to another piece of information in a context that lent partial judgement of value. Twitter is doing this on a much larger scale, and in real time. Twitter is providing collaborative, human-filtered news and information, delivered in a real time stream. This is not simply tapping into the categorical type of filtering by news source, but a categorical type of filtering based on an un-defined and unique personal phenotype. So I’m a tech geek, I follow another tech geek, he/she is interested in cloud computing, but also shares their interests in things that I probably would like, and possibly have not been previously exposed to. I follow this person and get tweets of news, commentary, and highly valuable, pre-qualified connections. Sorry, I get long winded about Twitter as a powerful human filtered news platform. I will write a separate post about this.

Twitter data paths are very one directional, and in a large top down tree/root structure. Replies, comments, and retweets try to be a feedback loop, but for me the implementation isn’t enough of a conversation to consider as an upstream path. That is, even when you’re sending data/info/judgements back “upstream” it really feels like it’s just an alteration on the branch that is put back into the running stream. Twitter data paths are also very transient in that if you don’t see it almost real-time, you miss it. For news, Twitter makes up for this with a shot-gun affect that ends up being the interesting news is re-filtered and arrives in your stream enough that you will hopefully see it. Critical news, such as the tsunami are deemed valid by almost anyone, and shared repeatedly, and practically impossible to miss.

I use Skype, chat (google, AIM, MSN, Yahoo) for real time conversations with people. I have noticed recently that more and more people have picked up on using twitter type tags when talking directly to someone in a group chat. These kinds of group chats are similar to Twitter’s feed in that they are real time. They differ from Twitter in that they are generally grouped by people and/or topic. Being generally setup based on topic or team. They are one directional in that they flow forwards, and are often not simple to graft people into the full stream, that is, newcomers to the conversation only get current and ongoing information. When these groups get bigger the most common type of Twitter tag is the persons name to get their attention. People will say @JonZ in the stream. This creates a topical stream of information flow that is collaborative, easily searchable historically, but lacking as a shared store of information for more than a few people who keep their history and have been in the stream for a long enough time. Skype group chats trump google groups type topical discussions because they are more personalized and very much more real time.

I use e-mail (gmail) for formal communication, for sharing larger pieces of information, and for asynchronous communications where the time scale is hours to days. I e-mail pieces of information to people so they can keep them in their permanent archive, and don’t have to come back and ask me for them. I communication with vendors, customers, and outside sources primarily via email. E-mail is ubiquitous in the current business world, and currently for people who are less technically savvy e-mail is the extent of their tools for digital communication.

I use wiki’s, google docs, web pages, Sharepointe, svn, git, forums, blogs, and other online http type resources as repositories of information for things that are few write to many read type, or documentation, guides, code, and shared static objects such as presentations, drawings, spreadsheets, documents, etc. These are great for organizing and sharing the rote knowledge gained from collaborative efforts, but lacking for inter personal communication. Throwing up a chat history does not directly map to a repository like this, and an additional layer of filtering and data processing needs to happen. Often this is done by going over the information and simply organizing and presenting it. There is a high barrier to entry as people are more reluctant to “publish” their opinions or thoughts as they are to chat them to a colleague.

I reluctantly use the phone. I like voice calls for short, direct, communication where nuance is important, or a personal touch required to avoid problems. I think the telephone call is largely deprecated in todays business world.

Now, I’m seeing people starting to use Twitter tags in group Skype chats. The chats are topical, say “project 101″. A group of people are hammering out details of the project, or it’s implementation or the testing of it. I realize that there is all this valuable, human filtered, information in this Skype thread, that could be processed and posted to a shared resource like a wiki. Doing that would mean re-reading the chat, summarizing key points, and formatting them for presentation. I’m thinking, I wonder if this discussion could be moved to Twitter. Well, it wouldn’t really apply because everyone would have to put a topic in each tweet like #project101. It wouldn’t work since it’s hard to have a private group conversation on Twitter. The business and legal teams probably wouldn’t be too thrilled if we started sharing our internal data with a 3rd party either. So, I start to wonder about setting up our own, internal Twitter. Seems easy enough, I’ve done and seen html discussion threads. But then we’d end up with a wiki of a Twitter style Skype thread. It wouldn’t be anything more than cut and paste a conversation, so we’re missing the summary, all we’re adding is some transparency and sharing amongst the company. Also, we’re only sharing words, links and sometimes files in Skype. What I really wanted was a Twitter for business that ended up automatically as a knowledge-base-documentation wiki thing. I want to capture the vast amounts of information, account for the human intelligence that’s already been applied to get the information up there in the first place, and disseminate it to appropriate parts of the company. Wouldn’t it also be cool if it could include standard objects that could be on one of them cool new HTML 5 web pages, like video, images, drawings, links, and all kinds of connections. Existing methodologies for web page data classification and extraction could be applied to these, and the human layer of creating organically and judging/filtering the value of the content, could all be applied, to the same data stream.

Now, what would this look like? When I started to think about it, it would probably look like Google Wave, with some kind of data analysis and formatting/presenting layer applied to the streams to turn them into those cool wiki-esque web pages.

I though Wave would take off when I heard about it, I have a wave account, and have used it once for actual collaboration. I think the reason it didn’t take off is it was an over-complicated chat platform that didn’t seduce the tech savvy crowd since they were already doing things like that, and failed with the less tech savvy crowd because it came off as a confusing replacement for something they didn’t see a point in having.

If I had the time, I would setup a business centric Wave server, have it spit out analyzed information dump / wiki pages, and provide a twitter like fire hose of all discussions going on in the company.

I think that would be the fastest path to bringing internal corporate communication into a smarter web 2.0 productivity HTML 5 whiz bang. And of course it would need to be buzz word friendly.

I hope this was a clear annunciation of the vision I see.
I was, originally, going to make pictures and drawings and embed them in it, but I think at this point it’s probably more productive to simply share the idea, and let the powerful imaginations out there envision their own version.
What do you think?

Please feel free to comment here, or e-mail me
jon@jonzobrist.com