Atlassian is one of those curiosities within the open-source world: like Apple, Atlassian doesn't tend to release its software as open source. But as with Apple, the open-source world loves to use its software.
From JIRA to Confluence and just about everything in between, Atlassian's software is broadly deployed within open source. Intriguingly, Atlassian turned back to that open-source community to integrate its own applications using OpenSocial, as I learned in an interview with Jay Simons, Atlassian's vice president of marketing.
Many people tend to think of OpenSocial as a way for Web sites like LinkedIn to share data with the Web, but Atlassian chose to use it to unify its applications behind the firewall. Why?
Simons: Roughly a year ago, Atlassian took a hard look at improving the integration between our eight products and upgrading the dashboard implementation of Jira, our popular issue tracker. Jira had a decent dashboard, and portlets based on our own technology that customers--and often some of our own engineers on different teams--sometimes struggled to use.
We had a choice: stick with what we have (slightly dated, but solid portlet technology), but make it bigger and better (engineers love this one, usually), or go open.
Asking seven independent teams to learn Jira's clunky portlet stack so they could integrate their products with Jira wasn't a popular option internally, and didn't really buy us much, so we intrinsically preferred the open option. There have been a few different standards for portlets over the years--JSR-168 and WSRP the most well known--but they all felt long-in-the-tooth. And then we took a close look at OpenSocial.
Many initially heard about OpenSocial a couple years ago, when it was billed as a Facebook killer--a shot fired by Google, echoed by the dozens of other consumer social networks scrambling to catch up to Facebook.
OpenSocial defines two concepts--an API for defining and working with social data (profiles, attributes, relationships) and specification for gadgets. OpenSocial's fundamental promise was interoperability--write an application once and host it in multiple social networks. Sound familiar? That's what we wanted to do with our own products.
A year later, and we've shipped OpenSocial in the guts of both Jira, our issue tracker, and Confluence, our enterprise wiki, thanks in large part to Apache Shindig, an open-source reference implementation of the OpenSocial container. Both Jira and Confluence are now OpenSocial gadget containers and producers, and the rest of our portfolio produce gadgets these two products can consume.
The benefits to Atlassian should be clear, but the benefits to our customers are also immediate: display build activity from the Bamboo build server, search results from the Confluence wiki, and recent commits to the SVN through Fisheye on a Jira dashboard that organizes that information alongside the issues and tasks related to an individual project. Everything a development team needs on a single page.
So OpenSocial wasn't a way for you to connect Jira with LinkedIn (or kill Facebook, for that matter)? What are the top-three reasons for choosing OpenSocial instead of some alternative integration technology?
Simons: One, it's open. OpenSocial's openness means it is consistently benefiting from the contributions of the community. Dozens of companies now are starting to work with it, from Atlassian to Google, and the spec is evolving quickly. Gadgets are an important ongoing part of Google's strategy across several products, so our customers benefit from Google's investments and innovations, as well as our own.
What's next for OpenSocial?
Simons: The OpenSocial community is quite active. The Apache Shindig project is also quite active. The OpenSocial specification 1.0 (it's on v0.9 currently) should be released in January 2010.
What originated as a technology for consumer social networks, is quickly gaining traction amongst enterprise software vendors, and enterprises. We've created a site to explain how we use it, and hopefully we'll see more enterprises use it well beyond the consumer Web for which it was originally envisioned.
The more the merrier.
Twitter and Facebook are duking it out to own the future of the social Web, though users won't have noticed. Indeed, for those who use both, this may come as a surprise, since the two, while both social media platforms, seem to serve very different purposes.
Tell that to Twitter and Facebook, which increasingly have painted big bull's-eyes on each other.
Facebook groks this more than Twitter, which is why your mom/dad, teenage neighbors, and friends all use Facebook, and probably don't use Twitter.
Both companies have open APIs that encourage third-party developers to build out their respective platforms. Facebook has the Open Stream API; Twitter, the ">Open API Service.
These are critical components of a platform strategy, but they're secondary to the lesson that Microsoft and Apple have taught us: if users don't care about the front end of software/services, developers won't care about the back end of the same.
Facebook largely works because people know how and why to use it. Twitter...not so much.
It's telling that Twitter's "big" feature of the last six months is...lists. I use and love Twitter, but after a month I still can't get myself excited about creating or following Twitter lists. I'm not even sure why I'd want to do so.
Is this the best Twitter can do?
This is perhaps why Twitter seems to work for a narrow class of user: Caucasian, middle-aged urbanites with no kids.
In other words, not teens, not your mom/dad, and probably not you.
Facebook's demographics look very different, probably because its current range of uses is very different.
To me, this is a user-interface problem, and not a defect in the DNA of the Twitter platform. It's simply not immediately obvious what one should do with Twitter. That's not the case with Facebook.
We learned this long ago in open source. What separates a good but doomed project from a truly great project is documentation (to help developers know how to use the system) and user interface (to help end users know how to deploy the software). That's why Linux was interesting but not ubiquitous until Red Hat, IBM, and others added the finish that made its power usable by the general business world.
Twitter has a lot of promise, but not yet much polish.
It's nice that New York gangs have found new ways to dis each other using Twitter. It will be better when Twitter makes it easy and obvious for me to talk with my parents using Twitter.
Most vendors must guess what customers want to buy, and how they'll use it. For IBM, however, with about 400,000 employees, it has the potential to be its own best laboratory, one that becomes even more potent when mixed with active participation in open-source communities.
That potential, as I discovered in an interview on Friday with Jeff Schick, IBM's vice president of social software, isn't a "gimme," but is powerful if you can enable the right sort of corporate culture and processes.
For example, Schick mentioned that IBM has a technology adoption program for employees that spans the gamut of new products, add-ons and patches to existing products, and still-raw technologies direct from IBM's labs. While the invitation list and process is different for each particular item, IBM generally encourages its product groups to "experiment" upon each other. The earlier in the development process, the better.
At the heart of this open approach to technology adoption are open standards and open source. When I pressed Schick on the relative importance of both ("If you could only choose open standards or open source, which would it be?"), he responded:
Our products may include open-source components, and often do, but ultimately open standards are the most important consideration for customers. As customers integrate our products into their various enterprise systems, open standards are critical for ensuring they work.
Point taken, but it's impressive just how much open source influences IBM's product development. Gartner estimates that 80 percent of commercial applications will include open-source components by 2012. At IBM, the number may even be higher.
Despite IBM not releasing its core software products under open-source licenses, Schick noted just how integral open source is to IBM:
From a development perspective, as we build our social software products in Lotus, we're always looking at ways to improve quality and time-to-market. Open source often helps us with both areas.
For example, we were blogging within IBM for a long time before deciding to build the Lotus Connections product, which is fast approaching hundreds of millions of users. After some study, we decided to build the blogging piece of Lotus Connections using the Apache Roller project, an open-source Java blog software. We have become active contributors to the project since then.
But it's not just in Lotus Connections. As you look across nearly every capability across our social-software strategy, open source plays a critical role. Open source is an integral part of how we build products. Our engineers are very much in tune with the wide variety of open-source components that are available to them, and use and contribute to them. Regularly.
IBM seems to have figured out better than most how to marry the global open-source laboratory with a massive internal laboratory. Talking to Schick, there appears to be a very blurry line between "internal" development and "external" development, giving the company a significant advantage over proprietary (Microsoft) and open-source (Liferay, Open-Xchange) competitors alike.
Some competitors may be able to match IBM's scale, but few to none have managed to marry internal scale (employees) with the power of external scale (open-source communities) in the way that IBM has.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Some believe that Twitter has the power to change big events like Iranian elections. I think that its strength may be in much smaller, but still significant, ways.
In fact, I was the matchmaker recently between a Barcelona cabbie and an American employee of a pharmaceutical company. Well, a matchmaker between the cabbie and this lady's BlackBerry, anyway.
It happened like this:
I have a Twitter search in TweetDeck that alerts me every time the word "Asay" is used on Twitter. (I need to be able to track down libel somehow!)
On August 30, I saw this tweet:
Hi! I'm a taxi driver from Barcelona. Somebody knows Jennifer Asay? She works for (pharmaceutical company). I've her Balckberry [sic].
I happen to be married to a Jennifer Asay, but not this one. So I looked up her name on the Web and quickly found her on LinkedIn. I reached out to her there to give her the e-mail address of the taxi driver, which he provided in his tweet. I also replied to him to give him her e-mail address. No big deal, right?
On Wednesday, I heard back from Raúl, the taxi driver:
Hi! I am the taxidriver from Barcelona.
She has found me thanks to you.
I will be with her for I will give back its telephone.
Thank you very much by your work.
Raúl
Nice, right? It gets better. Today, I heard from Jennifer, and it sounds like everything worked out, thanks to the power of Twitter (and LinkedIn):
I can't tell you how grateful I am that you reached out to me....by a miracle, Raúl brought me my BlackBerry today!
What are the odds? In our increasingly networked world, the odds are getting shorter all the time.
Again, it's a simple story, but one rich in possibilities too. Think about it. A twittering taxi driver reaches out to the massive echo chamber that is the Web and is heard by a complete stranger in Utah who also uses Twitter (me), who then turns to LinkedIn to find the sought-for person and connects them over e-mail.
There are lots of problems in the world. Communication--at least the possibility of communication--isn't one of them.
P.S. There's a very good chance that I've now ruined Jennifer's life by getting her back in touch with her BlackBerry addiction, but I want this story to have a happy ending.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay. And if you find my iPhone, please tweet it. :-)
Twitter has become an excellent way to quickly scan headlines. It's terrible at just about everything else. It's hard to have a coherent discussion in 140-character soundbites, and even harder when the architecture of Twitter is set to "broadcast" rather than "discourse." But maybe, just maybe, Twitter's not to blame. We are.
After all, Twitter is simply a creation of our society, and reflects our priorities.
Not all of society, of course. After all, as The New York Times reported, teenagers, usually technology's early adopters, hardly use Twitter at all, with only 11 percent of people aged 11 to 17 using the service. They are, however, heavily into Facebook, preferring to share with friends rather than talk at strangers.
A generational thing?
Perhaps. But I think the technology we build and use says a lot about society.
Competition from Bing, Ask, and other search engines is just one click away and likely equally good for Google users, yet we stick with Google. Why? Because it's fast, free, and has never disdained its users with a cluttered interface. Many of us were with Google early on and continue to reward its early respect for its customers. We're a loyal people that likes a crowd.
This phenomenon is hinted at in personal computers, too. While I'm part of a rising group of people who prefers the Mac to Microsoft Windows, I'm also in a distinct minority, according to data from Net Applications. The reality is that most people look at their computer the way they do toilet cleaner: necessary to get a job done but not anything to get worked up about.
Back to business. As well as open source is doing in enterprise IT, the reality is that CIOs and CTOs don't get too worked up about freedom and such. There's a very good reason that IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft dominate enterprise software, and "choice" is not it. These vendors simplify purchasing decisions by providing limited, but still good, choices.
Business, in other words, is business, not religion. OpenOffice is nearly as good as Microsoft Office in most ways, and better in a few. But it still captures anemic market share because it's simply not worth the bother for most enterprises or consumers. (Firefox, on the other hand, is, and continues to gain market share because we value the increased options its add-on library brings us.)
Open source is absolutely getting adopted, but only where it accomplishes tangible goals like cost reduction and increased productivity. As a society, we don't seem to want to waste hours of the work day fighting ideological battles. We just want to get work done.
Well, except for when we're furiously friending on Facebook during work hours, costing employers as much as 1.5 percent of productivity. You see, we're not all work and no play.
Which, incidentally, suggests that there just might be something to attempts by IBM and others to marry social software with enterprise IT. Our work lives are increasingly blended with our personal lives. They're just about the same thing.
All of which must increasingly be done in real time, as Twitter, instant messaging, SMS/texting, and other immediate or near-immediate technologies suggest. Even e-mail, which used to be considered "fast" communication, has moved to mobile devices so that it's omnipresent and, hence, that much quicker.
All of which raises the question, "Why are you still reading this post?" After all, you've spent 3,000 characters here in which time you could have already plowed through 21 tweets. Think of all the headlines you could have read. :-)
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
I read with interest that open-source messaging vendor Open-Xchange is building a "meta-address book" service that brings together your contacts from various social networking sites into "one continuous stream of updating contacts." While promising, I don't think it goes far enough.
It's nice to have a centralized address book. It's even better to analyze the connections between contacts and deliver services based on that data, as I recently argued.
One area in which this information would be hugely valuable is in connecting enterprises through their respective employees. Think about it: most companies spend far more money on sales and marketing than they do on product development. Why? Because customers pay the bills, obviously, and customers are hard to come by.
7-Degrees has an interesting solution called PeopleMaps that that crawls the Web for employment data on the contacts you have in Salesforce.com, and then presents an optimal (visual) contact chain to help enterprises figure out how they're connected to prospective partners or customers.
(Credit:
7-Degrees)
This is a useful way to map and monetize the "social graphs" of one's employees, but this, too, falls short of the full potential of a true "Web 2.0 address book," to use Tim O'Reilly's idea.
Open-Xchange is usefully connecting contacts into a meta address book, but I long for the day that someone connects those contacts through a meta address book, one that not only knows how well I know a contact, but also what sorts of things we like to do together and makes suggestions based on past history ("You and XXXX are in Boston at the same time - would you like me to arrange a lunch at Henrietta's Table again through OpenTable?).
This is when the address book becomes interesting, and when it becomes hugely monetizable by the enterprise.
For now, however, the enterprise largely treats its employees as drones with no lives (and, hence, no contacts) outside its payroll system. But if enterprises will look for ways to employees to improve their job performance by opening up their address books...we'll have discovered the next big thing in sales and marketing.
And someone will have created a billion-dollar business for themselves. Why not you?
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Over the weekend news broke that IBM Research has been working with personal mobile phone records to map social networks. Some may complain that Big Brother is watching, but the real question is why some company hasn't formed already to blend mobile data with IM and e-mail traffic to map and profit from the social graph.
(Credit:
Apple)
Think about it. My in-box already knows where I'm traveling, what I buy, etc. because my receipts go there. If someone were to merge this data with my phone records (easily had for the price of my AT&T login credentials), my e-mail log, and my Twitter, IM, and social network data, they'd know exactly who I know and where I'm likely to bump into them.
I'd gladly give up this data to facilitate those interactions.
Privacy wonks will bewail this apparent lack of concern for the sanctity of my data. But they'd be wrong.
It's not that I deprecate the value of my security. It's just that I value more the possibilities that arise when I share this data with a network of friends--sharing really only makes sense through a company or community that networks my address book with those of others I like and trust.
I can't fathom why someone hasn't done this yet. Tim O'Reilly has been talking about this Address Book 2.0 concept for years, and I've written on it several times, too. (See here and here.)
All the necessary data is sitting in my in-box or through easily accessed online or desktop applications. Someone simply needs to combine and process it.
Maybe that "someone," as Tim O'Reilly has suggested, could be the open-source community. We wouldn't want a community to shepherd the data, but to build the data connectors to a centralized service? Sure.
It needs to happen. I'd love to automatically be told that my good friend Mike is in London at the same time as I am, and have a service suggest a reservation at a favorite restaurant (which it would know through my past OpenTable reservations). I'd "pay" for that by giving up a lot of data.
I'm guessing you would, too. So who's going to build it?
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
A bad economy is good for open source, goes the increasingly conventional wisdom. However, while it's undoubtedly a good time to be in the market with a low-cost, high-value alternative to proprietary software, there are tell-tale signs that the recession isn't blessing all open-source companies equally.
Ross Mayfield, co-founder of Socialtext
For example, at the Enterprise 2.0 conference on Tuesday Socialtext founder Ross Mayfield declared, in the words of a conference attendee via Twitter, that Socialtext's first quarter "sucked" and that its "pipeline collapsed." Socialtext, once described as a highflier in a "sizzling market," has apparently come down to earth.
Or has it? Is this a one-time blip for Socialtext? While Socialtext CEO Eugene Lee announced layoffs in April as the company looked to cut expenses, Mayfield on Tuesday declared that the company's second quarter looks strong. Even the best companies can slip in a brutal market.
Or perhaps Sociatext is fighting a weakness in enterprise collaboration ROI (return on investment) and demand, rather than open source?
If that were true, one would expect all companies in Socialtext's space to be hit equally, but this hasn't been the case. During this same first quarter, Socialtext competitor MindTouch experienced double-digit growth, while Microsoft's proprietary SharePoint product also continued to boom. (Disclosure: I am an adviser to MindTouch.)
I suspect Socialtext experienced a road bump, not a barricade. The difference is that, in true open-source style, Mayfield was candid about the slip up.
Open source remains alive and well. It's important to remember, however, that this doesn't mean every open-source company will do well.
Open source is not magic pixie dust that makes bad companies good. It's not a cure for the common recession. Companies still need to execute well, regardless of their licensing strategy. And, importantly, the wrong open-source licensing model can handicap a company, making it harder to profit from a project's popularity.
The recession, in short, will sift good companies from bad, whether open source or proprietary. As for Socialtext, its fate will not be decided by a single quarter. It's in a good market with a good model. It should do fine.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Google is apparently "getting ready to fully cast its social net over its web properties," according to TechCrunch, the latest signal being the automatic creation of a Google account when opening a YouTube account.
It's a clever, almost Microsoft-esque move designed to make Google the center of our social universe. It can't happen fast enough. But Google shouldn't stop with its own properties.
The social Web is currently a morass of mostly siloed choices. I can be on Facebook but also have to build a profile on LinkedIn, not to mention Digg, Slashdot, Bebo, Classmates.com, etc., etc. While we've seen marginal linkage start to form between these through initiatives such as OpenSocial, they don't get nearly far enough toward the one-stop social experience most of us want on the Web.
Yes, choice is good, so sometimes we assume a dizzying array of choices must be very good. Not so.
As I've argued before (PDF), what we need is not a myriad of choices but rather a limited, manageable set of quality choices. Markets trend toward such choice naturally by eliminating weak players and elevating strong competitors.
This is as it should be.
Fearful as I am of any one vendor controlling my Web experience, as Microsoft did for decades in desktop computing, I'm almost equally fearful of a disjointed Web experience that never really hits its stride because users are hamstrung among different social Web sites.
I want the Web to be just that: a connecting web, not an isolating one.
So, dominate me, Google. You've been a good steward of data and user experience thus far, albeit not without hiccups. Find some way to pull in my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social data to my Google profile. Just ask: I'll give it to you. I have better things to do than waste time schlepping between different social Web sites. Save me the bother.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
I used to think I was in control of what I blog and what I Twitter. Recently I've been disabused of this notion, particularly with regard to what I Twitter. In a postmodern, Jacques Derrida sense, the reader has come to mean more than the author. Or to think that she does.
This fact was brought home to me yesterday when two of my 1,195 Twitter "followers" advised me that I was Twittering incorrectly. I had been working myself up to a blog post, and was thinking through the idea over Twitter in 140-character snippets. As a result, I posted a string of short snippets that added up to a full screen of Twitterings. A bit lengthier than I'd like, and much more than I normally post, but I wanted people to see how I think.
Now, I have yet to see a manual on proper Twitter etiquette, but given how easy it is to "un-follow" people on Twitter, it seems bizarre to me that certain readers should determine the proper way for me to Twitter, other than by unsubscribing if my strategy doesn't suit them. That, to me, seems the proper market-based response. If that 1,195 number were to drop to 500, for example, I might assume I were doing something wrong and correct the behavior.
But the data suggests the inverse:
Matt Asay's Twitter Growth
One of the commentators later suggested to me that he likes much of what I write, but was trying to offer constructive criticism in how to improve the content for him. I care about his perspective, so I'm trying to accommodate him. But I'm still not sure why readers don't vote more with their feet, rather than with their mouths.
The great (and terrible) thing about social media is, well, how social it is. Readers, especially on Twitter, aren't content to be followers. They also want to lead the content, and have no compunction about prescribing their preferred style and content. This is positive, I suppose, but after blogging for several years and Twittering for a few months, I'm finding it can be a bit uncomfortable to realize just how vocal readers can be.
More pertinently, it's very hard to take in social media's blaring wall of sound and effectively process it. Has anyone else found positive, non-cumbersome ways to interact with their Twitter or blog readerships?
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
