Kudos

…Is curiosity.

If you like signing up to Internet based services, like me, you must know the risk you’re taking by submitting your email address over and over. Here are a few services you might appreciate:

1. Guerrilla Mail – creates temporary Email addresses that last for 15 minutes and then go silently into the night. It’s entirely web based and requires no registration. You just hit a button and the system generates a new Email address for you to use.
2. Spam Gourmet – allows you to create an account which hides your real Email address. If you need to use a temporary address, you provide someword.x.user@spamgourmet.com where ‘someword‘ is a random word you haven’t used before and ‘X’ is the number of emails to accept before stopping the forwarding to your box. When you need a new address, just change ‘someword‘ and decide what X should be. ‘user’ is your user name (requires registration).

If you need more options, try reading this article, about 8 more disposable Email services.

This is a great example of the innovative vs. lookalike startups I was referring to in my last two posts.

And if you trust the service you’re signing up to, give them your real address. These guys are working hard to bring us on board and deserve some slack.

I’ve read lately that retail chain Best Buy is far into a new pilot program where employees get to work whenever they want. They can come and go as they please, as long as their targets and task deadlines are met. There is a hidden bonus here (aside from boosting employee engagement) – targets and tasks need to be thoroughly defined and tracked for the program to work. Both managers and employees have a good incentive to work those parameters out.

The pilot is being expanded from HQ staff to the retail floor. The assumption is that today’s workers can manage their own time, coordinating shifts with fellow employees and working together to meet store targets.

I find the experiment to be very interesting in a Web 2.0 kind of way. What Best Buy is basically doing is to shift power to the worker down the chain. That’s exactly what W2.0 does for the internet user. It shifts power down the chain, making each person a contributor.

Because of this conceptual similarity, I’m wondering how Web 2.0 (or Enterprise 2.0, to be exact) can facilitate this transition at Best Buy. The article didn’t include any data on the kind of IT in place to support this shift in employment dynamics, but it stands to reason that such infrastructure is required.

Furthermore, the assumption that employees have the responsibility and capability to manage themselves as contributors is very exciting to me. Is this shift in mentality that characterizes today’s younger employee the result of growing up into a social internet? Or is the social internet a result of these attitude changes, and if so what caused them in the first place?

I’ve read an article on Ynet that describes the future of jobs, as resulting of Web 2.0. I have a strong disagreement with parts of that article.

To those of us that don’t read Hebrew, here is a summarized translation of what was written:

In the late 90′s decision makers failed to predict the growth in demand for employees of the new generation; programmers, ERP implementers, knowledge managers and others. As a result, public professional education lagged behind market demand.

Today, Web 2.0 is again causing radical changes to the job landscape. People are talking about Second life marketing experts, PHP ninjas, Interface hackers, open source programmers and others.

Early retirement will befall CSRs (who will be replaced by the users themselves, as creators of support knowledge), brand developers (because the ‘long tail’ enforces a move from brands to tags) and we’ll see demand for Crowdsourcers, You Tube/flicker training experts etc.

Researches beginning in the 80′s show a decline in “traditional” industries, and a switch to advanced industries such as telecom and software. Traditional industries will need to incorporate knowledge workers into their production cycles if they wish to survive.

Globalization dictates that today’s third-world countries (such as India and china) will be the producers and service providers while first-world countries will specialize in high-end R&D, marketing and design. So, as a self proclaimed first-world country we need to invest heavily in the skill sets that will enable our workforce to integrate into the above mentioned first-world niches.

Phew, breathe out.

I don’t have a fundamental argument with the writer or the trends he describes. However, I have a strong disagreement with the totality in which he describes the coming changes. I resent a vocabulary of revolution and advise that we adopt a vocabulary of evolution.

It is quite plausible that viral marketing will be another tool to be used by a marketing manager. But the role of ‘marketing manager’ as we know it today will not vanish.

I agree that wikis and blogs are invaluable tools for customer care, but call centers are far from fading into the night.

It just might be that a company will reach a strategic decision to contribute some of its intellectual property to the open source community, but that does not mean you need an “open source programmer“. What you need is a programmer who can submit and collaborate with the open source community; a skill set that can be acquired within a week.

Current employees need not fear the revolution, but rather need to evolve along with the market and the advances in technology and society. The need to evolve is not new. People who work in high-tech learn new technology all the time. So do doctors. So do marketing people. So does almost everyone, with the rate of learning depending on his line of work.

Do we need to have our public education system adapt? Of course; our teachers are no different from marketing managers. If they don’t adapt they will become non-relevant. That is not to say that others will not fill the gap. It only means that the public system will become irrelevant as it was during the first bubble where we saw a proliferation of private institutes such as John Bryce college and Sivan (incidentally, I taught courses at John Bryce at the time).

‘Interface hacker’, or ‘PHP ninja’ are just goofy ways to carry a message across as to the skills and attitude required of the candidate. There is nothing “new” about those jobs. A good programmer is a good programmer. If she doesn’t know everything required for a specific task, she’ll sit and read a book, get some guidance – and do her job.

First and foremost, Web 2.0 is an emergent system. Emergent systems are by definition impossible to predict. Not a single soul managed to predict where Web 2.0 was going, and not a single soul will be able to predict where it will head. All we can say on Web 2.0 is that within it are created new systems that are better as more people use them.

It is the revolutionary (bon) tone that unleashes the demon of hype. Hype begets loss of rationality and loss of rationality begets a bubble. We really don’t need another bubble.

I call to the stop of the dreamy eyed prophets; they are scaring all the sheep.

A pause from my usual posts; I need to share a revelation:

I like to browse the web, looking for interesting blogs and exciting new services. Mostly, registration is required when accessing a new web service and, with some apprehension, I usually acquiesce and provide my details.

I have come to realize that I feel the same nagging apprehension during another kind of exploratory operation – installing a new piece of software on my computer. During long years of using windows, I have come to fear nothing more than bogging down my box with toys and utilities. Each new installation increases the size of your windows registry file which leads to a slowdown of your system’s performance. Install enough applications and your system will crawl. Furthermore, 1 in 10 applications will install nasty hidden thingies onto your box, compromising privacy, hijacking your machine and generally making your life miserable.

When registering to an online service, you do risk being spammed and you do risk a certain loss of privacy but current anti-spam technologies are so efficient (at least in my experience) that generally the risk will be fairly low – and you can register to as many services as you like and your computer’s performance will not be affected at all.

Think about all of the misery people went through in the last 15 years waiting for windows to start, reinstalling the system every couple of months, suffering blue screens and system failures and the universal “why oh why did I have to install that piece of crap utility just when everything was stable” hymn. This must be the single most important benefit to be derived from Web 2.0 and yet I’ve never read or heard anyone comment about it; so I’m naming reduction of system clutter as the forgotten advantage of Web 2.0 and declaring it a general blessing to mankind.

I have a friend who’s in charge of marketing and business development at a local services company. He reviews various start-up companies looking for business opportunities. Yesterday, someone sent him a “Web 2.0 toolbar” for his review and he accidentally forwarded it to me (instead of information regarding a different company he wanted to talk to me about).

The first impression I got looking at that email was that people are not fully aware that Web 2.0 is not a technology. It is an idea.

Yes, technological tools are used to implement the concepts behind W2.0, but they are not its substance. The substance of W2.0 is in what leading technology and academy gurus call emergent, freeform networking effects.

I won’t go into the formal definitions of these concepts, but I’d like to write about emergence, because I think it’s a very interesting idea. Basically, emergence can happen when a system has the ability to use a few simple rules to build structures. These rules will define what kind of structures are built, and what their level of complexity is.

I always think about evolution in this regard. Life, too, is built out of a relatively simple set of building blocks with rules that allow those blocks to be combined into structures. These structures are then combined into larger structures, more complex with each new cycle.

You have amino acids that make proteins. These make sub cellular structures that go on to create cells, organs and blood vessels, until you get an animal, which is a very complex organism.

Evolution has a tendency to give us unexpected solutions to natural obstacles. This is because of the unpredictable factor of mutations and their impact on the organism. Web2.0 follows these guidelines as well, and a true W2.0 application shows signs of emergence because of it’s very own unpredictable factor – the way human beings decide to use and link the information on the web to other bits of information.

Because of this, no one is ever really able to predict which W2.0 application will be successful. We cannot predict if and when a blog will have many readers, nor can we know which wikis will attract enough people to become successful. Sometimes a W2.0 application reaches critical mass, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Similar to the natural world, in W2.0 we see unexpected results to natural problems. Emergence dictates that the organism will adapt and mutate, sometimes in a counter-intuitive manner, to overcome obstacles. I was amazed once I read this blog post by Don Dodge. It describes search efforts after database guru Jim Gray who went missing while sailing his yacht. Here is a quote found in the post:

A number of folks on the distribution list have discussed the possibility of acquiring satellite data…The Microsoft Virtual Earth Team is working with GeoEye and Digital Globe to acquire imagery on the next pass…NASA is working on getting there vis/ir camera on an ER-2. All of our satellite friends are concerned about fog and clouds; and/or ability to find a little red-hulled / white deck boat in a sea of gray pixels. Still, all of us with any bit of satellite experience are willing to take a shot regardless of the low probability of success.

and this as well

Please visit the Amazon Mechanical Turk site to help review satellite images. You will be asked to look at 5 images and determine if they should be examined more closely by the search team.

Jim’s friends have accessed satellite information which is usually used by Google Earth and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth along with a bunch of other data and created a blog site on amazon which gives web users the ability to help locate a missing person at sea. I am fairly certain this has never been done before.

The information was mostly already there, and no new technology was used here. But, a bunch of new connections were made between existing bits of data and the word was put out to thousands of people on the web.

To me, this is a good example of a set of existing structures being linked into a newer, more complex structure. Emergence.

Here is what some people from the coast guard said about it:

Coast Guard officials said they had never before seen such a concerted, technically creative effort carried out by friends and family of a missing sailor. “This is the largest strictly civilian, privately sponsored search effort I have ever seen,” said Capt. David Swatland, deputy commander of the Coast Guard sector in San Francisco, who has spent most of his 23-year career in search and rescue

Of course, Jim has a few powerful friends (Amazon CTO and Google CEO among them) but I think this example is valid since it shows the evolving complexity of Web2.0. Other examples may not be as extravagant, but the principle is the same.

So, next time you talk about user generated content, wikis, blogs or (god forbid) Ajax, XMLHTTP and other techno-geek-talk, remember that underlying all of that is a basic concept that has been discussed and researched since the time of Aristotle.

Objects and patterns can arise from simple interactions in ways that are surprising and counter-intuitive.

(Emergence, Mitchel Resnick and Brian Silverman, MIT Media Laboratory)

Jim was never found. After exhausting all possible leads, the coast guard and his friends called the search off.

For a good visual example of emergence, go here.