Blocking social sites: good management or pushing people to mobile Web?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Community, Business, Internet, Mobile, Microsoft on
Sure the iPhone is cool, but how many people are buying a smartphone just to get Web access at work?
A lot of our friends who blog using LiveJournal (probably the most community-oriented blogging platform) have commented recently that they’re losing access to LiveJournal and other sites at work - so they’re buying a smartphone so they can carry on accessing them.
I keep wondering how much of the recent jump in smartphone Web browsing is down to phones being almost good enough, networks being almost fast enough and data plans being almost cheap enough - and how much of it is annoyed or paranoid people being forced to put their social network in their pocket to stay in touch during the working day.
Some people are losing access to IM as well, which is stupidly counter-productive because it’s a fantastic work tool. Blocking IM is like not providing a telephone. I’m less certain about work use of social networks and blogs, because although they have some work benefits like networking, it’s often the employee rather than the company that gets the benefits - I might be networking to find a contact for my current project but if I move on, that contact isn’t much use to my company. And while I could see your status on Facebook, I could see it on IM as well, without the potential distractions. And let’s face it, Facebook is 99% distraction…
The Telegraph reported last year that 70% of UK companies agree with me and are blocking sites like Facebook. But I - and they - might well be wrong. Dell announced today that it’s giving all employees access to Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Bebo, Orkut, Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed, Plurk and other social sites because productivity issues pale into insignificance besides being out of touch with your customers. Dell opened up to Facebook weeks ago so staff could join in a competition it was running, but given how hard Dell is trying to look like a company that listens to customers, it’s useful for employees to be able to defend the company, solve user problems or just hear what its customers are saying to their friends. Passionate Dell employees are to feel more appreciated than the British Airways employees who defend the company in Facebook groups on their own time.
Marc Smith at Microsoft Research has spent years tracking online interactions - not to accuse people of wasting time, but to understand online social dynamics. He thinks Dell has the right idea because it’s finding out more about itself and “self awareness is such a powerful tool for businesses.” You could spend a lot of money on surveys, focus groups, BI tools and company meetings to find out what customers think of you and communicate that around the company. Or you could let everyone rub shoulders with customers and find out first hand.
If you want your employees keeping your users happy online, on top of not blocking their access, Smith suggests thinking of ways to give them credit for the time they put in helping them. Microsoft in Brazil was worried when all the discussion on a once-popular area of the official site went away; it turned out it had moved to a newsgroup that was tracked by Smith’s Netscan tool, because people liked being able to see when they contributed the most answers. If employees want access to Facebook, turn that into a business benefit by tracking who helps the most customers. Some supervision is going to be a good thing, along with a policy on what people can and can’t say; you can go into detail, or you can stick with something simple like the Microsoft blogging policy, which states that you have to be smart to work at Microsoft so don’t do anything stupid online.
But even if people are reading Facebook and LiveJournal and other sites for fun rather than work, I’m pretty sure management rather than censorship is the solution. This is nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with management and motivation. If you trust your users to have a phone on their desk and not spend the whole day talking to friends, can’t you trust them not to waste the day chatting in IM pr throwing food on Facebook?
People who lose a day to reading non-work Web pages of any kind - whether it’s Facebook or the BBC News or eBay or cat macros or anything else - are goofing off and you should be able to tell that through your normal management procedures. If you can’t tell whether someone is doing a good job by what they deliver, counting up the time they spend not working isn’t the answer, but monitoring is better than saying to your employees that you don’t trust them to behave professionally. Now that the work-life boundaries are not so much blurred as completely muddied, someone who spends an hour after lunch staying in touch with friends probably spends an hour after dinner catching up on work too.
I remember the week I discovered Usenet (my supervisor introduced me to it the first time we discussed my MSc thesis). I don’t remember much else I did that week; it was a huge distraction and I plunged straight in for hours on end. And at the end of the week I looked at how much time I’d wasted and thought ‘I’d better not spend too much time on this, I have work to do’.
Plus, once you’ve pushed them onto a mobile device that uses 3G rather than your Wi-Fi then you’ve lost all chance of tracking what they’re up to - and maybe they’re no longer as passionate about defending your company online either.
-Mary
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Technological fixes for economic and social problems don’t work
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in People, Community, Privacy, Wireless, Security, Internet on
I’m guessing that most of you have already emailed your MEPs with a message roundly condemning the stealth attempts to pass legislation that will allow media companies to disconnect ordinary people from the Internet permanently just for the suspicion that they may be filesharing.
If you haven’t may I join my voice to those urging you to do so? It won’t take long (thanks to the folk at MySociety.org) and it will help preserve your rights online as well as saving the small and medium sized ISPs that do so much to keep Internet access prices competitive. It’s that last bit that’s key to IT professionals - the measures that the legislation proposes are too expensive and complex for most ISPs to implement, which will mean you’ll be left dealing with with just BT and Virgin for your business internet access - and I can guarantee that your monthly connectivity bills won’t go down as a result…
Here’s my letter. Don’t send exactly the same one - it’s your thoughts and words that matter:
I am writing to you as a constituent asking you to exert whatever influence you have with members of the IMCO and IMTR committees of the European Parliament to vote against amendments 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7 that have been introduced into the Telecoms package.
These amendments were introduced under the influence of industry lobbyists whose interests are in the attempted maintenance of obsolete business models that have become unsustainable; not only that, but they are an attempt to subvert earlier rejection by Parliament of explicit legislation to the same ends. The proposed measures are disproportionate, unworkable in practice, violate privacy and personal data security and would lead to entire families being denied access to the internet through the presumed guilt of one member. The European Parliament has already voted against them - they should not be passed by hiding them inside other important and much needed legislation.
Not only are they disproportionate, putting the onus on ISPs to detect and implement the measures required by the amendments is both an unfair measure and technically unfeasable. Many UK ISPs are small or medium sized businesses, and do not have the funds required to invest in wholesale tracking of their users’ actions. The amount of work required to implement these measures is large, and the techniques complex. The only organisations able to do this will be the incumbent carriers, reinforcing what is a de facto monopoly by putting small ISPs out of business.
There is, in fact, no way of identifying the difference between legitimate and illegitimate traffic in the manner described in the amendments. Many users use the same tools that are used to download copyright violations to install Linux, or get updates from Microsoft. If the tools proposed by the legislation aren’t perfect these innocent users will be tarred with the same brush as anyone violating copyrights. Even if it is possible to determine the type of data being accessed, it’s impossible to determine the actual state of the rights associated with it, or the intentions of the rights holders.
Innocent users also face the risk of having their home networks hijacked by third parties without their knowledge - and losing access as a result of third party actions. I’m more technically aware than most people, but it still took several weeks for me to find that someone elsewhere in my street was using filesharing software over my wireless network. Most home users don’t have access to the tools or the skills to find and identify these situations, yet the proposed legislation will make them liable for whatever happens on their home wireless networks.
I’m a technology journalist by trade, but I come from a technical background and helped found one of the UK’s first national ISPs, and also helped build the online presences of many major high street brands. The Internet has provided a boost to the economy, and these measures will reduce access to the Internet and by closing down small ISPs will increase the costs to the very users the European online economy needs.
The committees are scheduled to vote on this package tomorrow, 7th July, and I urge you to do what you can to have these amendments rejected and, failing that, to vote against the package yourself should it be presented for a vote by the Parliament as a whole.
I’m sorry that I’m sending this message with less than 24 hours to go, but I only found out about this today myself: so please do what you can to prevent these egregious and dangerous measures being codified into European law and to ensure that the European Parliament continues to represent the interests of its electors, even where those conflict with the short-term advantage of multinational corporations and their lobbyists.
Yours sincerely,
Simon Bisson
Remember you have a voice and a point of view, and it’s one that deserves to be heard.
–Simon
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Join the (beta) community
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Community, Beta, Software, Microsoft on
TechEd is Microsoft’s instant university, a place where developers and IT pros go to get information about the current state of all things Microsoft. It’s not really a place for big announcements - though the odd one sneaks out.
Most of the news from this year’s event has been about software moving from one stage of beta to the next. Whether it’s a new beta (like Silverlight 2) or a long running upgrade saga finally getting close to release (like SQL Server 2008) it’s not like a new release of Windows or a new Visual Studio. If anything we’re quickly moving into a world where the big bang launch is a thing of the past. Apple may be still spinning its “one more thing”, but even Snow Leopard will just be an evolutionary move. Instead public betas and community previews will become the way things get done, and the Web 2.0 perpetual beta will be the way of the rest of the IT business works.
Is this the end of the computing world we’ve come to know?
The answer is both a yes and a no.
It’ll be harder to write a software news story, that’s for sure, but that’s not really a problem. What’s really important will be the change in the way IT pros relate to the companies providing them with software. Commuunity-based development programmes mean that you’ve got a lot more clout than you’ve ever had. Instead of passively installing the code you’ver been given you’ve now got a chance to influence its development - so you can avoid big bang deployments that dissapoint and frustrate your users.
So what should you be doing?
It’s worth setting aside some hardware for test and development - and with virtualisation software now bundled free with most OSes, you can probably make do with one multi-core box, saving on space and power. Then sign up for the programmes related to the software and tools you intend to use. Once you’ve got the code you want, start using it the way you would in production, using real data (and if you can, real users).
The most important part of the process is possibly the hardest - you need to take time to join beta communities and take part in the discussions. Report bugs by all means, but also engage with the company representatives and describe your usage scenarios and any deficiencies you see. You’ll be surprised by how many people agree with you, and while you may not get an instant response from the developers, or even see the changes you want in the version you’re testing, your points will have been noted, and will be used to help define the next release of the software.
Beta software is an important tool. It lets you prepare for what’s next, and helps you understand new capabilities and interactions with existing tools. It’ll also make you ready for support demands - another area where beta communities can help, as you’ve got a ready-made peer group where you can share problems and solutions,
It’s a brave new community out there - so why not dive in and make the most of it.
–Simon
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