wikiSquared

SocialText versus 2 competitors

Communication Guru Robin Good offers a review of what is arguably the Corporate Standard for wiki-spaces -- Socialtext  -- compared to Yahoo Groups or Groove for small business collaboration. As an independent analyst, he shares his experience using Socialtext for project work with small distributed teams.

There's a post-script needed here.  SocialText has just changed (as in *lowered*) its pricing plan. (see note -- below)

February 15, 2005

YahooGroups, Groove Or Socialtext Wiki: My Personal Impressions
Online Collaboration

Social Networking

Thanks to the courtesy of Ross Mayfield, I have been experimenting with my small geographically dispersed team, how effective a wiki can be in supporting projects in which multiple professionals contribute and complement each other.

-------------------

In the past I have made heavy use of technologies at the extremes of the asynchronous collaboration spectrum. From completely free ones such as web-based YahooGroups, which offers everything from a mailing distribution list, to files archiving, polling of the group and calendaring, to much more versatile and rich commercial applications such as the desktop-based P2P full collaboration solution offered by Groove Virtual Office.

While the first approach has severe drawbacks in terms of privacy and intrusion from ads, both in the online facilities as well as in your inbox as a consequence of having signed up for a Yahoo service, the second one has issues relating to the level of computer hardware required, and the performance impact it may have on your other applications. Groove is also plagued by an excessively conservative and rigid access and protection system, great for enterprise customers, but absolutely suicidal for the SOHO and small business user.

I don't know how many of my colleagues and teammates have had to recur to re-install Groove from scratch as a consequence of the difficulty of storing or retrieving access codes once they are created. I myself have just lost my laptop, who died of over-resistance to being patched, and I am at a completely loss as to how I will be able to access again my account on Groove. I know I am not alone in this and I have duly reported my frustrations to Groove in the past. What I am asking is the provision of an option that allows the end user to select the level of security that she wants to enable at installation, while providing the ability to safely store and later retrieve one's own username and password with ease.

On Yahoogroups this is never an issue as, like most web-based systems it allows registered users to safely retrieve their username or password with a few steps that are easy and now familiar to many Internet users.

But, and really I am just speaking of my own experience, I was never completely happy with either one of these systems.

As said, Yahoo annoyed me with too much advertisements both on its online facilities as well as in my inbox.

With Groove, I am never sure who I can safely invite without getting them in a complete nightmare. The issues that most frequently annoy my potential teammates are:

a) the need to download a large application

b) the fact that Groove demands a pretty recent hardware setup with a fast processor, lots of RAM memory and possibly a fast connection to the Internet too.

c) issues dictated by its complexity and richness, whereby not everyone can easily and promptly understand or find out how to achieve something.

d) the fact that Groove works only on the Windows platform. Like for all collaboration tools to be used in cross-enterprise teams, being limited to interoperate only with people having the same type of operating system is a great limitation today.

Happily, Groove can now be utilized also from ANY other operating system, thanks to the great work done by the PoPG team in the UK, who sells access to a supercool service called Blended Groove ($30/user/month) and which provides web-based access to your Groove account from anywhere and with ay type of OS.

But, as you can imagine this doesn't come for free. The Groove full version costs in excess of USD 170, (price actually varies depending on where you are located and in relation to the version you choose).

So, when I headed out to test Ross Mayfield's SocialText wiki workspace, I didn't expect much, as I thought wiki spaces allowed yes for collaborative posting of notes and files but not for much more of what I had become accustomed to find in these more established and popular collaboration solutions.

I was wrong.

As you can find out yourself by accessing the free 30-day try-out offered by SocialText, wikis can provide a very effective collaboration workspace that is both easy-to-use and rich enough in features to support many teamwork-based projects.

While each wiki (there are tens of different types of wiki technologies out there) can be rather different from another one, all wikis share one thing in common: they let users edit web-based content in a very simple and straightforward fashion providing great support to those projects where you need to post, comment, annotate and update information with other team members on a daily or even hourly basis.

Access is as fast as to getting to any standard web page. No software needs to be downloaded, no plugins need to be installed.

Navigation is immediately simple and once you understand how to do two things (create a new page and make a link to it) you can do most anything you want.

You can create pages with assignments, references, attached files and images that your selected teammates can access privately and update, extend, re-organize at any time they wish.

It is as simple as working inside a normal text editor. Text can be formatted very easily, and making a change to an online document requires only a few seconds.

Weblogs and RSS are integrated from day one. You can also create as many "workspaces" as you want and utilize each one of them to manage a different project or workgroup. Each workspace is in fact associated with the people you select and it is extremely easy to remove or invite new team members.

SocialText wiki workspaces generate email notifications, RSS feeds and Update pages that allow any team member to easily monitor and rack any progress and changes to the workspace without needing to access it directly.

Everything that is composed, edited and written in the wiki maintains a full track record of the changes made, and the administrator(s) can easily revert any document /web page to any previous state it was in.

Workspaces in the SocialText wiki can also receive emails from any of the team members, which are immediately organized and made available to all the other workspace members.

For my own experience, this is indeed a great collaboration technology that can be extremely useful to virtual teams of non-technically oriented people. It bridges ease of use and access with all the advantages of being web-based and open to any operating system.

If I were to recommend an alternative solution to the likes of Yahoogroups (and similar ones), Groove and other asynchronous collaboration spaces I would have no hesitation in indicating a wiki, and the Socialtext implementation in particular, as a great alternative to such other approaches.

Having worked daily on the SocialText wiki workspace for a few weeks now, I only have a couple of issues that I personally look forward to see improved:

a) Speed. For a web-based solution like the SocialText wiki, speed is of the essence. I mean, if I click on a Web page to edit it and I need to wait for 20 or more seconds while being on a T1, I may as well go back to Groove.

b) Cost. The SocialText wiki workspace is presently priced at $30/month/user. At this price level Ross is cutting out all of the professionals, SOHO companies and non-profit institutions out there, including a great deal of academic organizations. Not that the tool isn't worth that money each month, but being totally innovative collaborative technology, at least for the mainstream, a much lower entry price would positively guarantee much wider adoption. What is most ironic to me, is that those customers groups are probably the types of organizations that can take best advantage of this new technology, as large corporate accounts take a much longer incubation time to comprehend, test and certify such innovative technologies for adoption. My suggestion therefore is for greater diversification of the price offering and for a substantial lowering of the cost to professionals or small business teams (1-10) like the ones I often operate with.

To those of you that already use a wiki with productive results, I wish to ask which are the true alternatives to Ross' system and what are the differences in terms of costs and features?

For independent publishers, professional consultant, small virtual teams operating online is money spent on the SocialText wiki workspace well spent or should we be looking elsewhere?

posted by Robin Good on Tuesday February 15 2005

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NOTE:  Robin concluded that from his experience with Socialtext, there are only two things he would like to see improve: speed and cost. We recently took a hit in performance because of large customer growth. A planned hardware upgrade addressed this, but we know we need to do better to retain our reptuation for great service and performance. Socialtext customers can contact me to learn more about our performance plans. But Robin's comments on pricing really struck a chord with us:

Cost. The SocialText wiki workspace is presently priced at $30/month/user. At this price level Ross is cutting out all of the professionals, SOHO companies and non-profit institutions out there, including a great deal of academic organizations.

Last week we had a company retreat in Seattle and a big topic was if we were fulfilling our founding mission to serve the Long Tail of wiki users. We already support an open source alternative, Kwiki, and from day one offered non-profit and academic pricing. We have taken steps to realize economies of service without losing our dedication to customer satisfaction. As Robin points out, our solution is a great fit for smaller distributed teams, but if price is a barrier, what's the point? So I took this up in conversation with a number of our customers, and we came up with some new numbers.

So today we are announcing our first price change, and a committment to sustainably serve our smaller (but growing!) customers:

• Socialtext Workspace is available as a hosted service for $10/user/month, with monthly, quarterly and yearly payment options. A Starter Package for 5 users for 1 year is available for $495.

• Non-profit organizations and academic instutitutions get the same great service for $5/user/month or a Starter Package for $245.

Financial Times & Wikis

Today's Financial Times has a piece on Blogs and Wikis.  It talks about them in terms of a tecktonic shift in what's possible. 

For those who subscribe to FT: Financial Times link

And a somewhat fuller version:
-----------------------------------

Tom Foremski: Blogging technology opens doors for enterprises
>By Tom Foremski
>Published: February 23 2005 07:50 | Last updated: February 23 2005 07:50
>>

There is a new phase of the internet emerging and it is being fuelled by a new class of technologies coming out of Silicon Valley that don’t even have a name yet, but they have the potential to be disruptive in their application.

Some have begun calling this new phase Web 2.0, but I prefer the term internet 2.0 because it more accurately encompasses the broad nature of what is happening. Blogging, and blogging-like technologies such as wikis, are shaping up to become one of the most important features of internet 2.0. I would not be surprised if these technologies become recognised as the “killer applications” of the next few years.

Let me explain why I think these technologies are so groundbreaking. I know that most readers are familiar with the term “blogging” and many also read blogs. Their content consists mostly of personal views on the day’s events, and other subjects. The content of blogs, however, is not the interesting part – it is the underlying blogging software and its ability to automate the many tasks required to run a website. No technical skills are required of the writer, beyond being able to use a browser and the ability to type. For less than $100, blogging software such as the popular Movable Type, from Six Apart, is a good enough replacement for online content management systems costing more than 1,000 times as much.

That capability alone would be enough to be potentially disruptive to online publishing business models, but blogging technologies also come with a lot more, a distribution system that targets its audience perfectly. This is done through a feature called “trackback,” and a standard known as RSS (Real Simple Syndication). Trackback automatically detects if someone has published a link to your blog post, and it will publish their comment on your blog. This means that it doesn’t matter if a reader posts a comment on the writer’s blog, or, on another blog – the software tracks it all. The response of readers to a news story, for example, can be plainly seen in real-time. It also means that other bloggers, by writing a comment and publishing a link to the original story, become distributors of that content to their readers. And it shows that if the content is relevant, an audience will find it, and also personally recommend it to others through their blogs.

RSS is another way to distribute blog content. It allows readers to subscribe to a blog and read the content without having to visit the originating site. RSS makes it possible to aggregate the content from several sites within software called a “newsreader.”

Other types of related applications are wikis, which differ from blogs in that any reader can change the content of the web page. Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia written by internet users, is a good example of a wiki. It also showcases how wikis can be used as knowledge management systems.

Blogs have been around for several years and wikis are 10 years old. What is new however, is the realisation of the business uses for these types of technologies. If they can create communities of self-selected readers companies could potentially communicate directly with their customers. And customers can provide direct feedback to the companies. If it is done right, this means potentially huge savings in marketing, and market research activities.

Astonishingly, a very small number of people within the business community have figured this out. Even in Silicon Valley, the birthplace of blogging technologies, the common view is that it is a narcissistic activity by unemployed software engineers with plenty of time on their hands.

A few people are trying to educate the business community through conferences, and interest from corporations seems to be sparking up. For example, in late January 2005, I took part in a journalism panel at the New Communications Forum, one of the first US conferences on corporate use of blogging and wikis. Elizabeth Albrycht and Jennifer McClure, the organisers of the event, were having trouble reaching their modest goal of attracting 80 to a 100 people to the conference. “I don’t know why, but then suddenly, just days before the conference, we were swamped by people wanting to attend, and companies wanting to be sponsors,” says Ms Albrycht. Encouraged by its success, they are now preparing a similar conference for Paris in April, and one for New York in the autumn.

The enterprise sector is being targeted by new start-ups such as Jotspot, founded by Joe Kraus, the co-founder of Excite, once one of the largest search engine companies. “Corporate departments can use JotSpot to quickly and easily build custom business applications,” Mr Kraus says. Other entrepreneurs in this space include Ross Mayfield, of SocialText, also a developer of wikis for corporations. David Galbraith, one of the authors of RSS 1.0 has developed “Wists” a simple tool allowing users to create and publish online catalogues of images. In the UK, Fergus Burns heads Nooked, a company that helps enterprises manage their RSS feeds. And new types of web sites such as Flickr are creating novel communities and group activities that could not have been predicted.

A characteristic of these software technologies is that they behave as “platforms” that enable and support online communities on the internet or in the private corporate intranet. Social software is one label, but a more fitting one might be “community-ware” or even “community-aware” software.

Tom Foremski is a former Financial Times news reporter and now publishes SiliconValleyWatcher.com, a business news blog for northern California’s Silicon Valley. tom@siliconvalleywatcher.com

productivity - right out of the box

It's easy to get carried away by the bells and whistles in a particular piece of software. Perhaps the appeal is even stronger when the underlying software -- wikis in this case -- has a decidely Soviet Heavy Industry look about it.

Earlier today I was reminded of something I learned -- way back when I was a newbie application programmer.  What I learned was that an overwhelming majority of users (that's what we called them), no matter what they claim, are thoroughly happy with a small set of features.

I was reminded of this today as I sat in a corporate meeting listening to the ideas proposed for a workgroup web site. What was being proposed was a dirt-simple application.  This small group wanted to keep track of, and have access to, a particular set of corporate documents.  What they wanted, basically, was a searchable bookshelf.  As I listened, someone pointed out that there are any number of simple web-development software packages that could be used:  simply paint a few screens and point-and-click one's way to create links to online copies of the documents.  What would then be needed was to get a tad of sympathetic help from IT to load this mini application onto the corporate intranet server.

I told them I had a better way.  Better, faster, cheaper.

I told them that I could guarantee any vaguely competent wiki-jock could give them 90% of what they needed in an hour's work.  I told them that in any single day, they could talk about the needs of this kind of an  application in an early meeting, work up a prototype at that meeting, do some test runs, and have a running, web-accessible wiki-space by lunch time.

I also told them that, unlike a (say) Dreamweaver-created app, the inherent flexibilities of wikis would allow extensive revisions over time - revisions that could be done on the fly, by almost any member of the team, without the need to re-write major chunks of their workgroup environment.

Bottom line?  For any need-it-tomorrow, tightly-budgeted, small scale application effort that could easily morph into a larger or more complex 'something' -- wiki software deserves a SERIOUS look.

It's PLAYTIME in the sandbox!

I hear and I forget,
I see and I remember,
I do -- and I learn.

So goes the old chestnut. 

In the case of wikis, it's particularly on target.  Wikis can seem strange and in some ways, Not Ready For Real Important stuff. 

A lot of that is just because they're (relatively) new.  Some of it comes from our own wariness at *really messing something up.*

I've created a WikiSquared Sandbox - a place where you can try anything .  If things get Seriously Chaotic, I can -- YOU can -- simply wipe the slate clean and start afresh.

give it a try - go and make mistakes - go and learn

http://WSSandbox.seedwiki.com
(yeah, there's a certain paucity of imagination in the wiki's name -- it was late at night...)

situated software - a 3 minute wiki

There are two ways to approach the subject of situated software – one is theoretical and the other, grounded.  This is the latter.

Several months ago a friend of mine took a part-time job at a local branch of a national bookseller chain.  There was the usual big corporation/big culture stuff my friend shrugged off with her usual indifference, but there was ONE aspect of the gig that ruffled her.  Scheduling employees, she tells me, is almost Dickensian in its inefficiency. 

Store managers have a MS-Word template that had columns and rows.  Each week, based on some set of rules we're not privy to, names and time-slots are placed into that grid. Seven columns for the days of the week.  N-rows for the number of employees that would be working that week.  Each cell of the grid has a shift time and assignment  (eg:  7-2:30, INF,  7am to 2:30 shift, with the employee staffing the Info desk).  A printed copy of this official schedule is tacked up on the cork board in the employee break-room. 

If you can't make a shift, you talk to the Manager On Duty, and he or she uses White-Out to change your assignment.

Switching shifts is much, much harder.

Essentially, it is up to the employees to find others with whom they can swap assignments.  In the best of conditions, you find yourself with a inconvenient shift, you walk up to a fellow bookseller and say “hey, wanna switch your Saturday night downstairs cash assignment TO one of my early morning shelving jobs?”

It's rarely the best of conditions. First of all, the book store has a LOT of employees who work very irregular hours.  Some people work a few hours each day.  Others, on weekends.  Still others, maybe one or two shifts a week.  So?  It becomes very hard to 'run into' a colleague to ask for a shift-swap. 

People find work-arounds.  On the break-room cork board we find a bunch of Post-It notes. 

The problem of irregular shifts among part-timers is still a big one.  It's entirely possible that the person you have some sort of easy-going friendship with won't see your Post-It until it's after the time you needed swapping. 

So what happens with this system?  What happens is that booksellers realize they're probably not going to get a swap.  Soooooo .... on the day of their shift, they 'call in sick.' Managers are put on the spot to find a replacement.  Fellow booksellers feel put upon as they have to cover for a co-worker who's clearly not really sick.

Now, I saw this and I thought, this is possibly the world's simplest problem to solve with a wiki.  I figured 'my application' would take about 10 minutes to figure out.   I was wrong, it took about 3 minutes (using SeedWiki -- a place this small is free.  'not a bad deal)

Here's what the Big Book Store does now.

Once a week it scans the Word document. ($49 sale scanner at the local CompUSA).  It sends that picture-of-text to a wiki.

The wiki is basically one page.  Smack in the middle of that page is the image of the schedule.  Above, Below, and to the side of that image are messages from employees – custom being different employees choose different fonts and colors to make their messages stand out from one another.

And those messages?

Hey, anyone wanna switch your Saturday night downstairs cash assignment TO one of my early morning shelving jobs?” -Tom

Tom – I can't do it THIS week, but ask me again.  -Kij

How about YOU taking my Saturday morning upstairs zoning in exchange for your 5-closing shift. -davidA

Tom, I could use the extra money – I'll take the shift – no need for a swap.  -Bob

 

... etc etc

 

And the upshot of this simple-as-dirt wiki space?

Employees get a better way to manage their time. and Managers have to deal with fewer surprises.

You can try out my (ahem) "pre production" version of this wiki:   -  http://breakroom.seedwiki.com

 

YOYOW - you own your own words!

Five words.  Five words can define the nature of a space.  Five words can be the critical difference between an on-line site that feels like a vibrant community and one that feels like an echo-y walk through an empty corridor.

Stewart Brand was one of the co-founders of the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (the WELL) and early on he coined this enigmatic prose. The idea of "owning one's own words" was the fuel for a years-long exchange on the WELL -- the YOYOW forum.
(see: http://www.well.com/member_agreement.html )

From those conversations came a legal document - it has do with the legal framework in which WELL patrons participate in the conversations, with rights and responsibilities.

the core of it?

The WELL is not the publisher or author of any works posted by its members. It is a passive service for storage and dissemination of the works that WELL members may choose to post and distribute via The WELL. WELL management does not screen works before they are posted, and no prior approval is required for posting. The WELL disclaims all copyright and ownership in such works and all responsibility for them.

You - the participant in an online conversation - and no one else, are responsible -- morally, ethically, legally -- for the words you create on the screen. For organizational creators of wikis, this is an important reference. 

Wiki-spaces often still feel like lawless Wild West towns - too many guns, too many saloons, too few lawmen.  Creative friction is one thing -- barely contained anarchy, another...

When we create a company wiki, there's often a legal department that wrings its collective hands and asks us to clarify issues of content and ownership.  What we do in those cases is point them in the direction of the YOYOW statement. 

When a company defines its wiki-spaces as just that -- spaces -- it's moving away defining itself as a publisher of ideas.    Think of your company's wikis as a bunch of park tables commandeered by a group of people who've just come from the beach.  Neither the park office nor your company is responsible for what's said - be it incorrect or libelous.  What you (your company and your local park's office) *are* responsible for is making sure your venue isn't the site of illegal activities.

So?   

When you're lucky, your group's wiki becomes rabble-y, raucus-y, and irreverent.

But never irrelevant.

as you arrive, check in here!

A human generation ago newcomers to the freshly minted Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (the WELL) were met with a prompt for their first 'posting:' As You Arrive Check In Here!

It was a simple enough thing.  It was a prompt to remind members (WELL-beings) they were entering a space set aside for an exchange of ideas, that they were dealing with people by way of the pipette of the ASCII character set.  In the millions of keystrokes made by the communities at the WELL, you were never far from knowing that 'hlr' gave up technology for gardening on Sundays, that 'bluefire' was a surfer, that 'lindsey' was a struggling artist who needed a hip replacement, that 'tex' was a writer better than any two people you've ever known, and that 'margaret' was a friend and supporter of Doug Engelbart's ideas. 

Ten years later I was responsible for creating an online community populated by technology- and change-management professionals. 

What happened, over time, is that participants occasionally introduced themselves. The bad news of this development was that introductions tended toward bloodless Corporate Speak. 

"Hi - I'm George in the Technology Services/Methodology group -- 'did my St Charles work 3 year ago,  assignments so far included UtiliCorp, Coca Cola, and Ford Motors (Europe). I'm currently working out of the Geneva office - doing CMS for the Pirelli/AutoStrada joint project. "

Well - now THAT was special ...

I chided my colleagues about this.  I told them what we needed was to be reminded of the flesh-and-blood people with whom we're sharing ideas.  I told them we needed to talk about our interests, our passions, the cities we've lived in, the wines we drink.  I told them about the WELL, and about the As You Arrive topic.

We created the As-You-Arrive topic in the global conversational exchange.  It became wonderfully successful, a place where colleagues would show a side of themselves that would never have been known otherwise. It became one of the foundations of trust we built on as we floated half- (and even less!) baked ideas.

And so it must be with wikis.

As we create these environments, we've got to remember that participants need to feel comfortable with the sense of place we foster.  Each workgroup has its own culture.  Our job is to understand some of these cultures and to do what we can to make sure our wiki-spaces are compatible. 

Our success depends on it.  As with so much of what we do, so very little rests on the technology -- and so very much rests on the fact we're dealing with making changes to a large chunk of peoples' lives - their work experience. 

trying wikis on for size

Choosing wiki software for your group means something of a shopping trip.  Some of the factors you'll be looking for include: price (especially if you're just exploring possibilities), reliability,  the software's ability to be customized and the kind of support you can expect.  You'll probably also want to look at the company that's providing tools and support and whether there's a business success story that seems  aligned with your group's goals.   And, far from least importantly, you'll need to consider your group as an audience -- whether they are comfortable with a particular products balance between ease-of-use and technical bells-and-whistles. 

Here's a listing of some of the wares you might look at:  http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiFarms

communities of conversation or street corners of schmoozing?

I've been thinking about how wikis can be a platform for community outreach efforts.  Which, in turn, made me think about the nature of the exchanges that take place online, the nature of the kinds of social groupings that might take place around these exchanges and the goals of any outreach effort.

My best guess is that, absent a fixed community of people, the textual to and fro' in online venues is somewhat superficial.  [To put this in context: there's a continuum of what passes for exchanges when people are online. At one side sits chat-room stuff:   'hey-anyone from Dayton?  (Grin)' or "cu l8r"  (see you later) ].  On t'other, are exchange styles like the ones we can see in  years-long topic threads on the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (The WELL).  In the case of wiki-space venues, I'm happy to say,  exchanges are slightly closer to the latter...

We shouldn't beat ourselves up about this. 

There's a lot to be said for casual conversations.  We kibbitz -- we talk about the weather, we talk about something funny we saw on the way to work.   You know, the water-cooler stuff of human exchange.  Our banter helps us 'measure' the people we're with.  It helps us figure out if they're people we want to spend more time with, or, in the case of online conversations, whether they're people who's ideas seem interesting enough to take up our time. 

So here's an idea.  Maybe your organization's online-outreach efforts should be seen as a fishing net  -- a way to gather people with a set of likely interests and who may or may not wish to pursue online conversations.  For those that do want to dive deeper, your company can provide tools and methods.  Some online, some real world.  For everyone else, your outreach has put an idea in the back of their minds.  They may return.   

Interview with Ross Mayfield, SocialText CEO

In the world of wikis and business, there's currently ONE player that's making a significant difference -- a Palo Alto company called SocialText.  It's client list reflects the growing conviction by Big Business that there's serious value in these online environments. 

A year ago, Ross Mayfield, SocialText's CEO, was interviewed.  Notes from that interview...