Michael Fauscette

Cloudsourcing, new options in the cloud

As we go into the week of Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference I was thinking back to last year. I remember walking over to the conference center and feeling a little annoyed that there were "clouds" on almost everything, buildings, buses, cars, people, bus stops...you name it, it had a cloud stuck on it. Now that is good marketing hype I guess but at the time that was about all it was for me. I mean I did understand what the "new" words meant (actually nothing really new, just new ways of saying things). A year later there probably will still be a bunch of clouds on my walk over but I have to say I'm getting used to the term. Ther are finally some new things that I think we should talk about when it comes to "cloud" (and if you know me, you know that it is still a little hard to say the actual word).

Before continuing the discussion let's define a few things just so you know what I'm talking about (and that my definitions may not be exactly like some of the other ones you'll hear). First let's talk about what I use the word cloud to describe (when I'm not talking about something fluffy in the sky). For me, cloud is simply the computing infrastructure need to do some computing work (servers, storage, plumbing to connect to the Internet) but sitting somewhere in a data center. It's essentially computing power served up as a utility (think electricity or cable TV). From that simple thought then, there are 2 basic types of clouds (not cumulus & nimbus), I mean classified based on location: !. Public cloud and 2. Private cloud. The public cloud is, well public (duh), like Amazon Web Services or Salesforce.com Force.com platform. You can pay a fee and use the computing power offered by the public "utility" provider. Private clouds are restricted to some specific individual or group use, like GE's datacenters. You can't call GE up on the phone and buy computing power from them (well, at least not yet). The folks at Appirio put together a very cool interactive map of the Cloud Ecosystem today. They do break out 3 types of clouds, public, private and vendor but for me, I'd just call vendor the same as public (yes, I realize you're buying actual applications in the vendor segmentation but I just don't really see a fundamental difference, I'm still paying for the use of some computing resource AND the use of an app). In all these cases you are essentially using the cloud to deliver some cloud application or other cloud service (like storage or security). You might pay for the use of the cloud app + the computing power underneath but the concept is still the same. The real value to a business with this cloud concept is flexibility, adaptability and potentially cost savings. (there's a whole different line of thinking that I have around the effect of utility computing or perhaps I should say commodity computing on pricing. If it's a commodity and scalable then the pricing should be driven down...anyway, that's not what I wanted to talk about today)

So the new thing that I'm starting to see, or perhaps it's not exactly new but actually the extension of a concept. The idea is something that I've heard called software in a service or cloudsourcing. Its really an extension of the business process outsourcing (BPO) business that exists today. There could be significant value generated to businesses by combining the two concepts, cloud computing and outcourcing a business process to a 3rd party. It takes cloud to the next step and offers the valuable combination for business of leveraging cloud computing + a cloud app (or cloud service) + business process execution in one bundle. The concept is still forming but I think it will be one of the big trends for the next few years as more offerings emerge and businesses look to offload non-core processes to less costly solutions.

Social software adoption, how are we doing?

I was going through some IDC survey data that I got back recently and I think there's an interesting story to tell. My group does a regular survey 2-4 times a year on software applications, called Appstats. We have some fixed questions for trending and some questions that change out each time so that we can look at many different parts of the applications markets. this last survey I included some social software questions. One in particular is interesting: Which of the following Enterprise 2.0 technologies do you currently use now or plan to implement in the next 12 months? Here are the results from 503 senior business and IT personnel across businesses from mid-market to enterprise:

Some things of course are no surprise, like collaboration platforms are the most prevalent in current use (they have been around the longest after all). I was a little surprised that the use of web 2.0 tools like facebook and Twitter for customer service surveyed at 46.3% using or plan to use in the next 12 months. I suppose the current "over" hyping of success stories in the application of these tools to customer interactions has caused a bit of a bubble. As I look at each individual app I do have some reaction, blogs and wiki's are getting more main stream, Ideasourcing seems to have gained momentum this year...things like that. BUT the real story to me is the overall trend, no category is below 40% (using + intend to use) which is quite an increase from the survey's we did less than a year ago. To put it another way, at least half of the companies surveyed are using or plan to use social software tools in the next 12 months. Social software is gaining momentum and that momentum has seen a significant upsurge in only 12 months. Exciting...

It's not about recovery, it's about reinvention!

Ever since Lehman Bros collapsed and we went into this accelerated financial tumble I have routinely been asked by vendors, end users, the financial investment community, and well, by most everybody I talk to, when I think the recovery will start and how long it will take. And of course the analyst in me keeps trying to answer but honestly, more and more, I'm convinced that it's not the right question. I don't believe we can or maybe even should recover if that means going back to the "good old days". I am starting to believe that in a very many ways things will be fundamentally different (maybe are already fundamentally different). We've been moving toward different for a while. The promise of the web, which clearly was something different than what we thought in 1999, has started to play out. The tech industry itself has been in a different industry cycle since the "recovery" from our implosion in 2001-02. That was a surprise too, that tech is behaving much like other industries although our cycles are more compressed (but then our whole history is more compressed than other industries).

Anyway, so what do I mean? I believe that tech, especially software is taking on a different look but that's not really where I am going with this post. We're in a business change cycle that is widespread and far reaching IMHO. The social web is changing personal behavior, personal expectations that spill over into our business lives (well, maybe I should say the line between personal and business is getting very blurry, but that's a subject for a different post). Our expectations of technology and how we interact with it has changed. Face it, in general enterprise systems are just not a great experience and businesses don't generally operate in a transparent, open, social model where everyone has a voice. The old industrial age hierarchical model is suboptimal for the information worker. In the old (or is that current) model information is power so it's hoarded. In the new world information is powerful when it is set free, the exact opposite of the current status quo.

We're poised on the edge of a business reinvention. The power of the social web can and is being applied to business and will drive a substantial business change over the next few years. The software industry will exhibit some of those social changes and will also emerge with a re-focused business and refined business models. Some outward signs of the reinvention:

Software companies:

• Tech mega-vendors (which I written about here) will accelerate consolidation around their ecosystems
• Hybrid licensing models will prevail over pureplays balancing efficiency and profitability with customer choice (SaaS, open source and on premise)
• Partners will also emerge in a hybrid model that blurs the lines between system integrator, independent solution vendor and value added reseller
• Significant consolidation will continue in the partner ecosystem for the next few years
• Open source software will continue to grow in acceptance and will increase it's share of the application budgets
• Software companies will increase their social software offerings significantly as customer demand steadily increases. Offerings will include stand-a-lone social applications, social platforms and embedded social functionality in traditional software categories
• The demand for mobile and real-time solutions will drive innovation in software products
• Silo'ed products will give way to fully integrated process-based apps (the impact of SOA)
• UI level integration / mashup capabilities will be embedded and commonplace in the enterprise as end users require the ability to individualize the way they interact with business systems

Social Business movement:

• People become the core of the business focus (people as the platform)
• Business transparency becomes the cornerstone of compliance
• Shared control versus centralized control
• Ongoing incremental problem solving becomes essential (versus crisis problem solving that results from centralized problem solving) as shared control starts to involve a broader range of individuals
• Crowd sourced ideas (internal and external) drive innovation in products and services
• Customer, employee, supplier and partner interaction becomes a conversation
• Service delivered "when, where and how" customers choose
• Managing becomes coaching
• Information silos are broken down
• Prediction is a viable tool based on the analysis of social data (applies to employees, customers and partners)

I'm sure there are many reinvention attributes I've missed but hopefully you get the idea. What should we add?

Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0

I'm a believer and supporter of the social business transformation that is starting, that should come as no surprise to anyone who reads this blog. There are a wealth of concepts that could be applied to business that were learned (or at least started) by web 2.0 and the social web. Also, the nature of web 2.0 lends itself to grass roots and viral expansion so many businesses have found themselves "doing" social business without ever having made a decision to implement a change. While I applaud these heroics, I have for some time had an uncomfortable feeling about the scaleability or even the advisability of this occurrence (not that I think these efforts could or should be stopped). The point is that if a business wants to effect a true transformation to a social business there must be a broad culture shift in the organization in addition to making tools and processes that enable the change available. I spent a good deal of my early software career managing the implementation of large software projects and I can say with some authority that without a methodology, a risk mitigation approach, the correct skills and change management a project is doomed. Businesses need enterprise class, scaleable social tools, social processes and knowledgeable assistance to pull off this level of business transformation.

Earlier this week some colleagues announced a partnership that is both good news for businesses that want to do social transformation projects but also an indication that social business is growing up. The Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0 is a venture / partnership between Dion Hinchcliffe (Hinchcliffe & Co.), Michael Krigsman (Asuret) and Ross Mayfield (SocialText). If you want to read the details and some analysis of the announcement check out Sameer Patel's blog, and also Paul Greenberg's ZDNet blog, they both had done a great job providing the details of the announcement. The partnership is important for several reasons:

1. This is a "grown up" approach to implementing e2.0 / social business initiatives, one of the few I've seen so far. If the social business transformation is to happen it needs this kind of robust and complete approach.

2. The partnership brings together: a. proven expertise and a methodology, b. an established and proven risk management methodology and risk management software application and c. a robust, enterprise class social platform on which to build and deploy the necessary tools.

3. The potential for accelerated evolution of methods, processes and practices as their framework, in it's new, more complete form is applied to real world problems and the learning that happens there captured and rolled back in to the approach.

4. This approach has a much greater chance of creating success and frankly, the more successful social businesses we help create the more we can make other businesses realize the power of this transformation.

Here's a graphic representation of the Pragmatic e2.0 framework:

Congratulations to the partners, we'll be looking for some compelling success stories in the near future!

Cloudy days

Oracle OpenWorld's done for this year and I'm now spending the weekend trying to catch up from a week at the conference and get the post-conference write up and analysis started. As I think back on the week one of the most entertaining events was listening to Larry Ellison at the Financial Analysts briefing rant about cloud computing (for the 2nd year in a row). Its a well known fact that Larry is not fond of the term (frankly it took me over a year to get comfortable using it myself so I can empathize here). Last year's rant (again at the Financial Analysts briefing at OOW) yielded one of my favorite Ellison cloud quotes: "the technology industry is the only industry that's more fashion conscious than women's fashion, I'm telling my marketing people to put cloud on everything"...a classic. This year the much quoted sound bite is "cloud computing is the future, it's also the present and the past". As I was thinking back on these quotes and giggling (which I suppose could cause a scene as I'm sitting in my local coffee shop, Phil'z, really awesome BTW, you should check it out if your in San Francisco...and no I didn't get sponsored to say that) it occurred to me that there's an important point lodged somewhere inside these funny lines, have we clouded (sorry couldn't resist) the SaaS message to much with all of the hype and jargon and are we obscuring the goodness in to much marketing? Do customers understand what we mean by cloud (actually do we all understand too)? And what about the other "technical" marketing things we keep seeing like multi-tenant / single tenant (sorry to bring this up again, but it's key to my point, here's my take on that subject), do they help prospects understand and adopt SaaS or are they in the way?

SaaS applications are growing ahead of the rest of the software industry, that much we can clearly see. But why? Personally I see lot's of benefit to consuming software in the accepted SaaS model and I think that the customers that are buying it do as well. I'm starting to think though that this may be in spite of our marketing instead of because of it. OK, maybe that's not completely fair, the important messages are also there, things like pay for what you consume, easier to implement (my post on that), faster time to value, lower TCO (although that one's up for debate), don't need to maintain your own infrastructure, simpler upgrades, easier to access from mobile / multiple devices, etc. But I do think our fascination with clouds and technical jargon is doing some damage to our overall messaging. What are SaaS or cloud applications anyway? In my definition cloud apps are SW applications that are sold on a subscription basis (so the software is leased rather than purchased), maintained by the vendor (patches and upgrades are installed by the vendor or the vendor's partner) and the app is available over the internet. The SW can be located at the SW vendor's data center, a partner's data center or even the clients datacenter by the way, but the customer pays 1 fee (not 1 to the vendor and 1 to the hosting partner). As far as I'm concerned that's it, nothing else is required.

Do customers want multi-tenant over single tenant? I don't think so, although some recent IDC survey data came up contrary to that point. On drilling into that more though, I think that survey helps prove my point, we've marketed multi-tenancy so much customers have started to think it's important to them, but can they tell us why...I doubt it. Multi-tenancy is only good for the vendor unless the vendor passes the cost savings on to the end customer...do you think that's happening? Oracle's Anthony Lye has very openly stated that Oracle prices multi-tenant and single tenant deployment the same for on demand apps (and the new Oracle Fusion Apps are architected so that they can be deployed in either model, customer choice is a good thing). Given the same pricing structure which do you think a customer would choose, a shared database with other customers (and yes, I know that it's very secure) or their own database? With their own database they get more flexibility. Alright, enough on that line of thought, you can read what I've already said about that if you want. My real point is that we need to look at the messaging again and focus on the value, on the benefit to the customer, not on technical jargon that doesn't really matter to the customer. I suppose that's a good marketing lesson no matter what your product for that matter. It's very important right now to SaaS or cloud vendors though, because I believe we've over marketed things that are not important to the customer and the real message is getting lost. Let's start spending more time telling customers that consuming apps in the cloud model has all sorts of goodness that comes along with it and no more time on cloudy messages about architecture (OK, you can save those slides for the IT organization briefing part of the sales process).

Could Twitter change customer service?

Alright, if you have caught me ranting lately about how Twitter isn't a new customer service tool, but only an enabler (or I guess a channel if you must) then this post may surprise you because I guess I've been proven wrong (now I know that part won't surprise most of you). So I will continue to contend that as previously applied to customer service, Twitter doesn't really prove a scaleable solution. Let's take a couple of the most popular cases, Comcast and JetBlue. In both cases the companies use of Twitter originated as a single customer service agent's attempts to use Twitter to help customers when, where and how the customer wanted aid. Over time the companies accepted this grass roots effort and started to add agents to create "scale". Now certainly Comcast's Frank Eliason and his efforts to change a very soiled Comcast image through his use of Twitter @ComcastCares is a very well known story and I would never say that his team's efforts haven't made a difference. The problem though, for me, with this type of heroics is that the only way to scale is to add more agents. Each agent can only handle a reasonable range of customers at any one time and the interaction happens outside of the companies customer service system. There's no issue tracking to resolution, no easy way to get answers from Twitter into the company knowledge base, no connection to the customer record to access customer information, history and record issues / resolutions, no issue cueing and routing...well, you get the point. The workflow isn't manageable and the only way to scale is by adding agents, not really a reasonable enterprise solution. Interfacing a customer service system to Twitter (and other networks like Facebook) could offer a better enterprise solution (like salesforce.com's service cloud solution, for example). The combination of the real-time conversation of Twitter with the more traditional customer service solution, allowing the customer service agent to move the conversation into an environment that is comfortable to the customer (that when, where and how concept again) while managing the interaction in the enterprise system is a powerful and reasonable enterprise approach.

That's what I believed before this week, then I read about Best Buys' new approach to Twitter and I had one of my "ah ha" moments. Best Buys, who have branded themselves in the past as the discount electronics store that offers more knowledgeable employees in their retail stores over other discount electronics retailers and even offered speciality help with it's GeekSquad has launched a service that uses Twitter to answer questions. The program, which is called Twelpforce, is a pretty simple idea, employees sign up on a website with their Twitter ID and when they Tweet using the hash-tag #tweplforce the Tweet is moved to the @twelpforce handle with attribution back to the employee (via @employee handle). The Tweet also shows up on the web site www.bbyconnect.appspot.com (Best Buy Connect), where all Best Buy Twelpforce Tweets are aggregated for search and review. All the employee instructions are also posted in a most transparent way right on the public web site (bravo!). This approach is about as web 2.0ish as you can get, transparent, spreading input across a wide / broad base, shared control and allowing employees to self select what and when they answer questions while using wisdom of crowds to provide a set of answers and comments for customers to review. The concept could work because it's not replacing traditional customer service but instead augmenting it in a new way, it brings the experience of asking the expert in the store to an online searchable real-time conversation. I suppose this process only works for certain types of businesses where there is a broad set of very knowledgeable employees outside of customer service that could address customer questions. It will be interesting to watch as this service, which is only a week or so old, catches on with customers and employees.   

Creating a Culture of Transparency

I was reading an article yesterday that got me thinking again about the culture shift that is necessary for a business to embrace the social web. The article from ChiefExecutive.net discussed the adoption of Web 2.0 principals by CEO's and supported the idea that CEO's are starting to "get it" and support social business initiatives. The article is very well thought out but I'm not here to review articles so I'll leave it at that and you can check it out yourself. If you read this blog you no doubt have read that I believe that e2.0 or social business initiatives are more about culture change in an enterprise than anything else including technology. The general leadership model used in business today is based on a model that grew up around the industrial revolution and has remained mostly consistent since then. That model, the hierarchal or top down model, is not conducive to the kind of culture needed for building a social business. It also was in general, anything but transparent. Web 2.0 has taught us that impactful change comes from democratization of interaction across a wide base. This horizontal network effect becomes the shared base of power for all subsequent actions. As you can imagine sharing power and control across a wide group is counter to the hierarchal leadership model where control is tightly held in a small group.

So if CEO's are starting to embrace social concepts for their businesses then that means the leadership model is starting to change in these organizations...or at least it's starting to get very stressed. At the core of this change though is the concept of transparency. The software that enables social business has inherent transparency built in but is that enough? Unfortunately no, just because you enable information flow doesn't mean that it will actually flow anywhere. Underneath the software there's a need for a culture of transparency, which is fundamentally different from what often happens in businesses today. Transparency is build on trust, or maybe trust is built on transparency...frankly I don't know which comes first, they're inexorably linked in my mind. I suppose I could have titled this "Creating a Culture of Trust" just as easily as transparency. Building an organization of trust requires free and open access to information and a culture that encourages openness (which is IMHO a higher order level of thinking and behaving). Culture change usually happens in small increments and this may be particularly true when trust or building trust is required. Trust is also hard won and easily lost, a process that seems to be amplified in an online environment. As a leader you can start to move towards transparency by supporting openness, enabling free flow of information and rewarding actions that build and sustain trust. And this doesn't just apply internally with employees, the concept is also critical with any relationships from partners to customers.

Finally got my hands on Google wave...

I was very excited yesterday when I was sent my user name and password for a sandbox Google wave account in prep for a demo / briefing from the Google Wave team (thanks to Sara Jew-lim and fellow IDC'er Caroline Dangson for setting it up). Of course I had seen the announcement and re-watched the video a few times but I still wasn't sure exactly what wave "was" and of course what the experience would be. Face it, I'm a hands on guy when it comes to software, it never really clicks until I can use it to do whatever it's supposed to do. We had a very good discussion with the wave team (Jason Freidenfelds, Jens Rasmussen, and Lars Rasmussen) and had an opportunity to play around with wave among the group (is that called waving?).

So what is it? Well, at its simplest, wave is a designed for the web communication vehicle that spans or combines pieces of all current online communication tools like email, IM, wiki's, blogs, etc. What it's not is a new social network (it is social though, or maybe more precisely collaborative). Wave is more about group and personal productivity than about connecting. They hope, through extensions by in house and 3rd party developers, that wave will become much more though. Think of it as a central gateway to many of your other online tools, so that you would use wave but you could update anything else you choose to integrate to wave (everything from IM or email to Facebook or Twitter). Conceptually the wave team used the idea of conversation as a shared object as the basis for the design. You can, for example, work collaboratively with a colleague on a blog post online in real-time, each typing at the same time and even editing each other as you go (you can see what the other person is typing and each typing stream has the author's name tagged to it)...the end result could then be pushed directly to your blog. The entire session is editable later and saved so that you could replay it and see exactly what was done (not so useful for collaborative blog writing but very useful if you work on a group project and a group member missed the session). It's designed to be synchronous and asynchronous as well so it can be used in an IM-like way and in an email-like way. You can attach files and embedded things like pic's (image drop, which for now requires Google Gears but won't in the future) and maps as well. In a conversation the threads are visible to all the participants and they can reply in the thread. There is also the capability to have a private conversation in the middle of the group conversation. While the interaction is (or can be) real-time there is also a draft a reply feature in case you want to think about what you're saying before sharing to the whole group. The built-in spell checker is contextual (it would know that "Can I have some been soup" should be "bean") and works as you type, giving you a drop down of choices / suggestions when you're wrong.

We did ask about business model and no plans are finalized but they are looking at lots of options. The initial launch will be consumer focused but some of their Google Apps enterprise customers have asked about adding it (so the enterprise model could be an add on to Google Apps which currently costs $50 / user / year). The consumer model could be ad supported or possibly a freemium offering with the option to buy up to a no ad version. There is also the possibility that they may have an "Extensions Store", much like an Apple Apps Store, that would sell in house and 3rd party extensions with Google getting a cut of the revenue. The public beta opens the end of September, you can sign up here.

UPDATE: Feedback from the Google wave team: "we actually already have hundreds of thousands of people on the waitlist, and will be drawing from that existing list for the approximately 100,000 consumers we invite to preview Wave on September 30th. So we welcome new signups, but we won't get to them in that first round. Also, important to note it won't be a "beta" on Sept. 30th -- it'll be just an early preview, with plenty of warts. Not for the pain-intolerant."

Does the emergence of the tech mega-vendor driven economy mean the end of innovation?

I get asked this question a lot, especially since I've started talking more about the emerging mega-vendor economy that is now driving the tech industry. What is the current state of innovation in tech and how is this changing (or is it changing)? The theory goes something like "the big vendors are really just interested in maintaining / growing their maintenance stream of high margin revenue and are not interested in the risk involved in driving innovation in tech."

I was reading Mitch Joel's Six Degrees of Separation blog today on Reinvention, innovation and change and that started me thinking about all the questions on innovation. I think part of the issue is in the definition of innovation. There are two fundamental kinds of innovation that we see in technology, continuous innovation and discontinuous innovation (sometimes called linear and non-linear innovation). Continuous innovation is created in a steady stream over time. Think of it as incremental improvement of a product or service. In software it's tied to the regular release cycle that offers incremental increase of capabilities and features with each subsequent release. Discontinuous innovation is quite different and is represented by disruptive, radical change. It's the new category killer product that leapfrogs the competition and drives significant change and opportunity. Examples of continuous innovation are everywhere in tech but discontinuous innovation is rare. Discontinuous innovation has given us things like the PC, the CD and DVD, MP3 Players, SOA, relational databases, etc. and each of those innovations have themselves been improved on through continuous innovation. The MacBook Pro I'm typing this blog post on today is a product of continuous innovation. You get the idea... So then I'd say that the mega-vendors are in fact drivers of innovation, its continuous innovation for the most part of course, but innovation none the less. Continuous innovation is a part of their business model and an obligation to their customers. You can argue of course that vendor X doesn't spend enough of maintenance on R&D and doesn't release enough new features but not that they are never producing innovation in their product lines.

Discontinuous innovation is a very different thing. I believe that, for the most part, discontinuous innovation has to be driven from the tech start ups. Investing in discontinuous innovation is important but the mega-vendors simply cannot use their resources in the long and painful process of driving this type of innovation. They owe their shareholders higher financial returns and their customers continuous improvement of the products, not disruptive technology. The mega-vendors may be in the position to buy and distribute these disruptive products in the future but rarely will they be the source of the innovation.

Both kinds of innovation are important and necessary for business to advance. The types of innovation work together in most cases to drive business improvement. For example I think that the social web is a disruptive innovation that is now starting to benefit from continuous innovation. The concepts are disruptive but the technologies that are required to make them work are for now, improvements in what we have. Enterprise software that is social enabled will form the foundation of the initial business changes. Don't get me wrong, there are certainly some discontinuous innovations waiting around the corner (or probably sitting in the heads and products of some emerging start ups today) that will accelerate social business changes but I don't believe we can wait for those changes before we start the social business transformation process. There are things that businesses can do today that will provide great return using the tools and concepts we have available. Will the change accelerate and be more impactful with new innovations...I'm sure it will, but can we afford to wait?

What's the next Twitter of the social web?

  Good question, right? I mean, there's always a "next" big thing in the world of the Internet. It's a little hard to think about it though, seems like Twitter just became "main stream" (well, some might argue, sort of main stream anyway). Its certainly growing like crazy and there are a lot of main stream celebrities so maybe that makes it main stream. I'm also not so sure we've "figured" Twitter out yet. I know how I use it, and I do really like it for all sorts of reasons, but it seems like almost everybody has their own answer for "what is Twitter"? Maybe that's actually part of the point of Twitter, it can be molded to what you want out of it, more so than say Facebook, anyway. One of my favorite things about Twitter is that it is both synchronous and asynchronous, which to me, makes it much more useful than IM or email (partly because of the tacit implications associated with each of them). Think about it, on IM, for example, if you leave your status on "available" then anyone who uses that vehicle feels like they should be able to get an immediate response no matter what you might be doing on the other end. It's really worse than a phone, although many people react to a ringing phone the same way (I don't, I learned a long time ago that a ringing phone may appear urgent but it is not necessarily important, at least not until I know who is calling and about what. I screen and if I don't know the number it's on its way to voice mail). Anyway, you get my point, and that's not really what this post is about anyway (not that I wouldn't enjoy a good rant about how I hate email).

Back on subject, what might the next big thing be? I posted recently on what I think the next gen web looks like, so I guess that's a good place to start looking. I think there are a few factors that could play into it, real time, mobile, location based and video for example. I personally think video is just emerging and will gain in following both in the consumer web and in the enterprise. YouTube of course is the established player but time is ripe for something new here. I've started looking at two newer services that have some potential 12Seconds.TV and Qik. They both support short, mobile (and web / desktop) upload and Qik supports live stream as well. 12Seconds.TV seems, at least now, as more of a consumer play but Qik is clearly looking for enterprise use (they talk about PR, marketing AND customer support). The idea is interesting, I think video will be a significant part of e2.0 / social enterprise as I stated on this blog recently. Video can incorporate some of the other characteristics too, certainly it can be location specific or geo-tagged, it can be streamed so it's real time and mobile as well (the new iPhone 3G S had a big impact on mobile uploads to YouTube, which to me says the audience is ripe to participate).

If it's not video, what else might pop up? Location based social networking is interesting, like Google Latitude for example. Maybe this works better in conjunction with existing networks though, location based Twitter or Facebook, for example. I'm not sure we need a standalone location based networking service, it seems like it would be much more interesting as a feature of an existing network. And speaking about Google, what about Google Wave? There is a lot of buzz still on this one and I personally do like the idea that there is something coming to replace outdated comm / collab tools like IM and email. I think it's still to early to tell though on Wave, but I do believe there is a place for a web native way to communicate and collaborate that is coming soon.

There's also another possibility (OK, there probably are a million others but here's one more), maybe Twitter is the next big thing. I do think we're still "figuring" it out and learning new ways to use it. Certainly businesses are experimenting with Twitter in a bunch of different ways and there's a lot more to learn. Twitter itself is still working on a business model, so who knows where that might lead. Yes, it's possible that Twitter will succeed itself as the next "big" thing...what do you think?