Archive for the 'Social' Category

Saw the Obermann

Vidar Andersen 18/06/2009 18:47 Comments

So I went to the DNA digital workshop at Deutsche Telekom (DTAG) in Bonn following up the previous workshop in Berlin and yeah, I finally got to see the man – René Obermann – CEO of (DTAG).

The workshop partnered young tech and Internet savvy people from the DNA digital initiative with DTAG decision makers to discuss how their corporation could potentially benefit from and deploy new strategies for e.g. corporate culture and product development.

Sure enough, Obermann is every bit the charismatic leader that you’d expect him to be, but with 30 minutes of his precious time allocated to listen to the summary of our workshop, the possibility of a proper dialogue and discussion was accordingly limited. It was nice to see him take the time, though. Kudos.

It was slightly fascinating to observe the depth that some of the participating employees of DTAG would sink to in the presence of their top dog. It was like a sudden lapse of personal integrity, as if the teeth of the previous biting discussions had all but fallen out. I guess it’s all natural – the presence of the Alpha male and all that jazz – but slightly embarrassing nonetheless. I can’t help but think it would have been more productive for the discussions to not have Obermann present.

My personal conclusion of the workshop was that – although highly interesting topics and people – the Enterprise 2.0 is not my battle. I’m unfortunately not passionate enough about the topic. I have other fish to fry, bones to pick. It was an interesting ride. So long and thanks to everyone for the experience.

As long as enterprises see, in the lack of a better word, Web 2.0 as a trendy afterthought that can be tacked onto existing and outdated models of thought – it’s thanks but no thanks for me.

It is my view that Enterprise 2.0 (whatever that may be to you) involves radical paradigm shifts, by and large incompatible with current enterprise paradigms. Furthermore, I’m convinced that I as an outsider cannot change an enterprise; The real revolution and innovation comes from highly innovative and passionate individuals within the enterprise.

Here’s some more images from the workshop.

Disclaimer: I work for a company that does business with DTAG. However, I'm not getting paid nor am I instructed to write this blog or to participate in the Enterprise2.0 discussion.

Comments

Twitter muzzled?

Vidar Andersen 13/05/2009 15:01 Comments

This morning I read a blog post over at Read Write Web (RWW) that caught me by surprise. I recommend you read it too. It seems that twitter has removed what I consider an essential feature in their latest update.

I was so surprised that I wrote a comment in the emotional heat of the moment over at RWW and I decided to republish it here later on. My initial thoughts were as follows:

I’m quite appalled that twitter seems to me to be self confident – if not almost smirk – with removing a setting that potentially alters the mechanics of conversing and discovering on twitter on a fundamental level; In other words making twitter less like, well, twitter.

I find the idea of not listening to 2% of their user base quite grand. Did they do the maths? That’s not a tiny amount of people, is it? My guess is, that there are a lot of the early twitter adopters and evangelists in those 2% too.

Another bet of mine is that most of those 2% are most certainly not confused by the @ reply ’system’. It’s inaccurate, not threaded and tracked – but who cares? It’s ‘the twitter way’ and some learned to live comfortably with it.

I’m also willing to bet that a much higher percentage was living under the illusion that they were getting every single public tweet from the people they were following and didn’t know that twitter was censoring and deciding what they could and could not see.

As to the topic of context, I personally find parts of the 2008 twitter blog post referred to in the comments over at RWW completely out of touch.

From the post:
“1) You should feel free to @reply people and not worry about it being out of context to some of your followers. In general, they won’t see it.”

To me, twitter is not instant messaging or email. To me, one of the most important aspects about twitter is enabling discovery, stumbling upon new interesting people, sparking curiosity, reading different perspectives. Why take all that away? I’m flabbergasted. Speechless.

Would it hurt too much to just leave the [promiscuous] setting as default OFF, but there to turn ON for the users who are comfortable with it?

Are there economical incentives involving either business plans or prohibitive cost-benefit ratios precluding it? If so, twitter should be up front and transparent about it.

Please bring ‘promiscuous’ back. I don’t want to have to subscribe to the RSS feed of every single user that I’m following in my reader of choice to get the complete unadulterated twitter stream (even from users that may have blocked me).

@blacktar