August 11th, 2009
FaceFeed: the enterprise perspective
Having seen some of yesterday’s jocular references to the marriage between FriendFeed and Facebook (hence FaceFeed in the title) it got me thinking about the enterprise perspective - if there is one. Earlier in the day and before the announcement, I was listening to an old buddy of mine. We were discussing marketing as it relates to an add on play for JD Edwards and he jokingly said: “We could always start up a FaceBook Group: Old Farts From JD Edwards.” We had a good giggle at that given that both our relationships with JD Edwards go back to the days of Ed McVaney, one of the founders. Then the announcement came which got Silicon Valley’s twitterati and assorted pundits in a lather.
I’ve been in and out of Facebook a few times. It doesn’t appeal to me though I retain an account to keep in touch with friends and family who don’t use Twitter. As currently iterated, I see Facebook as little more than digital vomit attempting to support an as yet to be proven ad sales model. Then I read Om Malik’s thoughtful analysis where he alludes to the real battle: Facebook v Google. In other words search:
The impetus behind the deal is twofold: our ability to publish more and more information in real time and the resulting explosion of data on the web. These two trends will soon make it nearly impossible to deal with the resulting information overload. I call this the problem of plenty. As a result, the current seek-search-consume popularized by Google will eventually hit its outer limits — and when that happens, Facebook wants to step in and take the leadership baton…
…FriendFeed’s unique ability is to foster conversations — not a massive user base. If Facebook can take this capacity to “converse” and marry it to its mobile clients, what the company will have on its hands is a true interaction platform, befitting today’s always-connected life.
The fact FriendFeed is stuffed full of ex-Google rockstars seems to be the current impetus for the deal but the search angle intrigued me because it resonated with another part of the conversation I was having earlier in the day around real time.
I’m not a huge fan of current thinking around the real time web. We’ve had it in enterprise for many years. It is well understood as not being about ‘in the moment’ but at the ‘right time.’ For some that will be nano seconds after an important event occurs, especially in financial services and utilities. For many that extreme time compression makes little or no difference to decision taking. Real time in the real world is often measured in hours, days or at the extreme end of some long run processes: weeks. Even then events often need parsing against trend analytics in order to gauge impact assessment across multiple alternative scenarios. As time progresses, I may yet live to regret that last statement but that’s where we’re at for the foreseeable future. The way I read current thinking on real time web implies an overload of garbage and nonsense that I have little choice but to wade through. That’s why I actively curate my inbound Twitterstream and stay away from Facebook and FriendFeed.
Some argue that Twitter’s problem is a lack of history but you know what? I can capture what I need and maintain a persistent search in Seesmic desktop or retain a history in Cover-It-Live. That provides me with the context I need that in turn helps avoid the chaos of the data stream. There are enough links in most Twitter entries for me to contextualize for myself what matters and what I can discard. That’s fine for me as a researcher but doesn’t scale well in its existing form in an enterprise context.
Last year I was part of a group developing an embryonic ‘Twitter for enterprise’ - ESME. One of the original design requirements was the ability to group, archive and tag so that I could maintain context because context is vital in an enterprise setting. Those elements provide me with the essential controls through which I can manage and curate an enterprise form of Twitter at multiple levels while continuing relevant conversations inside process flows. We proved that as a concept albeit one that by today’s standards would be regarded as crude.
I also saw the detail from InsideFacebook which talked about real-time search where it said:
With the new Facebook Search, which is still accessed by entering search terms in the box on the top right of any page, users will now see the latest status updates and shared content from both friends and all users who have made their profile open to everyone – in addition to more static types of results like applications, pages, notes, and groups.
Facebook may say that but my experience has been abysmal. Where topics are under populated I end up being shown ads and where there is plenty of material, it is hard to contextualize everything I am seeing.
Enterprise search remains something of a Cinderella. Again, returning to the conversation with my old pal, he said that like many, his company is trying to solve the problem of including unstructured data into the business intelligence/decision support domain. As I’ve come to increasingly understand, that’s a horribly complex problem that exercises the minds of engineers every bit as smart as Googlers. It involves contextualizing search terms. A hard trick to pull off in an automated manner.
There may yet be lessons for us enterprisey types out of what happens at FaceFeed and frankly, I hope they emerge in a way in which we can benefit. But of one thing I am certain, the compute requirements to blend what happens in the right time unstructured world and that of transactional systems is going to require serious rethinking. As far as I can tell, no-one has yet cracked that nut, even though many acknowledge that it is at that intersection where there is the potential to release enormous untapped enterprise value. When I think about the supply chain, that runs trillions of dollars alone.
In the meantime, we should at least cast the odd glance FaceFeed’s way. Watching how they develop new products and observing the impact with an eye on what this means for enterprise does us no harm.
Dennis Howlett has been providing comment and analysis on enterprise software since 1991. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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