Collaboration 2.0

July 2nd, 2009

Facebook - Snatching Defeat From the Jaws of Victory?

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 1:18 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

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What on earth are Facebook doing?

Imagine going into a stationery store and buying a Filofax personal organizer and then over time filling it with personal contacts info, photos and notes.

You come home one night and it’s no longer on the coffee table by the phone, instead there’s a note from Filofax saying there’s a change of terms and conditions. You call Filofax:  ‘Where’s my Address Book?’

“Oh we published it  online - just go to this url and you’ll see all your information”.

“Are you kidding me?!”

Facebook have changed their default security settings so everything I write on my account at that site is now available to everyone on the planet. I think… I’m not sure what’s going on anymore with who can see what on my account and don’t have time to find out.

Marshall Kirkpatrick over at Read Write Web has been struggling to parse the twists and turns of Facebook’s default security settings. It appears, and I’m not sure, that they want to encourage you to be more open with your information….I think.

Facebook is a free service I have an easy come, easy go relationship with; the understanding is they will fund themselves by advertising to me… I think…I don’t really care how they support themselves as long as they provide me with a useful service.

Hey - this is just like AOL!

Facebook, despite historically being a walled environment like AOL was in the 90’s, was significantly more flexible than LinkedIn was a couple of years ago and I now use Facebook and LinkedIn interchangeably as an address and contact details site, often depending on how people choose to contact me.

Linked In now has much greater interoperability and crucially a pretty clear and unchanging sense of privacy (famous last words). It is also zero cost to me, just as Twitter is, and I use these services like millions of others because they have some value and utility to me.

There are giant swathes of functionality I never go near - I don’t play games or use other embedded apps on Facebook or poke people, I don’t post on Twitter my emotional state around the demise of Michael Jackson and I don’t respond to requests for friendship from people I don’t know who send me kisses and suggestions of future intimacy.

What Facebook don’t seem to have learnt is the lesson myspace.com - the world’s biggest collection of animated gifs and auto playing sound files - have learnt after the rise of Facebook.

If you don’t look after your user’s browsing experience and look after their information and content responsibly they will migrate to the next free shiny object and you will lose momentum.

Youtube.com is now arguably equal to myspace.com in promoting music, being equipped with the excellent sound and vision tools people embed on MySpace (and Facebook pages, if you can still figure out how to do it).

I’m not invested in any of this

I have a social graph on Facebook but I have Twitter, where I also have a more unstructured social graph, feed my tweets through to Facebook.

Everything moves on and all these services either add value to my life, possibly to a point where they propose I pay for service, or a newer service appears which trumps the previous generation.

Just like in business you’re either growing or shrinking, there are no plateaus. You’re either adding value or being annoying.

Shiny objects dull over time, and don’t assume changing my rules of use of our casual relationship on your service without properly informing me in clear language what you are doing is a positive step.

As a consumer I’m not going to waste bandwidth divining what you’re changing, I just get a queasy sense that stuff I thought was between my friends is now out on the internet. I’ve already seen thumbnail photos of people I know in Google image searches that refer back to Facebook pages I don’t have access to unless I ‘friend’ them. Read the rest of this entry »

June 30th, 2009

Cisco Live! - CEO Chambers on Collaboration Business Value

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 10:34 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Web, Collaboration, Network, Cisco Systems Inc., Web 2.0, Internet, Oliver Marks

The above video clips (from my handheld Flip) are from John Chambers Cisco Live! keynote address today and are specifically two edits about Cisco’s strategic perspective on collaboration and Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise. In the second edit Chambers talks about Cisco’s business architectural re-engineering into a collaborative enterprise, which I have previously written about here.

“A year ago Collaboration & Web 2.0 was something people were trying but it wasn’t mainline yet…today almost every major enterprise is saying we have to move into this area. It is going to drive the next decade of productivity” says Chambers early on in the above footage.

Yesterday I was briefed by Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior and SVP of Collaboration Doug Dennerline, including on the four core layers Cisco see defining the cloud business internet: at the base is Infrastructure As A Service, above this sits IT As A Service (storage, bandwidth: Cisco’s size is an enabler to be a key cloud compute player), resting on this is Platform As A Service (WebEx connect for example) and the top layer is Software As A Service (WebEx, Security Services…).

The previous couple of paragraphs are two perspectives on Cisco - a third perspective is the 10,000 people at the conference here in San Francisco and the thousands more attending virtually, the vast majority of whom are in the internet infrastructure business. Cisco of course are a vast company that essentially dominate the internet from core global infrastructure - including routers in space - to the intricate wiring of individual and interconnected businesses.

Most of the conference attendees, and the source of Cisco’s immense profitability, are focused on the rapidly evolving global network infrastructure buildout which is now increasingly expanding into the consumer world.

Writing a short blog post about Cisco is like trying to write about the planet in scope, so pulling the three perspective strands above together - John Chambers vision and collaborative management structure, the cloud paas and saas momentum (on premise is an existing given) and the core network infrastructure business - are more than enough to chew on.

This short video by Cisco’s VP of Unified Communications Karen Wilson does a good job of describing the concept of the network as the platform, getting technologies that didn’t use to talk to each other talk to each other … and this thinking now increasingly includes groups of humans….

This is where Cisco gets interesting. Historically over a mere 20 year history they have created and plumbed ever more sophisticated network infrastructure - they are deep into enabling the physical world of tracking the soon-to-be-ubiquitous Radio frequency Identification (rfid) chips - but it is the focus on human networks that moves Cisco into the relatively uncharted human collaboration realm.

When Cisco say collaboration - as they do frequently in massive international advertising - their messaging is all about video and voice communication. This is understandable given that they have rapidly superseded the old copper telephony route infrastructure with multi use fiber and the huge profits from moving video bits around. Chambers incidentally today predicted telepresence would be a home appliance within four years, and Webex as both platform and as software service is rapidly evolving.

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June 28th, 2009

Web Squared: Web 2.0's Successor?

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 10:09 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Web, ISBN, Web 2.0, Channel Management, Internet, Marketing, Oliver Marks

Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle discussed their vision and nomenclature for the next iteration of the web in a webinar last Thursday: I believe the recording will be available online sometime this week, slides are above.

With the term ‘Web 2.0′ enjoying its fifth birthday (and supposedly entering dictionaries as the millionth phrase in the English language) the web cognoscenti need new terminology to help define what’s coming up next. Since O’Reilly and his company popularized the term Web 2.0, which has been around since 1999. Surprisingly the various techarazzi sites such as techcrunch, which made its name blogging web 2.0 stories (and investing in some of the startups) have not been very vocal about this next generation vision statement.

October’s always excellent Web 2.0 Summit conference, a Battelle/O’Reilly feast of futurism and commentary from various diverse luminaries (Al Gore spoke last year for example), will clearly hinge on the new ’squared’ paradigm. There’s a terrific post on that conference’s website by the two principals which is well worth digesting.

Web 2.0, as most ZDNet readers will know,

“..refers to what is perceived as a second generation of web development and web design. It is characterized as facilitating communication, information sharing, interoperability, User-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web. It has led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and web applications. Examples include social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups and folksonomies…”

…according to the quintessential Web 2.0 browser based collaborative app Wikipedia.

As Battelle & O’Reilly say in their recent post:

“the network as platform” means far more than just offering old applications via the network (”software as a service”); it means building applications that literally get better the more people use them, harnessing network effects not only to acquire users, but also to learn from them and build on their contributions.

More prosaically the underlying technologies to enable ajax user interface enhancements - dhtml and javascript - were codeable ten years ago; it was development of modern browsers incorporating standards that reliably ran that code which enabled Web 2.0 sites to scale and be secure. (There are huge problems with old versions of Microsoft Explorer being the ‘official browser’ in a surprisingly large number of companies to this day).

Where we now understand the concept of harnessing collective intelligence as ‘crowdsourcing’, a more up to date definition of intelligence characterizes it as allowing the collaborative group ‘to learn from and respond to its environment’.

Imagine the Web (broadly defined as the network of all connected devices and applications, not just the PC-based application formally known as the World Wide Web) as a newborn baby. She sees, but at first she can’t focus. She can feel, but she has no idea of size till she puts something in her mouth. She hears the words of her smiling parents, but she can’t understand them. She is awash in sensations, few of which she understands. She has little or no control over her environment.

Gradually, the world begins to make sense. The baby coordinates the input from multiple senses, filters signal from noise, learns new skills, and once-difficult tasks become automatic.

The question before us is this: Is the Web getting smarter as it grows up?

Where up until now we have used brute force to find stuff on the web through search engines, now we’re starting to talk to and more crucially with the web, say Tim and John in their treatise.

This is gradually being achieved through cooperating data sub systems:

There is a race on right now to own the social graph. But we must ask whether this service is so fundamental that it needs to be open to all.

It’s easy to forget that only 15 years ago, email was as fragmented as social networking is today, with hundreds of incompatible email systems joined by fragile and congested gateways. One of those systems – internet RFC 822 email – became the gold standard for interchange.

We expect to see similar standardization in key internet utilities and subsystems. Vendors who are competing with a winner-takes-all mindset would be advised to join together to enable systems built from the best-of-breed data subsystems of cooperating companies.

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June 25th, 2009

Enterprise 2.0 conference impressions

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 11:41 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Microsoft SharePoint, Enterprise 2.0, Conference, Collaboration Environment, Sharepoint Plan, Collaboration, Groupware, Content Management, Enterprise Software, Software

I’m in seat 14c on a Virgin America flight back from Boston to San Francisco after an exhilarating Enterprise 2.0 Conference. There’s a lot of similarities between this airline and the Enterprise 2.0 movement. The plane has wifi and a good modern user experience but essentially hooks into and relies on a large amount of legacy infrastructure: the airport and runway I just took off from isn’t changing anytime soon and serves a broad variety of other aircraft transporting people and materials.

The analogy is with core enterprise technology: Enterprise 2.0 is still considered in many quarters almost a fashion statement, just as Virgin America is thought of by some as a boutique airline.

There’s some truth in those ideas. Enterprise software is the heavy duty infrastructure of most companies, with tight security, communication controls and many processes like an airport.

Departmental collaboration environments are like the aircraft - an important enabling component but not seen by most as the core. When Enterprise 2.0 expands to serve the entire company, as is the case with some of the larger installations and unification plans we saw at the conference, it aspires to be at the core of the enterprise.

There are players in the space who are already in the this position of course: IBM have a huge installed base of Lotus Notes and associated Domino databases, while Microsoft have their exchange email solutions and of course Sharepoint.

Microsoft chose to deploy flying screaming monkeys towards attendees at regular intervals from their booth - possibly a tongue in cheek recognition of their status as the wicked witch of the north (west) amongst the many innovative vendors and practitioners that surrounded them. Box.net was even giving out Sharepoint T shirts with a large picture of a turd on the front: these were very popular with the Enterprise 2.0 purists.

I was briefed by Christian Finn of Microsoft about Sharepoint plans in their 10th floor suite (after a 15 minute delay waiting outside in the hotel corridor talking about cats with a charming Microsoftie). Sharepoint plans are of course a closely guarded secret; exciting plans will be rolled out during October’s Sharepoint conference.

From my perspective the Sharepoint ’shared drive’ approach to structured data workflows is robust, but much of the current collaboration functionality resembles a big square of packing polystyrene occupying the space where the future features - presumably gleaned from the innovative vendors and their adopters - will fit.

It will be interesting to see what sort of job MSFT make of their seat licence cash cow approach: with Office 2010 revealed in July the covers of their walled garden will gradually be opened over the coming months.

Finn did tell me that Bing, which leverages the innovations of the semantic web technologies world to provide linked contextual answers, is a purely consumer play, while the FAST technologies are the enterprise search engine for the enterprise.

The next tier of vendors are all growing, much as car brands get bigger and add features over the years - it’s a little like comparing a no-hubcaps-and-rubber-mat-carpet Toyota Corrola basic model from a few years ago with the current larger luxury models, since I was drawing transport analogies with airlines earlier.

Dashboards are increasingly in vogue this year, a sign of the increasing demand for metrics and measurement to pull together all the disparate user activity information and content for monitoring and budget justification.

The thirst for use cases by attendees at the conference was apparent. However as we found while talking to various end user teams inside large companies for the Open Enterprise 2009 award, the reality is that if a collaboration environment has become a core enterprise component it is therefore also part of that business’s competitive advantage arsenal. The advantages of showing it off to the world are usually less than nil, with a larger downside, and of course the lawyers and their security police exist to prevent any sort of conference show and tell.

One anonymous friend did tell me a succinct use case story during the conference which for me trumps any dashboard in delivering metrics.

After plumbing six or seven workflow tasks from various enterprise applications into a single browser window mash up, they did performance lab user test models. First they timed employees running through the seven performed daily tasks in their native applications, and then they timed the same tasks in the single browser window mashup.

There was a massive performance gain which multiplied across thousands of staff and represented significant savings in time and money. Despite this Enterprise 2.0 budget was still a tough fight for the mashup even as one of the seven legacy enterprise apps had one and a half million dollars lavished on it for an extended user interface upgrade,

The reality is no one got fired for buying Microsoft or the other large players, but it’s getting easier from anecdotal evidence to sell the more innovative collaboration products.

As Andy Fox, one of my ‘building successful communities’ panelists commented: ‘you have to get email notification you’ve been given an account on a social network‘…there’s a constant chicken and egg relationship between the two.

There were some interesting new products debuted during the show and I have other commentary but I’ll save that for a future post.

June 23rd, 2009

Jive & Telligent Get More Analytical

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 9:21 am

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Analytics, Social Computing, SAP AG, Enterprise 2.0, Telligent, Pricing, Tools & Techniques, Business Intelligence, Financial Planning, Social Networking

Jive, creator of ‘Social Business Software 3.0′, are announcing today an OEM agreement with business intelligence vendor SAP AG, through which it will deliver community analytics that combine the best in Social Business Software together with SAP® BusinessObjects™ BI OnDemand offerings. This partnership makes available complete cloud-based analytics and reporting solutions for Jive SBS customers.

Dashboard image from New Scientist Magazine

June 21st, 2009

Enterprise 2.0 Conference: Let's Focus on Business Value

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 9:14 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Conference, Oliver Marks

I’m in a drizzly, blustery Boston Massachusetts on the eve of this year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference. Where last year the conference weather was hot and humid, and the economy still pretty overheated, the weather this year fits the economic cycle pretty well.

Enterprise 2.0 was not well understood as a concept this time last year in most circles; twelve months on and many enterprise vendors have absorbed the core concepts, if not always the actual experiential benefits, into their offerings. In the last couple of weeks I’ve seen a presentation called ’Semantic Enterprise 2.0 - Enabling Semantic Web technologies in Enterprise 2.0 environment’ by DERI at the 2009 semantic technology conference, replete with a faithful opening section of Andy McAfee’s concepts, SuccessFactors offering enterprise 2.0 functionality within their core SaaS Employee Performance Management Software, and Autonomy discussing web 2.0 and collaboration in the context of their products, which essentially extract the core concepts of unstructured data and organize them in searchable, organized ways.

While it’s great that there is now widespread understanding of the concepts of Enterprise 2.0, I find it is still an uphill battle to get people to understand the experiential side. There are plenty of people and companies who talk around the concepts without actually using them.

Getting collaborators to use tools that are core to speeding the flow of their work, and demonstrating that the older technologies such as email should be above the flow for specific uses (such as formal personal notifications, for example) is still challenging.

I’m hoping this week’s conference will show a new maturity about the needs of the enterprise: In the current sober economic climate we don’t need ‘checked the boxes’ enterprise 2.0 components grafted onto existing product suites, which don’t demonstrate enterprise 2.0 at its best, anymore than we need focus on lightweight tools such as Twitter and freebie throw away collaboration solutions.

Getting to the core of the value Enterprise 2.0 brings to business is incredibly important. While all the hoopla about ‘free’ products with no business model is of some interest, there is also the reality that the casual observer’s impression is that all this stuff is free and therefore ephemeral and valueless.

Think of it this way: if you and I start a business and print color brochures which wind up costing us five dollars each to give away, do you think the person you give a brochure to understands that? Now imagine you’re that person who’s just been given the brochure: do you value it because of its production values or glance at it and toss it in the trash later that day?

Value and relevance is at the core of any proposition in life. ‘What’s in it for me?’ is the other way of looking at that.

Tom Foremski has written a terrific post called ‘The Internet devalues everything it touches . . .‘  today which goes through the almost sickening way price points are ruthlessly driven down in any industry the internet touches.

‘The chief characteristic of Internet-based disruptive business technology (IBDTs) is that it is at least 10 times more effective at one-tenth the cost‘, says Tom…’However, our society is not set up for sharing — even though the Web 2.0 world is all about sharing every online photo, text, video, song, etc‘.

At the heart of Enterprise 2.0 is the ability to make knowledge workers much more efficient, which has real value. Let’s not confuse that with selling the tools that could enable that to happen, they are two very different things.

Setting businesses up for sharing and collaborating as part of work requirements is central to the successful adoption of appropriate tools to perform processes more efficiently.

June 18th, 2009

Cisco Releasing Sophisticated Collaboration Framework to Accelerate Your Business Value

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 11:10 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Cisco Systems Inc., Collaboration Framework, Collaboration, Groupware, Enterprise Software, Software, Oliver Marks

Cisco are releasing a 58 page report which details their 900 percent return on investment in collaboration and social networking and which details how they have successfully increased productivity, innovation and growth.

The Report, ‘Creating a Collaborative Enterprise: a Guide to Accelerating Business Value with a Collaboration Framework’, shows how their best practices saved them US$691 million and increased productivity 4.9 percent in fiscal year 2008 against technology investments costing US$81 million.

The framework, interestingly from a company with no skin in the social software sales game, provides a portfolio of structured methodologies that aims to strategically harness the rapidly expanding array of Web and Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

Cisco warns that ‘organizations need to make use of new collaboration possibilities or face significant disadvantages‘ - competing with faster moving companies who are better equipped to make decisions drawing from a deeper base of information and able to operate across time and distance barriers more efficiently.

Cisco defines collaboration as ‘the act of people working together to reach a common goal’,  noting that the human factor - accessing the tacit knowledge ’stored’ within employees, partners, customers and the broader public  is the differentiator from past generations of IT change.

The Collaboration framework is based on contributions from the Collaboration Consortium, established in July 2008 and drawing on member insights and experience with a goal of developing a business management model applicable to any type of organization. Cisco’s lessons learned and best practices are a major part of the framework - improving collaboration across a now $US40 billion+ business is vital to their continued success.

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June 16th, 2009

US State Department Reschedules Twitter Maintenance Due to Iran Primetime

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 1:58 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: U.S. Department Of State, Twitter, Iran, Productivity, Oliver Marks

Reuters are reporting that the US State Department stepped in and asked Twitter to postpone maintenance in order not to disrupt service during Iranian daytime.

Twitter, in their blog post explaining the rescheduled downtime, said

…our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran. Tonight’s planned maintenance has been rescheduled to tomorrow between 2-3p PST (1:30a in Iran).

Proof of the disruptive power of Twitter, but is the service sowing seeds of discontent and confusion, or providing an accurate and valuable information flow?

Statistically the election looks reasonably clean so far as this post by Nate Silver discusses, although it is far from clear what is going on in Iran.

This brings up an important point again however: the mob law mentality that can sweep ‘grapevine’ communication services such as Twitter can be used and misused in all sorts of ways.

As I wrote recently:

For every charity fund raising network effect on Twitter … there is the equal possibility of mobilizing a mob to go and raise a ruckus or worse…

The network effect can be used to seriously destabilize just about anything or anyone regardless of the accuracy of information, and that is a chilling thought. Pittura infamante, a form of defamatory visual representation in Renaissance Italy and Fatty Arbuckle’s character assassination by the press are good historical examples of the heat of the moment destroying people regardless of information accuracy.

Twitter is a powerful tool for mob rule with plenty of room for unintended consequences, manipulation and Chinese Whispers…

Update: all Twitter & social network users are being asked to change their settings so their location is TEHRAN/ time zone GMT +3.30. Iranian security forces are hunting for local bloggers using location and timezone searches. If everyone become ‘Iranians’ it is much harder to find them.

June 14th, 2009

Sorry, the Help Desk Doesn't Cover That.

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 10:16 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Environment, Dion Hinchcliffe, Dion, Help Desk, Call Centers, It Operations, Oliver Marks

Dion Hinchcliffe has another good post up, this time on Cloud vs open source: there’s a third dimension I’d like to expand on, and that’s user support.

After all the strategic planning is done, the plumbing hooked up and sawdust swept up, the doors of new environments are opened up for the users.

Traditional IT, often denigrated as an inflexible behemoth, does have one thing going for it and that’s someone at the other end of the phone or email when you need help. (This may prompt ironic mirth in some quarters but be fair, that’s the intention).

IT service management is fundamental to users actually using software: just because you’ve mapped out a brilliantly sophisticated mash up of services doesn’t mean your users will understand how to use it or its value.

While it’s cost effective for open source and cloud companies to outsource their support to companies like get satisfaction, the sheer scale and complexity of some environments preclude meaningful external support; getting internal support up and running in this economy is challenging to put it mildly.

Dion says

It’s not that cloud-enabled services such as Ubuntu with Eucalyptus can’t provide cloud services; they can. However, they aren’t part of a finished solution and don’t create an ecosystem that create intrinsic economic or technical benefits in a situated setting. This is because a significant part of building a robust and successful computing environment is creating a compelling, finished solution that contains infrastructure, management, research & development, and support. All of these come together to create a service comprehensive enough that computing can take place, or significantly, can be an effective target environment for outsourcing. When a computing ecosystem consists of multiple stakeholders that depend upon it, costs and effort can then be distributed.

This support issue should be of fundamental concern to the Enterprise 2.0 community meeting for the annual US conference next week in Boston.

A handful of enthusiastic internal evangelists for an excitingly agile new way of doing things in a company don’t cut it to help a confused team member attempting to navigate their way around a newly modified website - they need support help NOW to get their work done in time.

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June 12th, 2009

Twitter Trust #Fails

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 11:12 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Facebook, Twitter, Metal Sludge, Corporate Communications, Team Management, Marketing, Management, Oliver Marks

There’s a big difference between a ‘Trust Fall‘ and a ‘Trust #Fail‘ to use the increasingly tiresome valleygirl slang #word Twitter users assign to stuff that doesn’t meet their high standards.

A ‘Trust Fall’ is a trust-building exercise often conducted in turns in a group, in which a person deliberately allows himself to fall, relying on the other members of the group to catch them. They are often performed in corporate team building workshops to get everyone to loosen up and feel more secure.

A ‘Trust #Fail’ is when you let everyone who can see Twitter, including your 2000 followers, know that you’re heading out of town and leaving a lot of expensive video equipment at home.

Israel Hyman, who shared real-time details of his recent holiday on Twitter, was burglarized and lost all his business’s video equipment.

“My wife thinks it could be a random thing, but I just have my suspicions,” he said. “They didn’t take any of our normal consumer electronics.”

In the future “he’s not going to be announcing when he’s heading out of town” online.

That’s a pretty obvious case of naivety, but there are other less clear cut cases of trust, such as the St Louis family who are featured in advertising in the Czech capital Prague. A life size family picture in a supermarket window started life as the Smith Family’s Christmas card. They posted it on the internet and it was purloined by someone and turned into an ad for a grocery delivery service. The business owner said he would have given them a bottle of wine if they lived nearer for any misunderstanding.

Then there’s Nine Inch Nails musician Trent Reznor, who has decided to stop interacting with the online community:

When Twitter made it’s way to my radar I looked at it as a curiosity, then started experimenting. I thought it through and in light of where I was / am in my career I decided to lower the curtain a bit and let you see more of my personality. I watched some of you get more engaged because you started to realize there’s a person (flaws and all) back there, and I watched some of you recoil in horror because I’m not what you projected on me….

I approached that as a place to be less formal and more off-the-cuff, honest and “human”. I was not expecting to broadcast details of my love life there, but it happened because I’m in love and it’s all I think about and that’s that. If this has bummed you out or destroyed what you’ve projected on me, fair enough - it’s probably time for you to leave. You are right, I’m not the same person I was in 1994 (and I’m happy about that). Are you?

Looks like the Metal Sludge contingency has discover Twitter! Finally! For those of you that don’t know what this is, please let me explain. Metal Sludge is the home of the absolutely worst people I’ve ever come across. It’s populated mainly by unattractive plump females who publicly fantasize about having sex with guys in bands. Kind of like a role-playing game where people NOBODY will **** make up stories about their incredible sexual encounters with people they WISH they could ****.

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