Social Media

Electric wok syndrome

In an acerbic review of Google+, John Naughton explains electric wok syndrome, which is always worth having in the back of your mind:

A spectre is haunting the technology industry. It is called “electric wok syndrome” and it mainly afflicts engineers and those who invest in their fantasies. The condition takes its name from the fact that nobody in his or her right mind would want an electric wok. But because it is possible to make such things, they are manufactured, regardless of whether or not there is a need for them. The syndrome is thus characterised by the mantra: “Technology is the answer; now what was that question again?”

Google tries social again

Google+

Google announced Google+ yesterday, their latest attempt at getting success in the social networking arena.

Techcrunch have a good write up of the details, but for the best coverage, it’s hard to top Steven Levy’s piece in Wired (indeed, Levy’s book on Google is also excellent reading).

Of course, Google have got this wrong before. Their list of misses is at least as long as their list of hits, and especially so in the social space – Buzz and Wave most notably.

Both products, to my mind, would have been more successful had they been marketed as enterprise applications rather than trying to get widespread consumer adoption.

Still, let’s see how Google+ works out. After all, huge numbers of people are using Google several times a day. They ought to be well placed to pick up plenty of users. This ubiquity though could stand in their way, as Tom Coates points out in a tweet:

Fundamentally, Google is a utility. No one wants to hang out at their power company.

However, the team behind this at Google is a strong one. Vic Gundrota and Bradley Horowitz are industry veterans that know their onions, but possibly most important is the role of Andy Hertzfeld.

Hertzfield was on the original team that designed the software for the Apple Macintosh. Several commentators have noted that the Google+ interface seems most un-Google like, full of neat whimsical flourishes and a step away from the traditional Google utilitarian user experience.

Only time will tell if Google+ takes off. The realistic position to take is that it won’t – Facebook is as embedded in this space as Microsoft remains in the office productivity suite area. In both those cases, what will remove the incumbent is not doing something better than them, but doing something entirely different that renders them irrelevant.

I’m not sure that Google+ does that, at least not yet. But I’d advise anyone reading this blog to sign up to the service if you can, have a play and make sure you’re in position in case the market swings in the direction of Google+.

The Preston Social Media Toolkit

A bit of a flurry on Twitter about Preston City Council’s ‘Social Media Toolkit‘ which describes itself as

a complete guide to joining the social media revolution

It costs £199 (plus VAT).

I wish them luck. I do this stuff for living and it’s very, very hard to make money from content. Apparently newspapers and record labels are finding it tricky too.

My preferred method is to give it away, publish it for free, and gain a reputation for helpfulness and perhaps a little expertise. That reputation, somewhere down the line, turns into paid work. That’s the theory anyway.

So would I advise any councils to buy this document? Probably not. There’s plenty of free content out there – possibly on this blog, if you take the time to hunt for it.

But if it’s easy to read documents you are after, then download Social by Social and Local by Social for free. The latter is a fantastic general document on the practicalities of using social technology, and the former puts it all into the local government context beautifully.

Another read is the 21st century councillor one for that particular group of people – and I understand that it’s being refreshed at the moment.

I did put out the idea of perhaps writing something like this collaboratively, on a wiki, for the benefit of everyone, but that might not even be necessary. Maybe we just need to produce a list of links to public, freely available blog posts written by people like Dan, Carl, Sarah, Sharon, Ingrid and others (sorry if I missed you out) which already have all that info in them.

That way, newcomers have a curated list of great content that will answer most of their questions, and the authors still get the clicks and the page views, which may or may not be important to them.

Just because you can say something…

…doesn’t mean that you should. Of course.

A bit of a Twitter flurry this morning about a case of a civil servant apparently being disciplined because of their use of the service.

The account in question, nakedCservant, is protected, so the updates aren’t public, and as I have never requested access, I can’t see what they are saying. However, according to this report, the civil servant behind the account was critical of ministers and government policy.

Various folk have called this out as being an example of a crack down on public servants being allowed to use services like Twitter in the workplace.

I’m not convinced it is.

The issue here is the message, not the medium, and it reminds me very much of the Civil Serf affair a few years ago. Whilst I don’t know the exact detail of this case, it’s clear that the civil servant is almost certainly in breach of the civil service code in terms of the content of their tweets.

In other words, the Twitter bit of this story is irrelevant. The result would be the same if this person were saying these things in emails, memos, letters to the newspaper, whatever.

I’ll go through my usual list of points when these stories emerge:

1. If you want to stay out of trouble, don’t slag people off in public.

2. Don’t rely on anonymity to protect you. Unless you’re very good, if somebody wants to find out who you are, they can do.

3. Having ‘these are my views, not those of my employer’ in your Twitter biography means absolutely nothing in reality. It’s no protection at all and I worry when I hear people being advised to do it as a way to feel safe about this stuff.

4. Never publish anything on the web you wouldn’t be happy to show your boss, your mother or a journalist. Assume everyone can see everything you write and that way you won’t be surprised when it turns out they can.

5. We’re in a strange situation at the moment where our personal and professional identities are in a state of flux and can’t be separated in a reasonable way. Most people, especially those that work in public services, can easily be traced to their employers online with a bit of Googling.

Maybe at some point in the future this will be sorted out, and we’ll have a common understanding of where work stops and home starts. But until then, be careful and if you have to think twice about posting something online, don’t post it!

Update: Steph adds on Twitter “don’t do politics” – and he’s right.

Update 2: Jimmy Leach blogs the view from the FCO.

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