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I attended the Mashup Summit put on by Colabria last Friday at John Maloney’s largesse. This one-day event had presentations by a variety of mashup vendors such as StrikeIron, Mashery, Kapow, Google, Nexaweb, IBM and Serus. These presentations were great, but after a while it was hard for someone like me (one of the only non-developers in the audience) to tell the difference between some of these mashup technologies. What was more useful was some of the introductory work by John on value networks and how a mashup was a type of value network. The final session run by John and Ann Majchrzak from USC was a discussion involving everyone in the room and was the most interesting session of the day. I wish they had cut back on some of the vendor presentations and started this most interesting discussion two hours earlier (right after lunch).

Wikipedia  defines mashups as “Mashup (web application hybrid), a web application that combines data and/or functionality from more than one source.” The Wikitionary definition is: “A derivative work consisting of two pieces of (generally digital) media conjoined together in some interesting way, such as a video clip with a different soundtrack applied for humorous effect, or a digital map overlaid with user-supplied data.”

It was clear that everyone was talking about mashing up a variety of data sources (public and private) and there were even some vendors that were providing data as a service to help with this (StrikeIron). But a term I kept hearing was “collaboration.” Why were all of these propeller heads talking about collaboration? Terms like SOAP, REST, Flex, AJAX, ATOM, XML,SOA, RIA and WIZDEL were bandied about with alacrity (I had to look up some of them, fortunately there was good wireless connectivity at the event), but those were the details of implementation. What was clear from many of the vendors is that mashups had taken hold in the consumer space but were something completely different in the Enteprise.

Stefan Andreasen the founder of Kapow technologies suggested that the best way to get started in the enterprise was to focus on some specific areas for mashups including: Business Intelligence, Portal Content, Data Collection, Content Migration, Lightweight Integration, and Automation of processes.

What was clear from many of the presenters was that mashups would not take the place of traditional ERP applications and processes, but rather they were for “opportunistic applications.” Those are the applications where you go to IT and they tell you it will be months before they can get to it, and then ask for a huge chunk of your departmental budget. In reality these applications could probably be done in a day or two and without even having to get on to the IT calendar. In one case 30 MBAs were being trained to create mashups from a wide variety of feeds and applications.

Orwen Michels CEO of Mashery felt that the ROI for IT with mashups was a hard sell, because these were small applications that may not have a big ROI for the enterprise, until you add up the hundreds or thousands of them, and then in aggregate they do have a compelling ROI. This is kind of the “long tail” argument that is present for content in the consumer space, but it does make sense in the Enterprise context, and also fits with what I have heard in briefings with IT executives when “mashups” comes up in the conversation.

Mashups In The Enterprise

However in the enterprise three things came up around mashups that do not always come up in the consumer space; they are: security/access, data integrity/quality and accountability for the results of the mashup. More about this in another blog.

Mashups and the Semantic Web

The semantic Web, or Web 3.0 isn't a new idea. This notion of an interdependent network of machines that can better read, understand, and process all that data floating through cyberspace—a concept many refer to as Web 3.0— first entered the public consciousness in 2001, when a story appeared in Scientific American. Coauthored by Tim Berners-Lee (one of the inventors of the architects of the Internet), the article describes a world in which software "agents" perform Web-based tasks we often struggle to complete on our own.

He saw “the Semantic Web will be a “place”—a combination of technologies, systems, networks, standards, workflows, taxonomies, ontologies existing in the ether of cyberspace —where machines will be able to read Web pages much as humans read them. It will be a place where search engines and software agents can better crawl the Net assembling bodies of context-sensitive content based on or explicit and implicit requests. While Web 3.0 will not be any more interactive then Web 2.0, per se, it will feature a greater degree of standardization for coupling content, applications and meaning, along with better tools to find people, web objects and content.”

I believe that Mashups are one of the bellwethers of the semantic web. Mashup backbones like the Salesforce AppExchange, WebEx Connect, OpenSam, etc. are also offering standardized ways for people to create applications that can access data across a variety of different data silos.

Widgets and Gadgets

Another aspect of this type of standardizations is through widgets and gadgets. Wikipedia defines a widget as “Web widget, a third party item that can be embedded in a web page.”

The most common example of the use of gadgets or widgets is Google Gadgets, where you can put any number of these gadgets on your Google search home page (I have 3 full tabs of these gadgets on my google page).
Another way this works is in Facebook, there are now 4,000 applications that you can clip into your Facebook site, from Super Wall, which lets Facebook members leave messages, photos or videos on one another’s profile pages, is an expanded version of a Facebook function built in on profile pages, called the Wall, to iLike tool, which lets users post clips of their favorite songs, has since been added to the pages of 8.6 million of the service’s 43 million users.

We are also starting to see widgets appear in collaborative applications. A good example of this is Near-time, which is a team space and collaborative publishing environment that now allows you to embed widgets. A widget is a micro-application that you can embed in your Near-Time wiki or weblog. Click on the link to see which widgets are in the Near-time widget library. Some of the widgets Near-time has integrated into their collaborative environment include:

• real-time chat from Meebo, Gabbly, and Skype widgets
• video and widget aggregators from Widgetbox and Spring Widgets
• polls and surveys from SurveyGizmo, Poll Daddy, and Wufoo
• maps and mash-ups from Google and Trippermap
• news and information from Yahoo! Finance and Forbes

Unfortunately, today you need to paste in code snipits today to make the widgets work, but in talking with Reid Conrad, the CEO of Near-Time the widgets will be drag-and-drop in the near future.

Mashup backbones, gadgets and widgets are all indications of the coming standardization of the Web. But what does that mean for collaboration? It means that when you create an avatar in one 3D environment you will be able to easily move it to other 3D environments. When you create a virtual team space that there will be a web-wide ID check and authentication service that will let you know the person you let into this space is really them. You may even have a standard profile that works across all social networks or online communities.

Although these changes may seem small and more focused on infrastructure, the implications for the end-user are enormous, and will change the way we live, work and play on the Web.

I admit I get hundreds of e-mails every day and I spend at least an hour each day dealing with them (reading them, sorting them, deleting them, responding to them, etc.). I have e-mail forwarded to my PDA, so when I am out and about I don’t miss any of them. But e-mail has been around for the last 30 years, why is it still so popular? Why do people use it for all types of collaboration?

9X better than e-Mail

If e-mail is such ancient technologies (in Internet time) why does everyone use them? John Gourville, in HBS's Marketing department, did research investigating why so many new consumer products fail to catch on with their intended audiences despite the clear advantages they offer over what's currently on the market. He talks about the '9X problem' -- "a mismatch of 9 to 1 between what innovators think consumers want and what consumers actually want." The 9X problem goes a long way to explaining the tech industry folk wisdom that to spread like wildfire a new product has to offer a tenfold improvement over what's currently out there.

According to Andrew McAffee, a professor at Harvard, and a keynote speaker at the Enterprsie 2.0 Conference in June 2007, “Email is virtually everyone's current endowment of collaboration software.” Gourville's research suggests that the average person will underweight the prospective benefits of a replacement technology for it by about a factor of three, and overweight by the same factor everything they are being asked to give up by not using email. This is the 9X problem developers of new collaboration technologies will have to overcome.”

E-mail Inertia

I use Microsoft Outlook for my e-mail (a love/hate relationship). Outlook is the predominant player for not only e-mail but as a PIM (personal information manager) as I keep my calendar in it as well as tasks and track my time for client work, etc. Because Outlook is the leader in this area there are lots of software that hook into Outlook, to either put data in, pull data out, or use my Outlook data for some other reason. A good example is TimeBridge, a tool, in Beta that I am currently testing to help in the process of setting up meetings. There are many collaboration tools and project management tools that also hook into Outlook, which makes me less inclined to get rid of it because there are lots of tools that hook to it that I can get additional functionality from.

The Medium is the Message

It is important to use the right medium to communicate and collaborate within a project team. For example, e-mail is great to let people know of status or give an update on a project, but it is the wrong tool for an extended discussion on a complex project issue. It is even more the wrong tool to use to discuss emotional or personal issues the project team may be having because e-mail does not convey any of the emotional tone or information, and a delicate situation can be made worse if misread because of lack of cues provided in the e-mail. IM/chat is a bit better, you get immediate feedback, and you can clip in emoticons, but even so it is the wrong medium to discuss complex or personal issues that always arise on projects.

But IM is not persistent, by that I mean that when the conversation is over it goes away. Often in projects you want to look back at these conversations and decisions, so it is important for these interactions to be persistent. If the project is in a regulated industry you may be required to keep IM messages for up to 3 years. This brings us to Virtual Team Spaces (VTS) like;

- Huddle
- Near-time
- Jive’s Clearspace
- Collanos

Many of the VTS tools have a variety of collaborative functions that can be adapted for project work. Blogs, wikis and threaded discussions are often part of these applications. They all support group and role-based security and all offer storage for documents of all types. They are frequently used as a team project space, where a calendar, document storage, IM/chat, and other functions are used by the team to facilitate collaboration and coordination within the project. However many of these tools don’t offer real project management functionality, but rather do light weight task tracking.

If you want to focus on some of the Web 2.0 project tools that recognize the need for collaboration and have built this functionality right into a tool that already has rich project functionality I offer a short list below:

Clarizen
eProject (Summer 2007 edition)
Copper Project
Projity

Most of these tools are offered through a “Hosted” model or are SaaS (software as a service) where you pay a monthly subscription fee for use of the application. Some of these tools like Projity try to emulate Microsoft Project, but is only available through a browser on the web. Other tools like eProject, Copper Project and Clarizen integrate additional collaborative functionality into the tool and are better suited to support a virtual project team.

Why Move?

So what would make me abandon e-mail, which is quick, easy to use and I have customized with filters, etc. and already has over 2GB of data in the (pst) file.
- E-mail is becoming increasingly a noisy communications medium (i.e. spam), so I have to mine it for the important nuggets of information in all that spam noise. I heard one 20-something call it [e-mail] "is the ghetto of the Internet."
- Second it is not secure. Not that I imagine someone will pluck a critical e-mail of mine out of the ether, but rather e-mail is fraught with viruses, and so less safe than other options.
- E-mail does not always get through, it is not always a reliable means of communication
- E-mail often does not allow large attachments (gnat charts, CAD diagrams)
- E-mail does not allow me to hold a conversation with more than one person
- E-mail does not provide a convenient record (but an inconvenient one where I would have to search for all the appropriate e-mails to the project)
- E-mail is not integrated with project content and calendar

Although e-mail, IM or SMS are all good for notification or alerts for a change in status or a project related event, and they are a good way to alert one team member or the whole team, they tend to fractionalize my collaboration, requiring that I use different tools for different functions or different types of interactions.

So am I in enough pain to abandon e-mail for a Web 2.0 PM tool? Probably not, but I am getting there. The first step is to start using one of these tools for a small project with a few people and see if you have to radically modify your behaviors and how uncomfortable this might be. If it is not too bad you might want to switch over to one of these tools because of the advantages in functionality it provides. However, to get over the 9x problem, it will have to be low cost, easy to use, try-before-you buy, secure, and very easy to invite colleagues or project team members into. It should provide a persistent space for project team documents and discussions and ideally it would provide me with the “presence” and status of all the project team members.

You can probably get all but the last item from Clarizen Copper Project and eProject, and a variety of other tools, but the ability to see presence and status of team members has not yet been integrated into most Web 2.0 project tools. Neither has location (GPS tracking), which could be very useful for large and distributed project teams.

Maybe if the spam quotient gets higher, or I get more sick of dealing with my inbox, or the project tools move more into the Web 2.0 space and start providing functions (like presence and location) that I can’t get from any e-mail tools, then I will start to move over to these tools and use my e-mail less!