As I started this blog, I set up some mental rules.
One of them was something I learned from Steve Todd, way back in the day — always excel at your day job before you do anything else at work. Doing a great job in your primary responsibilities is what gives you the freedom to explore secondary responsibilities.
I’ve been eyeball-deep in work on EMC’s next offering for Storage Resource Management (what you may have heard referred to as “SRM7″). Never mind my days, it’s consumed my nights as well! So I’ve let this blog get a bit rusty.
There are some other rules I’ve set for myself, and it’s cool to see that the “social” folks at EMC have codified some of those rules into a little video that people here actually get training credit for watching. It’s short and sweet, and I was pleasantly surprised.
I sat today in a team meeting, where we talked about our long-term goal of delighting our customers. It’s an easy thing to talk about, but it’s very hard to achieve. There’s a reason people always come up with the same holy grails of customer delight (say, the iPad) … there aren’t that many of them!
I ended up speaking some with our senior director about a recent set of experiences I had with Charter Communications. I recently upgraded my services with them, and have had several small nagging issues that I never thought to call them about. Just little things that kept me from being delighted.
If you’re at all active online, you’ve probably seen the recent hubbub about Facebook and privacy. Every time Facebook changes its privacy settings, the articles start floating around, but this time it’s more serious. The NY Times has dedicated space to the story, and Facebook itself has called a meeting of all its employees to discuss the issue. At least one colleague of mine is deactivating his account, and I’ve decided to take an audit on my use of the service and rethink my assumptions around it.
My first thoughts on Buzz are that it fails at solving a problem I don’t really even have.
It connects me to people I send GMail to, which is great. My GMail network is a subset of both my personal and professional networks, basically people I trust enough to give my personal address to. So it’s a great selection of people for me to start connecting with. Success.
Then it lets them talk to me/eachother/the world in the same way facebook/twitter does. And frankly if those individuals want to do that, they are doing it already with facebook/twitter. Failure.
Then it lets them aggregate stuff they post in other areas, which is cool. I can see what my GMail network is reading in their Reader accounts (except if I wanted to, I could already follow them in Reader, as I do with many of my friends) and what they are posting to their Flickr and Picasa albums (cool). But…
Then it gets worse. People can bring in their twitter updates. So for the subset of my Gmail Network who are twitter-enabled, I see their stuff twice, once in my twitter client of choice, and once in Buzz. And as people comment on those twitter updates, they do so in a fragmented way, some in Twitter and some in Buzz. So if I want to see the whole conversation I have to monitor my friends twice and spend twice as much time dealing with their twitter updates. Failure.
So for twitter, it’s made my life harder, not easier, and I can’t afford that. It’s why I stopped using FriendFeed.
That’s just my first impression after a few hours with it. Maybe I’ll see more as it grows.
When I saw the emails start floating by about EMC’s ON Magazine’s special issue about 20 years of the web, I flagged them for later attention and promptly moved on. That may have been a mistake. Recently, I cracked open the PDF and paged through it. Something on every page caught my attention. Except for a few times, I forgot I was reading something written by people at EMC. I guiltily asked myself, “are we really this cool?”
So here, as requested by Natalie, is my version of the web at 20…
I often hear people talk about not “getting” some aspect of social media, or worse, talking about it like it’s a waste of time, an indulgence, or even a joke. The other day I was struck by how much the rules have changed in terms of communication, and why if you aren’t listening, you’re losing opportunity.
On my drive into work on Monday, my mind was filled not with thoughts of Storage Resource Management but rather Social Search. Google recently made some inroads into this area, but I feel like we’re on the cusp of something revolutionary and nobody is seizing the opportunity to change the game.
Everything I am about to describe is achievable with today’s technology. And yet it sounds like science fiction. Here’s the world I want to live in. Continue reading →
I’ve been tinkering with twitter for almost two years now, on multiple accounts, trying to find the perfect way to integrate it into my daily life. And while my activity level on twitter has never been consistent, one thing has — the growth in the number of people I’m following. I realized early on that there comes a time when you have to decide whether to be lean in who you follow, or whether you have to start counting on tools to help you organize the data flow.
Never one to turn down a chance to play with tools, I’ve taken the latter approach (though in moderation; I still follow less than a thousand people). My latest twitter client is the Mixero beta, and after talking about it with a friend I decided it was time to do a little writeup. See, Mixero is almost great, but it’s the almost that is nagging at me week after week. I’m hoping that when it goes GA, we’ll see the client I know it can be….
(Those of you old enough to remember Cheers, I’m not talking about that Norm.)
I was paging through my reader this evening and came across an article by the always-wise Jeremiah Owyang about handling your boss’s connecting with you on Facebook. You probably know where I stand on this already, especially if you’ve read my post “Five reasons to ‘friend’ your co-workers (or boss!)“. Basically, you are putting yourself at a disadvantage if you have the opportunity to do this, and don’t.
But one thing Owyang talks about that I failed to, is how to handle being the boss and entering this situation. As a manager I’ve been in this situation a couple times, and chatted about it with co-workers over lunch. The key to avoiding difficulty is knowing (and communicating) your social media norms. For reference, here are mine, as relate to mixing work and online networking:
You can’t announce a font change on Facebook without the townspeople gathering their torches and pitchforks. Everyone loves Facebook, and wants it to remain exactly as it is today. And that’s been the story for years now. Of course, if Facebook listened to those users, it would be a little website for Harvard students and nobody else would use it. Clearly Facebook needs to know when to ignore their users and press bravely on. They’re doing a good job so far, and they’re about to take another step forward.
I have been with EMC since 1996, developing the guts of various SRM products in both development and management capacities. My main focus is on thriving in today's workplace in the context of my experiences at EMC, but I'll also write about other topics at times.
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This is my personal blog, and the opinions expressed here are my own, not EMC's. My posts are not read in advance or approved by EMC. Though I am employed by EMC and EMC is aware of and publicizes this blog, I am not compensated by EMC for my blog posts, and all costs associated with this blog are paid by me, not EMC.
