Lists and Waves

The fact that Twitter,  Twitter Lists and Google Wave exist warms my heart.  They are tools that generate their own innovation buzz eco-system and drive what this blog is all about: Future Business.  Foundational tools like these, along with open source projects, are the essence of the web2.0 innovation renaissance.  Think about how fast tools and processes can iterate today to match widescale and niche user needs compared to where we were 10 years ago.

At the moment it is the wild west for these innovation eco-systems.  Everyone thinks they have a good idea and they are running full-speed either with a little bit of money or completely bootstrapped.  Over time, we will start to settle on some valuable use cases and the real money will head in that direction.

As an innovator interested in new ways that business can operate, both tools’ potential fascinates me.  While Twitter lists is pretty much what I expected it would be, Wave did not live up to my initial expectations.  I’ll give both a fair shake over a period of time because, like Twitter itself, there is likely a path of use evolution.  The truly valuable use cases might not show themselves until 3rd party apps have been written that run on top.

For Twitter Lists I am starting to see

• Lists that you are in can be a crowd-sourced social descriptor of what you tweet about
• Curating a popular list gives you credibility as a networker in the space that list covers

For Wave I think we are going to need tools and agreed conventions which

• Help us collectively “garden” (manage) waves.  Waves have structure and are objects intended to grow over time.  Because they become more complex over time, they need constant management in order that they are accessible to newcomers and previous visitors/contributors alike.
• Help us find portions of waves that are relevant to our needs and re-use those elements in our own content spaces: other waves, blogs, etc…

Long live the companies that are thinking about how to start the next innovation eco-system.

Appealing to the masses

When you are contemplating aspects of various solution options, what do you consider?   Time/Cost for development?  Business Value?  Cost to maintain?  Simplicity?  Others?     I’m here to tell you not to underweight simplicity.   Even in regards to a tool like Twitter which is currently on its way from early adopters into the mainstream, it is the simple things that get traction.

Recently, I wanted to find a way to collect the information of professional speakers who are using Twitter.  Different people may have different uses for that information, but there is no doubt that collecting the info into one place will be useful.

So, how to do it?  

1. There is a Twitter app out there (wefollow.com) that will allow any user to tag themselves with the keyword “speaker”.  
2. I could have written a quick form that collects information into a publically viewable spreadsheet.  
3. I could have created a space on a collaboration platform and had people share their twitter handles there.

Normally I would have selected #1 because in my estimation it is the easiest to implement, the most scalable, and probably the one that will be easiest to manage over the long term.  Instead, I decided to follow the lead of @ITSinsider (original idea from @shawnrog) and do something less efficient, but more familiar to the target audience and therefore simpler…. I merely created a public-facing, editable by everyone, Google spreadsheet and then publicized a link to it: http://bit.ly/ManhC .  While I did not do a true test with both an A and a B, I am pretty confident that the 80 or so submissions in 3 days, is far more than what would have been achieved with a different method.

Keep this in mind when you are planning your next initiative.  Simple (for your target audience) is almost always better.