How Twitter Changed My Life

As some of you might know I am now an SAP Mentor.

Last weekend, as I was sitting in a summerhouse in a rainy Denmark without  internet connection, I had some time to think about the events that lead to this nomination, and somehow I can blame it all on Twitter.

I can’t remember exactly when I signed up for Twitter, but it must have been spring 2007. It wasn’t love at first sight, and I needed two gos at it before I became an addict.

At that time I was standing at a cross-roads in my professional life.
I wasn’t happy with the direction my work as an SAP developer/consultant had taken and my own company (web consultancy firm) ran very well considering it was only something I did in my free-time. The SAP world felt too old, too dry, way too male and not creative enough for me, I had a feeling I wasn’t working with people thinking like me.

Of course, the SDN community was there, but because I was never given permission to go to TechEds etc, the faces on the pictures were never anything but names to me.
Then track came along and suddenly I found a bunch of SDN’ers on Twitter, some of them even nearby. And suddenly it wasn’t so bad to be an SAP consultant after all.

In February Craig Cmehil posted an event on Facebook; an informal SDN/BPX get-together in Walldorf.
I noticed that Oliver, another SDN’er that I had come to know on Twitter, was going, so I tweeted him and asked if he was interested in going together.
A couple of weeks later I got the in the car with a total stranger to drive the 300 kilometers from Cologne to Walldorf.
Oliver had already been to several TechEds, so he introduced me to more SDN/BPX’ers; Craig, Mark, Marilyn, Thomas and some of his ex-collegues at CoE (Center of Excellence).

From there on, the ball started rolling, and soon I found myself blogging on SDN, tweeting with all those Mentors who used to be nothing more than pictures to me (considering them friends today), working on ESME with the best people on the planet, securing myself a new job in Norway and now since last week, a Mentor myself.
Wow!

The differences between ESME and IM

Many people have, during the last couple of weeks, asked me about the difference between IM and ESME. There will probably be many more asking, so instead of answering everyone individually, I will explain it here.

Listed, these are the main differences between ESME and IM:

• Opt-In Following: Allowing an asynchronous follower/following behavior.
• Group Concept: Post different messages to different groups.
• Tag Clouds
• Integration of different corporation back-ends/SAP integration

To explain the opt-in following concept, I will use a story that happened to me recently.
It demonstrates the power of Twitter and explains (one of the ways) how ESME can be a valuable tool for the enterprise.
I will write more about the other points on the list in the weeks to come.

I was installing LiveCycle ES at work, using a so-called turnkey installation, that turned out to be not-so-turnkey after all. (surprise surprise!)
Because this was a part of Adobe’s prerelease program, finding help was difficult and the forums on the prerelease program site wasn’t exactly like the forums I was used to on SDN. Days went by without any answers, so instead of wasting my time waiting for one, I shared my headaches with my friends on Twitter.
My friends shared that with their friends again, and within a couple of hours I had Adobe employees writing to me on Twitter offering their help.
The next day all problems were solved and I could finish my installation.

Everyone helping me were people I didn’t know, so without Twitter I wouldn’t have known where and how to find them. This approach lets them find me.

Because a service like IM uses a mutual following concept, you would have had to tell every single individual in your contact list about your problem individually and they would have had to do the same with their contacts etc.
With Twitter you write your message only once and it reaches hundreds of people (of course this depends on how many people follow you), and if a friend re-tweets and he has a couple of hundred friends and so on, you can reach thousands of people with only 3-4 messages.

Finding the right person to ask can sometimes be as time consuming, as solving the problem itself can be. This is no different in big organizations.
If you don’t know whom to ask for help solving your problem, finding this person can be a daunting task.
This is where ESME comes into play.

ESME – Taking It To The Next Level

It is only a week ago, since I wrote my last post on EMSE, the Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment.

In this one week, we moved from loosely discussing frameworks, design and implementation on wikis and Google groups, to submitting a 6 minute video for the Demo Jam at SAP TechEd.

To be part of this team has been an amazing experience, and I have gained much from it, both on a professional and on a personal level.

I will write more about my experience in the next couple of days, I just wanted to present our video for now.

Further ESME blogs on SDN:
Dennis Howlett
Abesh Bhattacharjee

ESME – Social Enterprise Messaging Experiment

Earlier this year I saw this picture (from Sapphire) with the words SAP, Innovation, Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise social networking together and it got me thinking.

A couple of weeks later, during one of the recent Twitter downtimes, some of us ran to the newly started Plurk, to let the world know what we were doing.
Of course that wasn’t so easy without an API in place, so that didn’t last long.
It was however just enough time for ESME – Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment – to be born.

ESME started off from one Plurk conversations (or here as RSS).
Now 20 days later, the project has already come so far, that the architecture and design ideas are being discussed in detail.

What I have found interesting and fun in this process, is that we have only used microblogging and collaboration tools to plan this project. Not once did we call each other or use IM.
20 people from all over the world have put their names on the ESME SDN wiki page (even though some are involved as “listeners”), so logistically it has not been an easy task.

Though through using tweets with a 140 character limitation and the wiki when we needed to go into details, we have built an architecture, the foundations of UIs we want to use, the implementation, discuss the social network aspects and think of scenarios where such a tool would be useful.
If someone had told me even just a year ago, that something like this would be possible, I probably would have laughed at them..
This has been an amazing experience so far, and I hope this is just the beginning!

Twitter and Summize

I found this update on the Twitter Status blog this morning interesting:

“The replies tab remains disabled today as we rework some of the queries that were causing problems yesterday. This has also been reflected in the sidebar of the status blog for the web features.
One way you can see replies directed to you is to search on Summize. You can search for “to:username” to see all updates directed at you.”

Twitter now encourages us to use third-party services, for functionalities they cannot deliver themselves anymore.

I know they have partnered with Summize before, for instance during Steve Job’s recent keynote (you can read about it here), to reduce their database load.

But this time they are outsourcing a basic functionality of their own system, which makes me wonder what is left of what Twitter once was?

Just a thought I cannot stop thinking about

It amazes me how busy I am wishing Twitter was back to normal again these days.
It just feels so awkward after so many months of using third party apps, that I had to revert to my browser to tweet again. I even had to go back to m.twitter.com on my iPhone.

By now, realizing that IM and Track will still be offline a while, all I wish for is an API that allows 70 req/hour again. I feel like half-a-person without the tweets trickling into Twitterrific/Growl.

Twitter have one of the most open APIs around, and I also think this was part of their recent headaches. (getting crushed by API calls)
We all gave our Twitter credentials to any third-party app that came along and looked interesting. We had a zillion different Twitter clients, Twitter search, Twitter karma services and we wanted to try it all out.

A while ago I listened to the Gillmor Gang discussing Twitter once again.
We all know Steve’s “obsession” with Track, so part of the conversation somehow got lost, and I haven’t been able to stop reflecting about this part ever since.

Chris Messina brought this up while discussing OAuth:

” So, you don’t actually have specific control to say, “I want to turn off access from Twitterific.”… You know, it’s like Flickr provides a great model of how you can turn on and off access from different services. This is just an example of one of the things that if we had it, I think Twitter would not only be providing greater value, but it would be demonstrating a level of user control over the use of this system that would actually be, I think, leading to greater resilience.”

I don’t know why this model haven’t been discussed.
I can only speak for myself, but in light of the recent problems, I would happily turn off Twitter access to at all the different services and clients I have tried out in the last months. I don’t even know myself anymore how many apps and services receive my tweets.

Implementing a flickr-like model, where you can see which third-party applications you are using and remove the permission for these if necessary, would be fantastic.
As a user it is a great way to control where your credentials go and it wouldn’t hurt Twitter’s API either.