Twine, Applications and Green Fields

Looking at Robert Scoble's interview with Twine's Nova Spivack reminded me of Freebase, Knol and countless others before. Basically the interview goes like this:

1. Sir Tim Berners-Lee* has talked about the importance of the data web, or more recently about the Giant Global Graph (GGG)*.
2. Twine has built technology that can create, maintain and query a data web.
3. Let's sit at our editor, create a little data web, and run a query
4. Look how beautiful, imagine all the wonderful things you could do with this!

* Substitute appropriate visionary here, like Danny Hillis or Won Kim
** Substitute appropriate information infrastructure technology like "semantic database", "object-oriented database", etc.

Now I did enjoy the interview and the editor does look nifty but I was still a bit disappointed.

First because the presentation is very technology centric, cleverly leaving the applications to the imagination. But what's a dataweb (or any information infrastructure) without applications? No, the editor from step 2 doesn't count as an application. Even a query interface or browser barely deserves that qualification.

Compare that to a database like Oracle. The relational database concept developed by Jim Grey et al was a major breakthrough, as was the query language SQL. But there really isn't much use to a relational database until you run business applications on top of it -- think of Payroll or Shopping Cart. Oracle didn't win the database war from IBM, Informix, Tandem, Microsoft and countless others because their database was technologically most advanced, but because they focused on the applications -- lately in the extreme by selling the database as well as its applications, either developed in-house or obtained through myriad acquisitions. Here's a list, and that's only the "strategic" acquisitions!

So I perked up when Robert asked "what are the applications you have in mind", but I slumped back when I heard Nova answer "we think this is something that would be used by work groups".

The second disappointment was what I call the "Green Field Approach". The demo starts with Nova creating a Twine, cutting and pasting some text, and then creating relations with other twines and some existing web pages. A bit further in, Nova shows how you can import information from other sources, but that seems an afterthought: "we're looking at what other sources might be interesting".

But given the terabytes of information that are already out there it seems the last thing we need is human authors creating new pages -- shouldn't the main goal be to navigate, organize, link and clean up existing information? Shouldn't creating the dataweb be as easy as tagging -- which very successfully avoids the creation of original content?

The best of luck to information technology companies -- we definitely think of ourselves as one.

But remember:

No Apps, No Glory!

and

There is Plenty Information Already!

Wikinomics and Maslow's hierarchy of needs

Reading Wikinomics I wondered what it takes for wikis to work in the enterprise. Jimmy Whales, the head Honcho of Wikipedia, has said that 0.7% of users did 50% of the edits on Wikipedia. If those same numbers held for the enterprise, a 1,000 person company's wiki would hinge on the contributions of 7 people. There has been debate about the Wikipedia numbers, but beyond that debate the numbers don't translate to the enterprise because the incentives are different.

What are the incentives to produce content on Wikipedia? There is the altruistic motive of providing free (as in beer) truth to the world, there is the satisfaction of finding and correcting flaws and, perhaps most important, the value of asserting yourself as a topic expert.

Referring to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, none of these incentives translate into level one (physiological) and two (safety) needs, perhaps "belonging to the Wikipedia community" might qualify at level three.

Contrast that with creating or editing a useful page on your company's wiki. Saving colleagues time not only improves the bottom line but might get you noticed by your manager or perhaps even your manager's manager, both of which translate into food and safety (of employment).

While we couldn't extrapolate our numbers because service networks go far beyond wikis -- especially by automatically providing much-needed structure -- we have been seeing the power of those incentives during implementations of Service Networks for Upgrades. Traditionally, non-IT employees shy away from tasks in planning or testing an Oracle Upgrade, but when they see how their contributions will be visible on the network, they often jump on board. With the help of their published experience, upgrades are completed in half the traditional time and at one quarter the traditional cost.

As a lot of momentum is going into Enterprise 2.0, I hope to see more of this type of quantification. While Wikipedia and Facebook may run on Maslow's belonging, esteem and self-actualization, mainstream enterprises will need to understand the material impact on their business for Enterprise 2.0 to really take off.