Meetup.com is one of those many web services people flocked to enthusiastically a few years back when it first appeared on the virtual social landscape. I signed up for a bunch of meetup groups imagining my cloud community horizons expanding explosively and began mentally preparing to get along to events and actually meet people face-to-face.

People I had previously only read, not met as such.

The reality was, of course, that events came and went (to be fair the Meetup community in NZ is pretty small, and I don’t think anyone else in Hamilton NZ knows it exists) and I never actually got a long to a single meetup….. Not one.

Until last Thursday that is.

For the last few years a bunch of Auckland web developers and designers have been using Meetup.com to have gatherings every month or so, and it was one of these sessions I went to last week. This is no-back-of-the-pub gathering of a handful of socially awkward boffins (though they do adjourn to the pub after the meetup, a post-meetup-meetup if you will).

No, this is a popular enough event that numbers are capped using the RSVP system at meetup. Take last week for example, there were 180 web folks in attendance, and 220 had registered interest before the event.

Without going into the details of the three sessions (links to them follow) which by the way were all very useful and entertaining (two often incongruous elements of a tech talk), the thing I was most impressed by was the healthy number of people who were prepared to brave rush-hour Auckland traffic to get along to a venue they’ve never been to, to listen to and mix and mingle with folks they may have never met.

OK so the free Pizza and Epic beer probably helped (thank you Orion Heath)

The other thing that tickled my fancy was geek-superstar Mozilla hacker Robert O’Callahan doing an awesome slides-optional presentation where he lost connectivity and talked for about 20mins with a “Server not found” error on the monitor behind him. Didn’t matter squat, he couldn’t have cared less, but sure looked funny thinking about it now.

Anyway, a big virtual-ups to the awesomely funny and larger than life John Ballinger (you can pay me later big fellah) and KarlVR and anyone else who’s involved in organising these things. Punters don’t appreciate how much effort goes into pulling something like this off on a semi-regular basis, especially when its a not-for-profit activity, and a fairly narrow slice of the community.

I’m all for the social web, but you really can’t beat face-to-face. I’m so relieved other people still see value in it too. See you at the next one.

speakers/sessions:
http://blog.luumin.com/2011/06/24/telling-stories/
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/25693/meetup.html
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/

Twitter performance seemed a little slow today (ok, so when isnt it so the lag between responses made the experience more disconnected than usual. An interesting conversation developed nonetheless amongst a mix of Cisco and independent contributors. The transcript of the session will be archived soon but the posts themselves are available now via a search on the #CollabChat tag at Twitter.

Rather than reproduce the conversation I’ll stick to including my own reflections on the discussion and the changing workspace:

Enterprises and their solutions have often rubber-stamped physical and virtual forms of workplace interaction amongst teams, have set boundaries, defined policies, rules and roles, sandboxes and security, times for meetings and formats for content and communication.

Those legacy features may be desirable in regulated, sensitive or corporate environments but a big challenge for today’s workspace is we now have ever increasing opportunities to participate in diverse and distributed virtual teams and projects, and to use services and resources that may exist outside the corporate firewall. Workspace members come and go, their patterns of work, availability and timezones are varied, the tools or resources they use, content and tasks they perform and collaborate on are increasingly diverse.

As a member of a virtualised team an individual may and should be able to view their workspace differently to the way others see or make contact with theirs. They each focus on different requirements, and contribute in different ways. The workspace may be addressable (say via a URL or such like, thanks @LLiu) but it will be distinctive and personalised, and temporal.

The workspace is multiple people, one or more places, multiple resources and devices, interacting at various times. Documents, video, voice, meetings, messaging, asynchronously or synchronously etc etc. As @MikeGotta mentioned the modern workspace landscape is surely challenging the desktop metaphor we are accustomed to.

We need IT to bridge across the entities, times and locations, to support us as we interact with and contribute to the workspace outcomes.

Various technologies come and go, some stay, some outlive their welcome. Email, document and content managements systems, portals, blogs, forums, wikis, virtual worlds etc. A best of breed of any one may be great for many workspace requirements but certainly not for all. Experiments like GoogleWave offered a lot but possibly overwhelmed the user with choice and direction.

Telepresence in its various forms, desktop sharing and conferencing, and recording and streaming of audio, video or other captured activity are IT functions that already support us with live face to face or time-shifted asycnhronous participation in distributed teams and workspaces. Other tools like SocialMiner from Cisco can play an interesting role and reach out to open channels and provide clues about disconnected conversations on a topic related to your workspace activities.

The challenge for the workspace of today and tomorrow and the tools used within it is ensuring sure these tools are relevant to the individual, the team and their activities. To present them and be flexible in applying them in various contexts. To be innovative and malleable to support changing demands, and inter-operate with other emerging platforms and standards. And importantly, not overwhelm the user with choice or features, yet provide the functionality they desire when they need it.

Should be easy right?

The online conversation attention problem worries me more than the asynchronous nature of the conversations that do establish themselves. The very fact that they are not synchronous makes for more opportunities for others to engage don’t you think? We don’t have to all be in the same place at the same time.

Twitter and many other social media tools tend to create loosely coupled conversations. Our contributions via tweets and posts are fighting for attention in a sea of messages flooding our followers in-boxes. And now that many of us are aggregating these IMs, blog posts, Flickr feeds, YouTube subscriptions and the like via browser plug-ins or FriendFeed or GoogleBuzz the whole attention problem is compounded. It’s a miracle that useful conversations can develop in this environment at all.

As Jason touches on, the public nature of many conversations and platforms is discouraging for some potential participants who then limit their contribution, others give it no consideration and quickly pollute, dilute or devalue the conversation.

As a technologist I’ve typically shied away from the monolithic community sites (e.g. Facebook) that provide social media features, preferring to use best of breed tools (e.g. Twitter, Flickr). As an early adopter, like many of the posters on the blog post I’m picking, I enjoy interacting with the niche communities that spring up around these new tools. But as we know they are often isolated silos of activity and although the conversations are focused and seem valuable, they are limited by their accessibility, discover-ability and number of eyeballs. You cant have a conversation on your own… or can you?

I have to acknowledge though, and it saddens me a little, that these days most of my conversations tend to gravitate towards Facebook. I still use my best of breed favorites to publish content out at the edge of the network, and though I may foster conversations there my content is inevitably sucked into the FB pool via syndication feeds and snazzy social APIs.

No social media platform is the perfect place for a conversation though right?. Blogs, Twitter streams, forums, email or IM for that matter all eventually decay a conversation until its essentially impossible to follow. And though platforms like FaceBook support making connections and fostering conversations, partly due to the sheer volume of participants, but also the magic sauce behind the scenes, there still seems to be a lot of room for improvement.

I believe the “magic” that happens on or between platforms is the only way to substantially improve the quality of the conversations. We may think we are the masters of our own contributions but augmenting them mechanically is the only way to sort, filter, discover and improve them in my opinion. GoogleWave may have been a step in the right direction, but we’re still waiting for the silver bullet don’t you think?

Back home with the box, Kym unpacked it carefully, I kept a safe distance as I was on no uncertain terms banned from any contact with said device. The machine was fired up, and I watched with trepidation as Vista appeared on the screen and began to engrain itself on the silicon and liquid crystal. Some casual input from me over Kym’s shoulder eventually got HER laptop onto our home network and out onto the Internet.

The Lappy was mostly provisioned with the tools Kym is going to need out of the box, and the only thing I dared suggest I might install was a copy of Skype. This was agreed to with a look of suspicion, but I was not to install anything else, and not until the new owner had taken some time to play with the new toy.

So it was a couple of days later I thought I’d take advantage of her Ladyships absence to install Skype. Plugged in my USB stick, copied the installer over, setup a profile for her, and made a test call to the automated Skype service. I wanted to check out the built-in web camera and although I could make a call to the upstairs desktop but there’d be no one on the other end and only other living creature in the house was the Cat so how would that work……. unless…. I called the Cat…

Yes that was it, tilt the laptop screen down so the web cam was aimed at the cat on the sofa, place a call to my account logged in on the desktop upstairs, run upstairs and answer it and see if the cat appears. Which of course he did. So much for the visual image but how about some actual communication???

Our cat Kola is anti-social at the best of times but he does respond to a mouse-like squeak sound that I make by drawing air in between pursed lips, so I let rip with this squeeky sound over the Skype connection. He immediately sat bolt up-right on the sofa with a startled look on his face, glanced nervously around the room, looked suspiciously at the laptop, then settled back down on the sofa.

I figured its gotta be worth repeating the “squeak” just to make sure it wasn’t a one-off. Sure enough Kola responded instantly, but this time looked straight at the laptop, he knew it was coming from the machine, and he didn’t like it. By this stage I’m laughing to myself in the office upstairs, delighted that I had achieved a crude form of inter-species Skype communication. Now all I have to do is train him to place a call.

There seems to be a never-ending supply of hype around empowering users through shiny wee orange buttons linking to RSS feeds, but efforts to harness the technology really are better directed towards machine-machine/publishing system/CMS integration, syndication and mash-up development.

In other words, behind the scenes magik happening without user involvement or awareness. Hell, its hard enough to convince some developers that they should RSS-enable services and content let alone educate less web savvy end-users about its benefits.

Now I don’t want you to get the wrong impression (well that’s not true, I don’t care) coz I am a fan of RSS and other uses of XML or structured data to exposure reusable content and data, and have been actively integrating RSS generation and consumption in tools I work on for many years now. Jesus, I was even a fan-boy of Dave Winer and user of his tools (Radio & Frontier) for many years.

But one thing that bugs me about RSS is the suggestion that it’s of real direct conscious use to end-users and that we must educate them on this matter, but is this really the case?

In browser subscriptions? Nope.

Your average casual web user just doesn’t GET what those pretty orange icons are and really doesn’t care much for optimising their news reading activity. In fact for many people I’m sure they enjoy the serendipity of wandering about from one web site to another, who know’s what you’ll read next. I don’t believe information overload is something every web user suffers from. What about GoogleReader and Bloglines?. Come on, lets be honest, other than web-geeks and news-addicts no one is really taking the time to learn how to use those tools effectively. Browser support for auto-discovery though prominent in the UI is still the domain of expert consumers.

User defined channels? Nope.

User driven customisation of news portal content failed to capture a market in the 90′s and it really isn’t any different now despite technologies like RSS? Ongoing positive-action required to manage those channels is as unlikely as creating them in the 1st place, and the resulting decay and diminishing value of those customised views results in users abandoning the mechanism. Personalisation is another matter of course and some sites get this right on occasion.

Trusted relationships? Nope.

As a consumer I may happen to trust my local newspaper, or bbc.co.uk, or stuff that magically appears on news.google.com, but I don’t think we should overestimate the value Joe-average puts on relationships with content providers. Look at how unquestionably most folks consume the stuff big-media outlets like Fox, MSNBC, Sky are generating for eye-balls across the globe.

User publishing? Yes, to a degree.

A tiny fraction of the population actively publish blogs and other web content, a slightly larger volume may read them. Fortunately none of these folks need to directly interact with or manage RSS as it is generally auto-generated. The beauty of these RSS resources is in the automated indexing and relationship building that goes on behind the scenes.

Syndication? Yes! Mash-ups? Yes! A glue between disparate publishing mechanisms? Yes!

These back-end uses demonstrate the real power of RSS. Its no coincidence one of the ‘S’ in RSS stands for SYNDICATION. Integrating resources and adding value on behalf of the user to reflect their personal preferences, history or relationships is more likely than direct-action taken by users to manage RSS and messy URLs themselves.

RSS for everything? Definitely not.

The early schism in the community over evolution of the original relatively simple RSS format into the RDF based one, and resulting tit-for-tat nonsense as features and elements were added to subsequent releases, and finally the arrival of the likes of ATOM on the scene no doubt put off a heap of developers committing to using RSS in any form until there was some stability. These days there are RSS parsers capable of handling the variations for every development platform. It’s stating the obvious I know but RSS isn’t the only means of facilitating web interoperability, trying to make it do too much is one reason for the mess of overlapping specs that RSS became. Invent your own schema for your dedicated purpose, publish it, share it, and others can bloody well Transform it with XSLT if they dont like it.

The various forms of RSS are all great enabling technologies but the only organic consumers who actually benefit from direct use or engagement with RSS are still power web users and readers. In my opinion we are better of not trying to introduce it to the end-user vocabulary at all.

Please, lets encourage developers to build structured interfaces into their apps and services so we can build sexy mash-ups with it, but as far as end-users are concerned lets all just pretend RSS doesn’t really exist. But don’t tell Dave Winer I asked you to do so.