One of the sessions I got the most out of at the Foresight Unconference over the weekend was Eugene Kim’s; topic “future of collaboration”. I took away some learnings for Twitter.
It began easily enough with a question. “What’s your favorite collaboration tool?” The answers ranged from telephone, to wikipedia, IM, humility, open space, internet, Eugene’s napkin, and twitter. You can almost guess who decided to throw Twitter up there.
Eugene provided a definition “Collaboration is two or more people sharing knowledge for a specific bounded goal”. He also asked us one of those trick questions; Is Collaboration about people or tools?
This led to a discussion where I brought back a Twitter example. Collaboration that is happening in an informal almost unstructured environment. This is a classic case for bottom up complex behavior to evolve. And it is. The example that emerged was:
Twitter Watercooler (naming the pattern what do we see?)
Twitter is becoming our online watercooler. Once your twitter follow X people strategy reaches a critical mass you can almost always drop in and find a topic to post or people to say hi or send a comment to.
It goes further. Start tracking certain topics, eg “social media”, political candidates, “open social” “jowyang”, etc. These were all suggestions I got within a few minutes of posting a question. What do you “track” on Twitter? So the answer is people, topics, events. etc. I really appreciated the “jowyang” answer. for it shows another side of Twitter. Others might say who’s stalking who!
If you aren’t following very many people… another thing to follow is the feedback people are giving to the stars. If Jeremiah has almost 1500 people following him then the right question by him could easily return a high number of quick answers. If you like one of those answers you can contact them direct, or send an open Twitter etc. If you aren’t tracking your name yet you should be. Then you will get all @yourname even if you aren’t following them.
In each case… what you see in twitter or on your twitter client can enable you to respond back to whoever just tweeted. Whether it is another question or an answer or pointer. This is opportunistic collaboration.
What I’m observing is people are looking for coders, developers, all sorts of help and jobs out there. There’s a marketplace around the Twitter water cooler emerging.
Twitter is the new IRC channel. It’s more personal, and it brings in a broader cross section when you add tracking into your peripheral vision.
I’m at KMWorld 2007 tomorrow. I’ve set up a twitter account for the event.
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