Working ourselves out of a job...

This is probably going to give away my age, if I haven't already.

When I started working in the Telecom industry, everything was shiny and new and the future was so bright that we wore our RayBan Wayfarers at night.

With great power, great responsibility came with it, in many cases and particularly with my engagement in developing markets, our work was somewhat heroic, deploying life-changing technologies and greatly impacting the quality of lives of the population at large. From enabling businesses to the levels of first-world countries, putting internet under the fingertips of the kids attending schools accessible only by dirt roads, to the birth of the mobile information society and the freemium long distance services.

While we did this, my colleagues and I were in privileged positions, calling a developed country our residence and working for staple-name corporations. We were the only ones that could do this job.

As the transfer of these technologies further advanced, we saw the world shrink and flatten and our colleagues on the other side of the wire get more empowered. The result now is that in many of the more mature technologies, the ones doing the work we used to do are no longer our neighbors.

When we foresaw these changes, we recognized them as a shift in paradigm and to a certain point, we succeeded in achieving these but somehow in the process, we might have worked ourselves of a job....

Time to grow up, dude...

Corporations many times are compared with real people. They are born, they die, can be sued, they pay taxes, etc. Free speech is a debate. Many of them evolve a quite identifiable persona.

Pretty much as people, we expect them to grow in all aspects and live a full life. That's what this entry is about. Social Responsibility. Very much like a guy who just steps into the picture to take care of some issue, we are OK with new and -specially- small corporations to be focused on task.

They have one thing to do, they do it well and they do nothing else.

Now, once they grow bigger and older, we start to look at them in a different light. We expect them to do all sorts of things. Give back to the community, create jobs, pay well and play nice. Just like we do with older guys. They have been around here, we expect them to pitch in somehow, be nice, don't just talk about the $%^& work, even party a bit and have a beer with us. If they don't, we call them a "Jerk" or in the best case, we declare that they "lack social skills".

So, aren't our Corporation's Social Responsibility expectations just another way of humanizing them?

The secret sauce of Social Media

I recently read the inaugural blog of a good friend, Marco Cuttin. He makes a very nice walk on memory lane going through all the communications systems and how they evolved.

However, while Marco shows the similarity and how they evolved, fails to point out the one thing that makes Social Networks, Social Networks.

The one thing that is different is that the connections ARE PERSISTENT. What I mean with this, is that once you have connected with someone, and exchanged information, the network remembers that path and it can be traveled again by others. It is like a telephone system that grows branches according to your calls. This concept is also very well illustrated by a speech by Sebastian Seung on TED, "I am my connectome".

The App Reigns

I should have known. I dared to mention the iPhone and I just got a gazillion hate mails.

The conversation went south quickly, falling into the this vs. that and the "I was here before" conversation.

What this made me realize that -personally- I care less and less about the device, about any device, and more about the apps. Functionality and content are king in my reign. TiVo and the DVR have done more for TV in my case than color, HD or any other improvement.

In the case of a computing or a Smartphone device, the reality is that very specific tasks are attributed to the Application and not the device. Nobody "Macs" or "PCs" something. But you do Photoshop an image, and you "throw it into an Exel" and on a bad day, it is your Outlook that is "acting up". In one concept: The App is the verb.

On the device, I have some killer apps that I just need to have. My preferred ones are:

Pandora. My music, randomized and with new stuff! Love it on the computer, even better on the handheld when it can go everywhere and has XG access.
Evernote. This is a powerhouse application. If you haven't tried it, you should. I just loved the first version because of the concept of ubiquity. The idea is a Notebook that can be accessed by a variety of ways, web, PC or Mac client, and Mobile client. In addition to this, the first version allowed for hand-written notes, email-to-notebook entry, and note emailing as well as a neat web-clipping functionality. On the mobile, it gets even better when you add the camera and the geo-tagging functionality.

GMail Sync. I mean Contacts and Calendar too.

Google Voice. If you read "The Mobility I Want", you know why. This is the closest thing to unified communications Nirvana.

It is not broken, it is a feature...

If you are in the tech industry, you have probably heard this one, usually said as a joke.

If I have to explain any further, this refers to when the developer or Marketing finds an unexpected bug or defect and -BAM- (please draw starburst around it...) turns it into a new feature.

What is interesting is that the opposite is also true. New features that are misinterpreted can often be taken as a defect. I am an example of this with my newly-found learning curve on touchscreen phones, while I am still trying to make use of that muscle memory, now with almost no other tactile feedback besides haptics.

This also happens at any level of human life. One example is the controversial ADHD. Most people that I have known with this syndrome tend to be extremely creative and intelligent. So maybe it IS a feature!

I am trying to convince my wife on some of my "features"....

You are like Einstein

Yep. Much like Albert Einstein. Not because you can come up with the Special Relativity theory and also play the violin, but because your ideas come in the oddest moments.

Einstein once said: "Why do I have my best ideas in the shower?"

This is true for most of us and it is ironic that most of the time your best ideas come to you in waves and in places where it is so hard to document them.

I am currently inmersed reading "The Artist's Way", which is what you can consider a "classic", written in by . The concepts exposed there are not easily proven, but they are still very valid. One of the key concepts, at the core of the author's thesis, is that repetitive tasks "feed" the creative mind and we can then tap it. This is the author's explanation on why these ideas come to us in places that we are sometimes even embarrassed to confess.

This is the reason why Evernote is probably my all-time favorite app on my phone and the new version on Android is capable of doing off-line creation and editing.

Now we just have to make it work under the shower.

What's its name? Facemail?

It was in the news, but honestly, nobody is paying a lot of attention.

Facebook has announced that this Monday, they will make available their email services. At the time of this writing, it is not clear what enhancements are they incorporating into their Inbox feature, other than a dedicated email address.

I have been watching social media for a while (click here to see my 2008 rant) and I never saw Facebook as an email killer, but more like an Outlook killer. Think about it, What does Outlook do for you in a typical office environment? Integrates your contacts, communications, and takes care of your appointments and resource booking. There is not a lot that Facebook is missing out of these.

There are four things that I would point out with Facebook's announcement:

1.- Facebook does stand a chance. Email is becoming more and more just a transport layer and a notification mechanism. If I look at how my two daughters use their online resources, it is easy to come to this conclusion. They do have email addresses, to be able to "communicate with the dead", but they rarely check them. They communicate through Facebook and SMS, and email's function is reduced to make the vibrating device go off on their smartphones. If the notification piece is solved, Why send an email? You already have that message in FB's Inbox. It seems that something in these lines is coming with the announced Office Online integration.

2.- We need more. Some said this will be a GMail killer. Well, not until we get the gazillion storage capacity, the external email address, the capacity to SEND emails to people that are not on Facebook, Offline and mobile client access, resource management, iCal and VCard translation, multiple addresses to be able to manage your online personas, distribution lists, better threaded conversations, and -Oh Yeah!- better search. This is without even factoring in Google Buzz (or Wave?), which is a truly revolutionary way of communicating.

3.- What about voice? Nobody cares anymore? I do. Google has a nice foothold here, both with the Android operating system running on phones, Google Voice, and Google Talk's capacity to do VoIP. And it is not just a telephone, it looks more like your personal switchboard and unified communications platform. Facebook has a shy attempt at something like this with their partnership with Vonage, but again, no way to call anybody outside of Facebook, and what is even worse, no way to call anybody ON Facebook that does not have the Vonage app on their mobile.

4.- We still need more. There has been some comparisons with GMail's priority Inbox -which I think is the best thing after email search-. Facebook has insight into what is important for you, and what is not. So -in theory- they may be able to classify email according to this. The question here is, Can they do it better? Right now, honestly, they are not there yet. Facebook filters out stuff that I am interested in and stuff that is new to me and I would have never given a chance other way.

And let's face it, we do have "circles of friends", we have the "A" list, the "B" list, the acquaintances; people from work, and family. On top of this, our interests change. When I am looking to move to another city, or just go there for a short trip, I focus on friends that live there. If I am having parenting issues, I turn to friends that have same age kids as mine. These are all things that are not necessarily reflected in my status updates. Facebook makes it -in the best case- laborious to track these changes.

One thing is true. They got us to write about them, not on email but on a blog, and announce it on Facebook.