I have been observing a difference in the way that people use IM and email as younger people move into the workforce. I have young friends and co-workers (mid-20s) who I communicate with frequently on IM and never / rarely via email. Even some aspects of dating seem to have moved to IM with long, intimate IM chats replacing what used to be long phone calls for many couples. I also have a few techie friends my age and older who are IM addicts, but they tend to be the exception rather than the rule. From my perspective, IM is great when you want to have a discussion or need a quick answer to a question, while email is handy for business where you need to keep documentation or need complex information for reference (documents usually).

I just read an interesting piece on CNET summarizing this phenomenon:

Email is so last millennium.

Young people see it as a good way to reach an elder – a parent, teacher or a boss – or to receive an attached file. But increasingly, the former darling of high-tech communication is losing favour to instant and text messaging, and to the chatter generated on blogs and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

The shift is starting to creep into workplace communication, too.

…

Beyond that, email has become most associated with school and work.

“It used to be just fun,” says Danah Boyd, a doctoral candidate who studies social media at the University of California, Berkeley. “Now it’s about parents and authority.”

…

“Adults who learn to use IM later have major difficulty talking to more than two people at one time – whereas the teens who grew up on it have no problem talking to a bazillion people at once,” Boyd says. “They understand how to negotiate the interruptions a lot better.”

Kirah, at Microsoft, even thinks young people’s brains work differently because they have grown up with IM, making them more adept at it.

…

“Nine to five has been replaced with ‘Give me a deadline and I will meet your deadline’,” Kirah says of young people’s work habits. “They’re saying ‘I might work until 2 am that night. But I will do it all on my terms.”‘ (CNET)

It will be fascinating to watch the changing dynamics of the workforce over the next couple of years as employees who have been raised with IM, MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking technologies enter the workforce in larger numbers. I am looking forward to the changes that this generation could bring with them: innovative approaches, quick and nimble decision-making, a focus on the results obtained instead of an 8-5 butts in chairs mentality, a resistance to bureaucracy, and more. With these changes, we may end up with a new set of problems; however, I think that the corporate world could stand a good wake up call.

I recently blogged about an interesting trend of making job offers via blogs. The two highest profile examples were Calacanis offering the Unboomed Amanda a job at AOL/Netscape and Scoble speculating about how he could go about hiring Calacanis.

Yesterday, Mark Cuban put a new twist on this trend by putting out a call on his blog offering a job to anyone who can solve the problem of getting people out of the house to watch a movie in the theater without spending more money on marketing than what the movie can earn.

This is an open challenge. You come up with a solution, you get a job. Seriously.

…

So if you want a job, and have a great idea on how to market movies in a completely different way. If your idea works for any and all kinds of movies. If it changes the dynamics and the economics of promoting movies, email it or post it. If its new and unique, i want to hear about it. If its a different way of doing the same thing you have seen before, it probably wont get you a job, but feel free to try.

So go for it. Come up with a great idea that i want to use and I will come up with a job for you to make that idea happen.

for real. (Mark Cuban)

This morning, TechCrunch posted a piece about online dating 2.0 that got me thinking about how our online and offline lives have merged. This is especially true of the 20-something MySpace crowd and the early adopter techie crowd. Both of these two groups, while having slightly different approaches, have moved to the point of doing almost everything online.

And yes, I have used online dating, and it was a great experience for me. Shortly after my divorce, I realized that all of my friends (and all of their friends) work at Intel, which is not surprising, since we are one of the largest employers in the area; however, by dating people at work you run the risk of eventually managing or working for an ex … not a comfortable situation. Around this time last year, I met the current boyfriend on Yahoo! Personals. His take on online dating reflects the views in this post: “we have moved everything else online, why should dating be any different?”

Most of us get our news online, rarely picking up those stacks of paper filled with yesterday’s news (my parents refer to them as “newspapers”). I immediately recycle the phone books that appear on my doorstep knowing that I will never use one when I can get the same information online without having to find a place to store these books that are now roughly the size of my couch. I rarely pick up the phone to talk to friends in favor of email and IM.

This does not mean that I have moved all of my interactions with the world into the online space, and I do not think that doing everything online would be a healthy approach. We need the offline interactions as well; however, the online interactions can facilitate the offline. Email and IM just seem to be more convenient ways to arrange an evening out. Many of us who blog “meet” people online as a result of comments back and forth in the blogosphere, but we take the opportunity to meet these bloggers in the offline space when we get an opportunity at a conference or other venue. After recently exchanging blog comments with Josh Bancroft, we realized that we both worked at the same Intel campus, and getting together offline resulted in him joining a session at OSCON next week that Danese Cooper and I are leading. Both online and offline interactions have their place, but it is interesting to see how the two are merging to the point where we do not even consciously think about how we use them both.

Danese Cooper and I are leading a series of lightning talks focused on the Art of Community at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland next week. The session features some great speakers including Mitchell Baker, Karl Fogel, and many more. If you are attending OSCON, please stop by our session!

The Art of Community

Track: Emerging Topics
Date: Thursday, July 27
Time: 5:20pm – 6:05pm
Location: Portland 251

Online communities have been a fundamental element of open source culture for years, and they are now becoming an integral part of the daily lives of more people every day. New people are joining and participating in online communities in everything from open source projects like Firefox to social networking sites like MySpace and LinkedIn. This session will offer guidance on how to create a successful community in the form of 5 minute lightning talks from a group of experts on the following topics:

• Introductory remarks: Danese Cooper, Intel and Open Source Initiative
• Benefits of having a community: Zaheda Bhorat, Google
• Corporate communities: Josh Bancroft, Intel
• Using Collaboration tools: Karl Fogel, CollabNet
• Leading a community and creating a community culture: Geir Magnusson, Intel and Apache
• Concerns and challenges: Zak Greant
• The Character of Intentional Communities: Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Corporation
• Impact of web 2.0 on communities: Dawn Foster, Intel

The Washington Post had an interesting summary of the Pew Internet & American Life Project blogging survey. In short, here is the typical profile of a blogger:

• More than half are under 30

• Only 15% blog to make money

• They use blogs for creative expression

• Motivation tends to be personal (keeping up with family / friends and meeting new people)

Here are a few choice quotes from the Washington Post article:

They consider themselves digital natives.

They’re young. They’re addicted to instant messaging and social networks. And they’re more apt to dish about the drama at last night’s party than the president’s latest faux pas.

…

“The average blogger is a 14-year-old girl writing about her cat,” said Alexander Halavais, an assistant professor of interactive communications at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut.

Typical bloggers are not ranting about politics or trying to be hard-core journalists, he said. “The survey shows that blogging is really a community-based activity and a way of connecting with people.”

Apparently, the TechMeme crowd (those of us over 14, not blogging about our pets) appear to be in a minority. The beauty of the long tail is that we can blog about a variety of topics and find an audience of like-minded people who share our passion for a topic. A 14 year-old blogging about her cat will have readers who care about her or her cat, while people who are passionate about open culture would be likely to read my blog.

Open culture is a fairly specialized topic, and I will never have millions of readers on this blog, nor do I necessarily want millions of readers. I would rather have a few dozen readers who are passionate and knowledgeable about the topic. The point is that within the long tail, we can each find our niche, regardless of what the research finds about the “typical” blogger.

This morning, Tim O’Reilly published four big ideas about open source that will guide his discussion at OSCON next week:

1. The architecture of participation beyond software. Software development was the canary in the coalmine, one of the first areas to show the power of self-organizing systems leveraging the power of the internet to transform markets. But it didn’t stop there. What we’re now calling Web 2.0 is a direct outgrowth of the core principles that made open source software successful, but in my opinion, many of the projects and companies that make up the Web 2.0 movement have gone far beyond open source in their understanding of how to build systems that leverage what I call the architecture of participation.

2. Asymmetric Competition. One of the most powerful things about open source is its potential to reset the rules of the game, to compete in a way that undercuts all of the advantages of incumbent players. Yet what we see in open source is that the leading companies have in many ways abandoned this advantage, becoming increasingly like the companies with which they compete. I have no concerns about the ultimate health of the open source development model or the vibrant creativity of the open source community, but I do question whether open source companies really grasp the implications of the new model. I think that if they did, they’d be Web 2.0 companies.

3. How Software As a Service Changes The Points of Business Leverage. Operations and scalability lead to powerful cost advantages; increasing returns from network effects lead to new kinds of lock-in. The net effect is that even when running open source software, vendors will have lock-in opportunities just as powerful as those from the previous generation of proprietary software.

4. Open Data. One day soon, tomorrow’s Richard Stallman will wake up and realize that all the software distributed in the world is free and open source, but that he still has no control to improve or change the computer tools that he relies on every day. They are services backed by collective databases too large (and controlled by their service providers) to be easily modified. Even data portability initiatives such as those starting today merely scratch the surface, because taking your own data out of the pool may let you move it somewhere else, but much of its value depends on its original context, now lost.

These are all important concepts for open source, but I am particularly drawn to the idea that open source has provided a foundation (technically and conceptually) for what we are now calling web 2.0. I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about this relationship recently because understanding how open source works (my background is in open source) can help us understand web 2.0. This is particularly true in discussions about what motivates people to freely contribute to communities.

Eric Raymond wrote that “Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.” Within open source software communities, many projects are started to fill the developer’s need, and as the user of the software, the developer has a personal stake in the product’s quality. Linus started Linux to fulfill his personal need for a Unix-like operating system that would run on lower cost hardware. Other developers frequently contribute to open source projects to fill a need of their own to have a particular project ported to a favorite hardware platform or to add an additional feature that would make the product more closely meet their needs.

This idea can also be applied to other online communities outside of software. People join and participate in social networking communities, like the MySpace community, to fill a social need and have an online location to hang out with friends, coordinate social events, share new (or old) music, and blog about their ideas and experiences. Others join business-oriented networking sites, like LinkedIn, to make better connections with people in related industries and to network online with like-minded people. Some people join online news and information communities, like Digg and Newsvine, to share and discuss information with others.

These examples demonstrate how people can join online communities to fill a particular need, and how those needs can take many forms and motivate people in different ways. Keep in mind that motivation is incredibly complex. A single individual may be motivated to join and contribute to online communities for many different reasons, which when combined form a powerful set of motivators. The interesting thing is how the motivation is similar for open source communities and web 2.0 communities.

I just posted a new entry to my Trends in Web 2.0 blog focused on social software usage in the enterprise. This entry considers the changing workforce demographics with new employees raised on email, IM, MySpace, Facebook, and other social software just entering the workforce, and it discusses how we can use their expertise to help other people become more productive using collaborative, web 2.0 technologies.

You can get the complete entry from the Trends in Web 2.0 blog .

Firefox has always been built on viral marketing, and the SpreadFirefox campaign has been nothing short of brilliant. The latest initiative lives up to the SpreadFirefox legacy. For World Firefox Day, they are asking each of us to bring one friend into the Firefox family by September 15, and in exchange, they will immortalize the names of both the giver and the receiver in Firefox 2.

Please take a minute to visit the World Firefox Day website and start the process.

MySpace is frequently used as a prime example of web 2.0; however, I am finding that it has fewer web 2.0 characteristics than I expected. I recently used this definition of web 2.0: “I think of web 2.0 as a convenient shorthand for the collaborative, community oriented web where collective intelligence is harnessed and content is created by the many rather than the few. Users participate in an open fashion using technology that facilitates participation for those who are not serious coders in contrast to the static web of a few years ago.” (Trends in Web 2.0)

MySpace excels at creating a community of people who generate huge amounts of content in the form of profile information (about me, who I’d like to meet, interests, personal information, schools attended, employers, friends, comments, blogs, group membership, and much more). The volume of content is nothing short of amazing, and this content is promoted virally when friends encourage other friends to join. When all of your friends are on MySpace, you miss out by not joining, which is a strong form of peer pressure. In order to join, you need to share at least some information, thus creating more content. Absolutely brilliant.

However, I have been frustrated with the MySpace experience. I recently blogged about how I do not fit within the age demographic, so I find it less useful than someone closer to 25 might. I will put this frustration aside, since I cannot really blame MySpace for my age, and no change that MySpace could make would roll time backwards to make me 25 again.

Age aside, I am increasingly frustrated by how MySpace uses (or does not use) web 2.0 technologies. They have a very simple interface where the user types content into text fields and the content is displayed on the profile. This is great for novice users, but I would like more. Today, I wanted to add a quick Javascript snippet to display the RSS feed for this blog on my MySpace profile. I can enter HTML to format the content within the text boxes; however, Javascript is not allowed. I also wanted to move a few things around on the page. MyYahoo and many other sites have Ajax interfaces that allow drag and drop of widgets to rearrange them on the page. With MySpace, I would need to write this code myself or download an annoying template that would rearrange it for me; I cannot just drag and drop the boxes to a more convenient location.

MySpace also fails to leverage the expertise of their user base. For example, the MySpace help files are minimal and fairly useless. Here is an example:

Q. How do I add color, graphics, & sound to my Profile page?

A. Adding color, graphics, and sound to your profile page is easy and requires only a basic knowledge of HTML (the programming language used to create web pages on the Internet). Simply go to “Edit Profile” and enter the desired HTML coding where appropriate. If you do not know HTML, you can reach out and make a new friend by asking someone who has color, graphics, and/or sound on their Profile page how they did it. People on MySpace are friendly and always willing to help, so just ask! This is a great way to meet new people! (MySpace)

I am not one to be excited about writing help files; however, MySpace has a robust user community that could be leveraged to provide this information easily via a wiki or other technology. EBay has successfully implemented something similar giving users the ability to easily help each other. MySpace could easily set up a wiki that people could use to share tips and tricks, helpful hints, and other information. In the above example, the users could create detailed instructions about changing profiles including the code required.

MySpace has a lot of strengths in social networking and content creation; however, by utilizing some of the newer technologies, MySpace could feel less like a static environment and more like a dynamic and vibrant web 2.0 site.

Earlier this week, Kate Bevan from The Guardian said, “Firefox is wonderful. It’s up there with chocolate and sex on the grand scale of great things about being alive.” I am a huge fan of Firefox, but right up there with chocolate and sex? Hmmmm, no comment.

Richard MacManus, a ZDNet blogger, suggests that Firefox’s market share will continue to increase as enterprises begin to adopt it. I blogged on a similar topic earlier this week describing how “the tools that we use outside of work as consumers tend to creep into the enterprise.” MacManus describes this phenomenon and relates it back to Firefox with the following insights:

In a corporate blogging program that I’m involved in, a bunch of us were discussing the reasons why Firefox usage is growing. One person noted that in the XiTi survey of European patterns of use, Firefox is most often used at weekends. He inferred that this means personal and household adoption rates are higher than corporate ones.

This trend for Firefox adoption to be driven by the consumer market is a positive sign IMO, because we’re currently seeing a larger trend of ‘Web 2.0’ consumer apps infiltrating the Enterprise. Just today I was speaking to some Salesforce.com execs and one of them pointed out that its Skype mashup is proving very popular amongst its customers. I can point to many other instances of social Web tools becoming utilized a lot more in enterprises – IM, wikis, Web Office services, indeed the software-as-a-service tools that Salesforce.com runs.

My point is that I think Firefox market share will continue its upward trend, particularly when Enterprises start using it more. (ZDNet)

MacManus is right. The applications that we use as consumers will gradually creep into the workplace, and when enough people across the enterprise begin demanding the use of any application, IT will usually relent and eventually begin supporting it to appease the masses. This is especially true for a secure, stable web browser, like Firefox, which would generate fewer IT objections than an application with questionable security or stability issues. It also helps when you can convince a few key people in senior management to request the application just to light a fire under the IT department!