How Microsoft and Jive Might Get Microblogging Wrong

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Microsoft SharePoint and Jive SBS are the two biggest players I know of in the one-size-fits-all enterprise collaboration world.  Thanks to the two year lag between consumer web product innovation and enterprise collaboration followup, we now see microblogs gaining recognition as a must-have feature for the biggest players in this market.

This is great news but there’s still a worry that the future of office microblogging will be born on top of some half-baked implementations if MS and Jive get it wrong.  My fear is that an integration of microblogging into Jive and SharePoint will wind up being less enjoyable to use than the standalone microblog networks such as Twitter and Yammer.  I’d really like to see Friendfeed-style realtime activity streams included rather than a me-too microblog that looks good on a brochure.

More important than being a twitteralike:

• Real time update syndication (PubSubHubbub, rsscloud).  Serendipitous Yammer conversations happen when two-plus people are online and reading/responding in real time.  Standard RSS can’t meet this demand.
• Integration of external content. See Facebook news streams for examples.  Automatically slurping in activity on other busy sites like YouTube and Twitter add a lot to your average Facebook news feed.  It actually adds *too much*, which leads to the next need…
• Granular filtering and presentation.  When you get around to allowing the syndication of any and all external content, then you *must* provide filtering and occlusion.  The person who tweets 50 times a day must not ruin the experience of the other 10,000 users of your system.  Users need granular filtering and control if they’re going to get any value out of your system. If we were to overlay our Yammer stream onto our Jive “recent activity” stream right now all of the long-form content would disappear in a sea of low-value Yams.  This isn’t to say that either mode of communication is more valuable than the other, only that we need multiple views: one for only micromessages, one for only long-form content, and one view for everything.
• Multiple modes of access.  Yammer and Twitter have standalone microblogging clients for desktop, smartphone, and web.  A Jive client that rolls microblogging into a one stop solution is unlikely to be as fast or as pleasant as the standalone microblogging solutions.  Ideally I’d like to see your microblog have its own first-class client that runs alongside the standard web+iphone Jive clients you already have.
• Easy interaction with items within an activity stream.  The baseline here is Like + Comment.  Facebook,  Yammer, and Friendfeed do this.

Bottom line

What I’d most like to see out of Jive/Microsoft is a way to bring in near-realtime items from other feeds.  Whether or not you implement your own “microblog” is immaterial as long as I can see Tweets and Yams and similar content brought in immediately via PubSubHubbub and then I can like/comment/share them within the walled garden of our Jive community.

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