What's The Future of Communications?

It's been a week since the 140Conf in NYC and the short panel discussion Apr. 21st on the Future of Communications with Bryan Katz of Avaya, Tal Givoly of Amdocs, Jeff Pulver and me.  Fifteen minutes is barely enough time to scratch the surface on what's happening in the world of communications due to the emerging technologies - especially social networks and demographic changes in communication preferences.

I finally got some time to expand on the "what if's" and "wouldn't it be nice" capabilities that I believe are or will be the capabilities we want and will actually have in the "future of communications".  I am not going to try to discuss all the possibilities of the future of communications here in one shot.  I will touch on finding people, presence and controlling your communications.  These were some of the ideas we touched on so briefly last week.

Finding People
At the session we started out with the question of who really owns or controls how we find and contact people; The Directory.  Social networks are clearly changing the game here.  As Jeff asked me (either during the panel or possibly in a side conversation), is Facebook becoming the new white pages and are service providers losing control over this?

Think about it.  Where are you most likely to go to find someone you know, knew, or recently met?  Where are you likely to go to look for a business or individuals with the service, skills, or products you are interested in?  With all the individuals and businesses showing up in the social-sphere it's less and less likely we will rely on the traditional communications providers directories.  It's going to be through the Social Networks and via the major search engines.  You know who they are.  Once you find the person or business you wanted, what you want to save about them is also changing.

Presence
Presence means three major things to me.
1) Location - where I am or where someone or something I seek is, including what time it is there.  This information will impact how/when I want to be reached and how/when I reach out to others.  This is demographic of course but there is no denying that applications like Foursquare are allowing people to more freely share where they are despite the fears people in my demographics have about it.  Who would have thought even 2-3 years ago that people would want to so freely share exactly where they are?
2) Communication modes available - show me what IM, social networks, Skype etc that a person is currently available on. Show me what methods by which that person prefers to be reached at the moment - voice, text, instant message etc.
3) State - in short, show if am I busy and in what way (personal dinner with the family, a meeting, quiet work time, am I alone or not, etc..  Whenever possible detect my state automatically.  It can come from my calendar, location service, or a camera to know if I am there and alone or not.

This more complete view of "state" impacts what I want to see (or hear), how, and when.  Similarly, factoring in the state of who I am looking for will impact which mode of communication I select to reach that person at that time.

Communication Control
I don't know about you but I want better ways of controlling the inflow of communication that comes at me.  The "communication overload".   We need help to avoid distractions.  We often need to (or should) defer and delay incoming communications until a more appropriate time.

We need help in alerting us to what information or communications we really want and need to look at first.  It's far too easy to miss or to take too long to see information such as tweets on a subject I am following.  It's also easy to miss the urgency of attempts to reach me via social network messages, voice mails, emails, missed phone or  IM's - personal or professional.

What The Future May Hold
1) Finding People and "Contacts" - since we are looking for people in different ways the concept of what a "contact" is has to change with it.  I want to save the multiple IDs I have for them - personal, professional, social networks etc.  I want to save additional information about why I know them or the business they are in.  I want to be able to search my own contacts repository by far more than just name. Doesn't this become your own consolidated Directory?

I don't want separate lists for personal and "work" or for each "network" I use.  I don't want separate lists on each device I communicate with.  A single list is driven by what I refer to as the blurring of our personal and professional lives and communications.  We will have the option to converge it all if we want to.  Who else besides ourselves that can "see" this list, or where it is stored, will be of prime concern to the personal and professional user.
2) Choosing A Communication Method - When I want to reach a person that I know, and is already in my "contacts" list, I want to see much more about their "presence".   Show me which networks they are logged into at the time, their presence "state", how THEY prefer to be reached and more.
3) Location Services - Knowing where someone is will also be more prevalent - as long as it's by  user choice.  Knowing where a person is gives us alternate ways to reach someone - like calling the hotel or business you know your contact is at because their cell phone is off or not being answered.  How about re-routing a workers call to the desk,  phone etc they are nearest at the time?
4) A Personal Communication Agent - a rich view of presence, especially "state", will feed into a user rules-based personal agent.  An agent that will select if or how to let a call, IM, text, through initially as well as decide after the fact if an "alert" should be popped on my device.  Information contained in emails, voice mails, tweets, IMs etc will be post-processed by source and keywords.  The personal agent and my presence state determine if and when to alert me to key information I want to see.

Unified Communications For Personal And Enterprise Use
All the above is a just a piece of what Unified Communications needs to be.  It's more to me than common "access" to email, vmail, calling and mixing modes.  The personal agent aspect needs to get stronger and stronger.  A good personal agent needs to be fueled by richer and more automated presence.

Unified Communications isn't just for the Enterprise.  Personal communications (home or mobile) and choices are just as complex as professional.  Are we really able to separate professional and personal anymore?  Service providers offering communications to the home and/or mobile user need to address Unified Communications services just as much as Enterprise vendors do.  Any Unified Communications system will have to at least optionally allow the convergence of  the personal and enterprise lives of it's users.  Of course Enterprises have to come to grips with that and the needs of their employees and support it.  For example, social network use "at work" is still a debated subject.

Putting It All In Real Terms - what can the above allow me to do?  A few examples of what is emerging and what will be.
1) I want to get a hold of Jeff Pulver either for personal or professional reasons.  I look him up in my contacts  from my desk device at work, or my smartphone.  I see through location services or from his last few Facebook or Twitter updates, that he's in Tel Aviv and it's late there.  I also see I have email, Twitter, Facebook and Skype modes to reach him by.  I choose a less real time Facebook message method to reach him.

2) I'm out to dinner with a client.  From my calendar entry, my presence state is automatically set where it is known that I'm not alone as well as busy.  To me it's still rude to take a call or text in the physical presence of others you should be paying full attention to.  As a normal rule my "personal agent" will automatically and silently ignore calls (including silencing any rings) and Social Network based (or any) texts.  I prefer no distractions in this setting.

During the dinner my golf buddy calls.  The call is silently routed to voice mail.  End of story.  Then my boss calls, is prompted on the urgency of the call and he says yes.  The call goes to voice mail, and due to the source being boss, and urgent tag, I receive a pop up alert at my phone.  Last, my wife calls because a relative just went into the hospital with a critical illness.  Initially the call is silently sent to the agent and based on her answering urgent, the call goes through.  Alternatively, if my cell phone were off, through location services my wife can see where I am, since I allow her to, and dial the restaurant I am in.

Some of the capability above exists today.  The rest is coming - or at least it should be!  You may say you don't want or need such advanced presence, location services or a personal communication agent.  Just remember the last time you said 'who'd ever want to do that?'.

140Conf NYC Observations and Future Of Communications

On April 21, a colleague of mine, Bryan Katz (@njkatz) and I attended 140Conf in NYC.  He and I also sat on a discussion panel with Jeff Pulver (@jeffpulver) and  @givoly addressing the Future of Communications and impacts emerging social networks, location services, directory functions are likely to have on the future.  Attached below is a copy of Bryan Katz's blog regarding the event.

Avaya was a sponsor of last week's 140 Characters Conference in Manhattan.  Mike Killian and I were on stage for the 'future of communications' panel.

This #140conf is an eclectic gathering of twitter users.  Its focus is more around building relationships and not so much about the technologies of social networking.  Jeff Pulver says  it “was more about the evolution of our collective soul and the underlying effects on both our relationships with each other and the effects of this on businesses, institutions and organizations”.  The live gathering felt a little like a large family reunion with hundreds of Twitter users meeting face-to-face to share their experiences.  With well over a decade of running conferences, Jeff Pulver has mastered showmanship.  And this conference didn’t disappoint.   It opened with Miss America, complete with crown, coming center stage to introduce Jeff to kick it off.   While she didn’t speak about twitter, Jeff had many mainstream leaders in press and media who did as well as celebrities:  MC Hammer and Ivonca Trump.

 (All sessions for the conference can be found here:  http://nyc2010.140conf.com/schedule .  Click on “watch this” to see the individual sessions.)

The conference format provided little opportunity for deep technology insight.  Each speaker had on the order of 10 minutes, and each panel had about 15 minutes.   This gives one the chance to make assertions, but not really back them up with substance.  It allows one to share broad ideas and helps users to decide who to meet or follow.

How popular is twitter, really:  According to TechCrunch, there are about 75M twitter accounts.  It grew tremendously last year.  At its peak (July, 2009), 2-3 accounts were being created each second.  25% of the accounts have no followers, 40% have never sent a tweet, and only 17% tweeted any time in December.   They estimate that there are about 15M active twitter users.  Compare that with Facebook that has inarguably several hundred million active users and Skype which has almost twice that.  When the celebrity John Mayer announced that he was no longer going to use twitter, it was observed that he has 500,000 followers.   Putting that in context, it’s somewhere between 1-3% of all twitter users! 

Main conclusions: 

• The value of twitter: A key value of Twitter is about listening to others, not only about marketing.  Sure, foursquare and coupon applications show benefits for business marketing. And many of us have followed up on comments made on twitter to clarify facts, fix customer issues, or even gather leads as a start of a sales process (click here for a great blog summarizing Avaya efforts - thanks to Paul Dunay.) But the greatest impact observed here was when twitter was used to create a connection – to develop a rapport across the internet – to lend a personality to your business. Whether educators, artists, or business leaders, the message was consistent.  This provided a powerful new way to connect in a more real way with others.  Oddly enough, the most direct impression I had was of Ivanka Trump. While admittedly not a technologist, she went through how she cautiously started using twitter and how her use grew as she learned it was a valuable tool to have a broad-based conversation on her projects - exploring “crowd” opinions.

o    An example is applying twitter almost as we use email broadcasts or blogs internally - an open conversation tool among others with similar interests.  While it’s too soon to tell, at a minimum I’ve already met up with one of our channel partners and am discussing future methods of collaboration with them and, through them, with potential customers.  In short, it's another way to find and create linkages to people and topics.

o    In the schedule, speakers were given with their tags so people could follow them and comment to them directly.   This further fosters conference collaboration in a new way. 

·         The possibilities real time interactive internet:  The conference thematically portrayed an interactive and collaborative internet showing example-after-example of how static web pages are not as useful as interactions that adapt the resources dynamically.  While augmented reality is a clear example, the adaption of news sites is another example with search tools and feed sites now incorporating live twitter feeds. 

·         An augmented real time event - fully engaged while staring at devices:  Everyone was tweeting constantly.   But at normal conferences when people seem to be more distracted by email, they were conversing via text directly.  The use of a common hashtag (#140conf) brought people insight into what others were saying and hearing live, turning the 1-way stage into a broad-reaching collaboration session.  (Periodically, Jeff would announce where the $140conf hash tag was in the rankings of twitter search.) 

Use of Twitter for customer communications, a picture of what’s possible:

Eric Stegemen @EricStegemann of tribus group Real Estate described an application that he’s having built from his firm that uses real time data to link with his firm.  He looks at tweets about real estate in a given area, rates the content, and (for a subscription fee) provides a lead to local brokers with guidance.  If the user tweets asking about “Real Estate Prices in NJ”, for example, it’s not a very serious customer.  But if they ask about “homes for $200-250k in Leonardo”, this more specific request is a hot lead that a local broker can help handle.  He has this handled via a customer management system, but it’s not yet tied to telephony.  

A few other notes.

·         Democratization of news and speeding up information flow:    There were panels and speakers from the news media.  They discussed the implication of faster information flow.   Twitter feeds news faster than any other media.  News web sites took 40 minutes before providing an article about the Haiti earthquake, for example.  This used to be considered lightning fast, but now information is shared instantly via twitter.   We were asked to imagine if twitter was in widespread use during the 9/11 disasters.

·         Pure raw capitalism:  For those people who can place investments, this kind of instant information form a basis for quickly capitalizing on news.

·         EDUCATION:

Jeff had an education theme for this conference with several speakers and panels on new approaches for education.  This was exemplified by a standing ovation for Chris Lehman, a Principal of the Science Leadership academy in Philadelphia.  He spoke passionately about “School 2.0” and received a standing ovation.  It’s worth 10 minutes to listen:  http://bit.ly/daRyBs   If not, here are a few paraphrased quotes: 

·         On curriculum: “What we can do and what we are asked to do in education are radically different.  For teachers, it doesn’t matter if it can’t show up on a test.”  “We aren’t teaching creativity since we can’t figure out how to measure it”.

·         On technology:  “At dismissal, every kid grabs their devices when the door closes.  They use these devices in ways that we can’t imagine and sometimes in ways we don’t like.  But we provide no way to guide them because we don’t participate in these conversations.”   He compared these new technologies to something a pencil … “we don’t have a pencil lab, why do we have a computer lab?  These technologies are like oxygen and should be part of our teaching methods, not outside of them.”

Another standing ovation was given to the St.James 8^th grade class.  They created a short skit and song, and their creativity was rewarded with an eruption of applause.   The point of this was similar to Chris Lehman’s.  The teacher (George Haines @oline73 of Saints Philip and James School) integrated twitter to help them learn.  In this case they used twitter as a way to see how it felt to be one of the characters in Animal farm as each kid adopted a personality and acted the part objectively via this anonymous communications mechanism.   Here’s their skit:  http://bit.ly/d9Tihy

·         The future of communications panel:  http://bit.ly/9iKIr3   Our panel was late in the second day, and it was a bit afield from the rest of the conference.   But communications technology is a passion of Jeff’s, and he was leading this panel discussion.  Jeff Pulver wanted to explore how communications contact information will diverge access away from telephone service providers.   We spoke about the seamless integration of communications channels and the need for an aggregation service – probably not provided by these vendors.  

o        From reading tweets, the messages people seemed to get from our brief session was that social networking has a chance to replace directories, but that there won’t be a single directory.   Phone companies right now are connectors for people, but they may not play this role in the future.  Jeff has asked if we would help him develop a future communications conference.

o        Listeners also heard that social networking is recognized as a popular and important communication modality, and, will/should be embraced as an integrated part of the communication system. Michael Killian’s comments were tweeted by audience members: “presence in communication leverages the where-are-you and what-are-you-plugged-into on aspects of presence in helping learn how available are you”