Don’t Cross The Streams
February 1 2012 02:00:00 PM
Add/Read Comments [10]
I've found myself discussing the pros and cons of activity streams a lot lately. While streams, or news feeds, can be a great way to display information and encourage conversations, they can also be a huge contributor to information overload.
I'm sure your first reaction is to quote Clay Shirky's famous "There's no such thing as information overload, only filter failure" line.
Yes, filtering is EXTREMELY important, and the combination of manual controls, automated filtering via analytics, and crowd-sourced curation can be very helpful in managing overload. But shouldn't we question the root cause of the issue, putting too much information into the stream in the first place?
My favourite way to illustrate this point is the following scene from the 1984 movie Ghost Busters:
Dr. Egon Spengler: There's something very important I forgot to tell you.
Dr. Peter Venkman: What?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Don't cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?
Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Dr Ray Stantz: Total protonic reversal.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Right. That's bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.
While I'm not worried about total protonic reversal, I am concerned that having status updates, file sharing, Q&A, news links, CRM updates, social media feeds, workflow approvals, ERP orders, support tickets, polls/surveys and a dozen other sources of information all piped into the same stream can make social software almost unusable.
Of course I understand the potential benefits of making information available to a large audience by "freeing it from it's application silos." Enabling people to discover content and colleagues that can help them with their jobs is a clearly a wonderful thing. I'm just not sure that taking information from a dozen different systems and squeezing it all into one stream is going to be the nirvana everyone is hoping for.
That said, at the end of the movie crossing the streams was what saved the day. So perhaps as activity streams mature they will be way to conquer the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man of enterprise collaboration.
Who you gonna call?
I'm sure your first reaction is to quote Clay Shirky's famous "There's no such thing as information overload, only filter failure" line.
Yes, filtering is EXTREMELY important, and the combination of manual controls, automated filtering via analytics, and crowd-sourced curation can be very helpful in managing overload. But shouldn't we question the root cause of the issue, putting too much information into the stream in the first place?
My favourite way to illustrate this point is the following scene from the 1984 movie Ghost Busters:
Dr. Egon Spengler: There's something very important I forgot to tell you.
Dr. Peter Venkman: What?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Don't cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?
Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Dr Ray Stantz: Total protonic reversal.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Right. That's bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.
While I'm not worried about total protonic reversal, I am concerned that having status updates, file sharing, Q&A, news links, CRM updates, social media feeds, workflow approvals, ERP orders, support tickets, polls/surveys and a dozen other sources of information all piped into the same stream can make social software almost unusable.
Of course I understand the potential benefits of making information available to a large audience by "freeing it from it's application silos." Enabling people to discover content and colleagues that can help them with their jobs is a clearly a wonderful thing. I'm just not sure that taking information from a dozen different systems and squeezing it all into one stream is going to be the nirvana everyone is hoping for.
That said, at the end of the movie crossing the streams was what saved the day. So perhaps as activity streams mature they will be way to conquer the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man of enterprise collaboration.
Who you gonna call?
Bravo, Alan!
I have several different information sources just like most people, but I have absolutely no desire to see them all feed into a single stream. I use each source different and the best intelligence about what priority to give each feed at any given time is my own. I choose what to look at entirely based on what I want to see at that moment. It may be work related task lists, it may be friends updating their status, and it may be the latest science or gadget news. It is really not all that hard for me to select the source and go view it.
The idea that some mechanism - no matter how good - would be aggregating, ordering, and prioritizing these makes the assumption that my desires and mood are predictable. I am not a predictable cog in a machine. I am not a number, I am a free man.
Thanks Andrew. I know it's sacrilege, but I think keeping some things separate can be advantageous. Your point "I choose what to look at entirely based on what I want to see at that moment" is important. I do think software can provide some assistance in surfacing key resources in context of what you're doing, helping you discover new things. However, I don't think any algorithm can fully replace the decisions you make on your own.
As a developer, I abhor context switching. If I'm coding away, and somebody approaches me with a "quick question", the conversation might last 30 seconds, but it could take 15 minutes to fully get back into the frame of mind I was in when they arrived. I hardly get any email any more, so that's not the distraction it was in previous jobs, but when it was, I worked solely off of a local replica of my mail, with scheduled replication disabled. Similar to Andrew's point, I would choose when to think about email and choose when to think about code.
But even within email, context switching can be jarring, because an email can theoretically be about anything. I find it difficult to compartmentalize that - to focus only on the message I'm reading, respond to it as needed, and then completely forget about it upon moving on to the next one. If I spend 5 minutes in my inbox, I'm thinking about 8 different things. They might all be important, but instead of each getting my full attention until I've dealt with it and move on to the next, by the time I'm reading the last message, my attention is diluted by everything else I've just looked at. It's particularly noticeable if some of that information is comparatively frivolous.
That's why I miss so much that scrolls by in Facebook: my brain tunes out as I'm skimming past all of the Farmville and Mafia Wars posts, and rants about who did or didn't win some football game, on the off chance that there might actually be significant information about something happening in a friend's life... so if there is, it's likely I don't even notice, because my mind has already been Tebowed to sleep. Additionally, if I'm not diligent in checking the feed, all of the fluff has shoved anything of substance far enough down that I have to scroll for an hour to find it, so if it's been a few days since I logged in, I don't even bother reading past anything that's older than a few hours. I shudder to imagine the impact if enterprise end users had a similar experience on the job.
Tim you make two great points:
1) while integrating content from multiple sources removes some of the switching between applications it does cause the problem of jumbling tons of related topics together.
2) As things scroll by they are gone. I imagine we'll soon be hearing stories of managers complaining "Why didn't you respond to the post I put into the stream for you?"
You know my recent thoughts are that the current state of activity streams are a demise or productivity due to over subscription and having to constantly watch as you mention.
Smart filtering has already shown to be a failure inside facebookc with the feedback they get on a constant basis. Also, most workers will be highly unlikely to manage their own in a reasonable format. Current users have enough trouble with rules and mal filtering to not add in a living stream.
I wrote more here. { Link }
Thanks Chris. I completely agree that most people don't work the way vendors assume they will, or set up their demos to emulate. Scripted scenarios are nice, but often to realistic. I'll go take a look at your post.
I should add, if the future does include filtering via auto-magical algorthyms, I hope vendors enable it so that power-users can tweak the settings. For example, it's why I like reading news via Zite on the iPad vs. Flipboard.
I think filtering alone isn't the solution ... filtering may reduce the noise but the key is splitting the stream again.
So why doing a single stream when you split it again? Because it's now YOUR choice HOW to split it. With about 600 friends (a lot of them very active) + some subscriptions on Facebook this stream is already a typical overload example if I would read it as a whole stream.
What I did is splitting it in various lists like Social Media, IBM Notes/Domino or private stuff like Dancing, Poker, Family etc. So now I am able to look at the stream that I am especially interested in and get the information needed very fast.
And yes, somethimes I am crossing streams ... e.g. having people from Social Media in the Notes/Domino Section or vice versa. And no the universe doesn't explode ... at least for now ;-)
Adding filtering (no games activities for me) I now have streams that can be handled easily and suit my personal way to gather informations. And being able to do it your personal way is the great benefit. One source organised my way instead of many sources organized in ways a I may not feel comfortable with.
Doing the same with Twitter of course.
Here are two good posts that I wanted to link to this blog post for further reading:
- { Link }
- { Link }
Thank you Harald, I agree the UI is a key part of the solution. I would find Twitter unusable without TweetDeck.