Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

Apophenia explains (as pointed to by Stephanie Booth today)

“Academics have been noting that young people’s social and emotional energies have been moving from email to IM.

Do young people have email accounts? Yes. Do they login to them semi-regularly? Yes. Do they use it as their primary form of asynchronous communication for talking with their friends? No.”

As usual, the teens are ahead of us. It will be interesting how the trend evolves as IM finally starts to wash across the business world… (in some ways RIM’s are already the business medium of choice for the really important/juicy missives, the school yard gossips of the working world are they not?)

See the same meme from earlier this year: “Teens: Email is for old people” on Ars.

# Intra-racial couple : the notional social stigma associated with dating someone of exactly the same race

# I have a number of really cool records on vinyl, but sometimes I find myself sometimes reluctant to play them in that format. And not to play the mp3 in stead. because how else would I be able tobroadcast to the world exactly how cool I really am?

# (related) It’s funny, I’d actually pay for a device that listened to what my record player was playing, auto-magical-algorithmically recognized the song playing, looked up the meta details against some free online database and helpfully syndicated the feed to last.fm, to my msn and gtalk header etc. ( you know this is actually technically feasible… )

# (also related) Music is such an interestingly irregular good. The value to you of a good song has components both an intrinsic as well as a social (and some more one or the other). It’s not just the song, it’s also who else likes the song.

song of the day: Mates of State – Fraud in the 80’s
(I wish you could hear it on vinyl…)

click this bit to play:

My friend Chris Matthews as I wrote about earlier, was one of rare brave/clever souls to show up at Office20Con last month with the intention of buying some “office2.0” tools – rather than just talking about them.

One demo we caught was SmartSheet – basically a cheap-and-cheerful Web-based excel clone of sorts for collecting and sorting information in an spreadsheet-like layout. Their elegant twist on the spreadsheet is email workflow integration. e.g. the app will let you automatically send out emails for instance to a group of people to remind them to fill in their section of the sheet and then visibly keeps track of progress for everyone etc.

So this lets you web20 [yes that’s me using web20 as a verb] some fairly run of the mill day-to-day business processes. Got to be at least slightly more efficient than the old way of e-mailing out multiple copies of some word or excel template for input – if just by saving you the trouble of versioning and merging the results etc.

Anyway I was interested how this product worked out for him.

chris matthews: btw, I used SmartSheet for the first time this week

Thomas Purves:Did it work?

chris matthews: totally!

Thomas Purves: nice
Thomas Purves: glad to hear these things work sometimes

chris matthews: I put up a sheet with the english text from a web page we needed to translate. then had columns (blank) for the other languages. And sent it to like a dozen people who speak many languages.
chris matthews: within 24 hours I had 4 of 5 languages completed
chris matthews: and the fifth will be done tomorrow

Thomas Purves: sweet

chris matthews: yup
chris matthews: it has a fun side effect: no one likes to be the last one done their work
chris matthews: socialmedia creates socialpressure

Thomas Purves: that’s cool
Thomas Purves: i hadn’t thought of that effect, Thanks to the visibility/transparency yes
Thomas Purves: social pressure enforces productivity

chris matthews: ClearPressure ™?

Thomas Purves: ha ha

I like this story as both an anecdote of a web tool driving not just some tangible boost in work efficiency but also for the unexpected (might we say emergent?) change in behaviour caused by just a subtle shift in the nature of the interaction.