Group Blogs, Wikis and FriendFeed- Participation Drives Innovation

A post, Using FriendFeed Rooms for Work: What's Needed?, by a fellow blogger, Hutch Carpenter, started me thinking about how the web can and often does play a role in the innovation process... and what could make it better. As I've discussed in this blog and with my clients, we at Atomica believe that strategic new product development requires participation by managers from a variety of different department. Often that is neither practical nor possible with far flung divisions and busy schedules.

Early solutions to this problem included conference calls and later, video conferencing. These options is of course subject to the same types of challenges as in house meetings are- schedule conflict, tardiness and inattentiveness. Some issues relate to the off-site nature of these gatherings. The distraction of interruption by phone or physical presence... by those who disregard a closed office door and the temptation to multi-task when one is cozily situated at one's desk staring at a full inbox.

Newer web based solutions have started to surface and, in general have allowed managers to overcome some of the drawbacks of both virtual and actual meetings. The asynchronous nature of most web applications allows users to overcome the drawbacks mentioned earlier of unfocused attendees in teleconferences and video conferences. Multi tasking, contrary to popular opinion, actually results in a loss of productivity, not a gain.

By allowing workers to access the group site in their own time, the propensity of group members to concentrate solely on the activity at hand increases. This leads to more and responsiveness and better communication.

An early web application, group blogs, has turned out to be excellent for brainstorming. The open nature of a group blog allows participants to express their thoughts and comment on others, building upon one or several central ideas and keeping a running record of the conversation. They do, however, tend to favor those participants with the strongest writing skills, often the marketing folks who tend to try to run the show anyway. This can lead to minimal input from those with a more technical bend, often the engineering folks who have the basic information required to make the project a success.

Wikis, popular in many companies for group projects, solve some of the problems related to document exchange and provide a forum for users to post messages and comment on them. Rather than digging through the overcrowded in box for email messages pertaining to the project, group members have one central storage place for everything. There are some drawbacks though.

The land of wikis is well developed, but most of them suffer from only emphasizing multiple user changes to documents and revision tracking. They lack the interactive participation that makes FriendFeed so compelling.

Friendfeed however, shows real possibilities. This application allows sharing of a variety of different types of media including web pages, documents, image files and videos and provides rooms for group meetings. Adding wikis to Friendfeed would offer the best of both worlds and greatly improve the level of participation of various users in group projects. Hutch Carpenter offers some ideas on how to do this effectively.

Rooms already have three key elements for making them into wikis:

- Ability to manage who the room members are

- Room-specific search

- RSS directly into rooms

Here are my four features for wikifying FriendFeed rooms:

1. Better handling of RSS feeds for document changes

2. Sticky setting for entries

3. Timestamp comments

4. New comments and entries notification

Because participation is key to effective innovation and we live in a world where distance increasingly is meaningless, we must come up with better ways to enable managers to effectively interact. As the web continues to evolve, I'm sure we'll continue to see better applications.

On the other hand, there will still always be that one member of the group that never contributes his share.