Image source: flickr

Well, the internet is buzzing with the discussions and reviews of Google’s recently release browser, Chrome. Nick Carr has some good thoughts on the subject, his key take aways:

“To Google, the browser has become a weak link in the cloud system… Google can’t wait for Microsoft or Apple or the Mozilla Foundation to make the changes.”

“…winning a “browser war” is not its real goal. Its real goal, embedded in Chrome’s open-source code, is to upgrade the capabilities of all browsers so that they can better support (and eventually disappear behind) the applications.”

I agree with this basic idea of needing to move browser technology forward, and having a few competing products motivates people to innovate. I recently heard an explanation that Google’s “Don’t be evil” credo really meaning “Don’t be Microsoft.” However, they were often criticized for releasing non-standard products, including features in Internet Explorers but also C# and Active X (more on that later.) In order to give browsers more speed and capabilities, Google had to move away from web standards.

Just to be clear, web standards are basically a really good idea, even if adoption of new ones is a slow process. Leaping frogging the standards process brings us back to web development in the mid-90s. In those days, after creating a website, we had to test the web pages on all the browsers across all the platforms. More likely than not, the site never worked on the first try, which gave the process a Groundhog Day feel. (Of course, we still have to do that today, but it is thankfully not has bad as the days of Netscape 4 and IE 5.)

Google’s decision to go open source is clever, but there is an implied statement to the other browsers of “join us, or be left behind.” I suppose, at least the other browsers are given the option of having access to the code, unlike other proprietary browsers. I’ll admit that an optimal outcome would be the other browsers would adopt only the best features, and those features would eventually be accepted as web standards. However, the problem with this scenario is that it will take a while for time for the best features to emerge, as web developers create new kinds of content for them. In the meanwhile, developers will have to play the user percentages game, and make trade offs to maximize what the number of people who can see their work. More importantly, users will have to have multiple browsers to access different kinds of content.

The fundamental problem is that the moving away from standard and interoperability is going to fracture the internet. If you want a glimpse of the implications of this idea, an interesting place to look is Korea where a large percentage of sites use Active X, which I learned about first hand trying to plan a trip to Seoul last year. Blogger and friend, Danny Kim gives a interesting account of the use of Active X in Korea. He also sent me a parody of Google’s Chrome comic book, which is worth a look as well.

Image source: flickr

I’ve been busy helping organize a workshop, which means of course less time for blogging. But I’ve noticed that in the midst of long 3 hour planning sessions, we take breaks to check email. We also got a request from one of the people we’re recruiting to help us to insure that there would be time for email breaks.

It would seem that email breaks are the new cigarette break. While the latter causes lung cancer and the former doesn’t, it is still a vice. Our need for continuous connectivity and up to the second status reports makes the act of unplugging just as unnerving for many as nicotine withdraw.

I guess that is something to be thankful for the day before Thanksgiving. Gigaom is linking to an Xing site, which calculates the value of your network. Mine is over a million dollars. You enter in some demographic information and they describe the size of your network, and the frequency of contact. Of course, a figure like how many people do you speak to weekly is very hard to estimate, which makes me question this numbers and charts really mean.

In the gallery section, you can compare your network value with others by country and industry and age (which is the horizontal access.) This clever addition makes it competitive, and vastly more sticky and viral. But I’m not sure why we are seeing all the peaks and curves. I’m not sure how many people have submitted to this, so it might a few people might be outliners and causing spikes. Getting more data points might smooth out the curve, I guess I’ll check back later.

I attended a very good discussion at MobileCamp on Mobile Social Networks, which was run by Keith Erskine of padpaw. We ended up talking a lot about facebook, which seemed to be on a lot of people’s mind. When talking about Linkedin and Facebook, the overall vibe I got was that people liked keeping their social networks separate in all their various forms.

In terms of social netwoking sites, Linkedin was for business, and Facebook was for friends and family. Recent feature additions or announcements for upcoming features on both sites are making them look more like each other. Linkedin recently added a photo feature and plans on opening up their platform. Facebook added groups and has a limited profile features, which comes very close to allowing different groups to get different versions of your site (although it’s not quite here yet.) Even with these features, it seems as if the group wanted to keep them apart. (There was the sense in some people are reaching the limit on how many sites they wanted to maintain.) It seems easier to me to maintain one, rather than several. Although I guess people may not want to have all their data locked into one privately owned site. This point brought up protocol, standards, and Open Social, which I want to address in another post.

People often use different email addresses for work and personal use, I check a handful accounts everyday. Since getting my Blackberry, I can finally synch my computer and phone address books, which was a simple but powerful change. Now, all my devices share the same information and it is now stored in multiple places.

Recently, I’ve received work email through Facebook which complicates my email archiving system. Friends have invited me into Linkedin. Although some relationships are clearly defined as work or personal, social circles are usually not that discreet. Their edges are porous and overlap, and people migrate from one to another. What is also interesting is how the bucketing of people now can get directly verbalized. That is, accepting an invite to Linkedin from a co-worker and then denying the invite into Facebook.

Why do people like to keep their social circles separate some of the time and not others? It is a personal preference? Or are there user experiences (for lack of a better word) involved which have an effect if we want to group them together or not?

Two nice work office related new items hit recently about what people who at work when their not working.

The first one tries to estimate the cost of playing fantasy football during the work day. Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc came up with the number of US$435 million per week in labor is spent on people playing fantasy football while they should be working, or only US$275 million per week if they only spent 10 minutes a day thinking about it. Of course, they also point out that similar productivity is lost due to a host of activities, like smoking breaks and off-topic web surfing.

Another article on Wikipedia made the internet circuit on tracing back changes to entires to various companies and organizations. A lot of fuss has been made about people at Walmart and Congressional offices altering pages about themselves. However, I thought the more interesting findings were the people editing off-topic pages from work.

Someone from the CIA corrected lyrics used in a musical episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. There seems to be Democrat party employee who loves tennis, and keeps tabs on the soon to be retired Tim Henman page. But the best example has to be someone at the Minnesota Republican Party who replaced the entire Harry Potter entry with a one-liner spoiler of the last book.

Although I didn’t invent this correlation, I am highly amused with the idea that the number of keys someone carries is a function on his or her power. People who lack power own few or no keys. Extremely powerful people have no keys as well. Those somewhere in the middle, like myself, lug key chains brimming with keys.

How many keys do Michael Bloomberg or Bill Gates have? Can you imagine Queen Elizabeth barreling down on the M3 going to Windsor Castle saying, “Cripes! I left the house keys next to my DS Lite. I guess I’ll have to use the spare, hidden in the flower pot round back of the garden.”

Graphing the Power Key Curve is an interesting exercise. As you can see in Figure 1, the function looks quadratic. (Of course, this is only a rough approximation. The actual curve is unlikely to be symmetric, but I couldn’t intuitively guess at how each side would taper different. Please leave a comment, if you have any ideas.) Looking at the graph, we see that an increase of key ownership reflects an increase in power. However, at a certain point, a continual increase in power reduces the number of keys in one’s possession.

One feature of quadratics is that each value on the y-axis has two values, as show in A and B on the graph. Of course, it’s easy to know how many keys you own, just count them. The tricky and fun part is figuring out which side of the graph do you reside, especially as the number of keys your own change.

Here’s my current key situation. The dip last fall was the least amount of keys I carried in a long time. As I stared freelancing full time and moved into a new housing situation, I was down to a mere three keys, which was a good thing… I think. Regardless, that didn’t last long, as the number of keys for various work spaces crept up. My storage space is showing up as the Misc. key. Looking at this chart might motivate me to get rid of it.

But the real question is… how many keys do you have on you?

I’ve been posting a lot on the massiveness of the attempts to re-direct telecom infrastructure in positive ways. The macro problem is basically how to tackle large scale problems and change conventional ways of thinking, which led to the question, why do I rarely finish tasks early? Is it just human nature?

Along the same lines, I got to thinking how the world was able to for the most part fix the Y2K bug (remember that?) Yet in most other cases, impending disasters, like our dependence on oil, failing infrastructure and unsustainable spending, all go unheeded.

I came up with two reasons, one is that the world had a deadline. Come January 1, 2000, we were all scared that the lights would go off, our bank accounts would evaporate, nuclear power plants would explode, sewage would flood into our drinking water system, and our computers would explode. I knew a lot of people in IT who certainly were not going to party like it was 1999 on that New Year’s Eve. (On the smaller scale, my personal tasks tend to get completed when I have set deadlines.)

Are we just lazy and short sighted without deadlines and structure? Maybe, maybe not.
The second reason is that the direct costs of fixing the bug to most people were minimal. It was a one-off project, and no government or company was going to be known as the one that blew it. Coding systems to switch from two digit years to four digit years was complex, but it was containable. Further, it didn’t require much sacrifice on the individual level.

Where as in the case of moving off our dependence on oil, the transition is going to demand direct lifestyle changes and loss of freedoms to most people. Of course, starting early will make the transition easier, but that is unlikely to happen. Further, large scale social problems rarely has concise, real deadlines, which makes Y2K an interesting, albeit special case.

Back to the drawing board.

New York Times reportor, Lisa Belkin, tries to justify “wasted time” at work in her Life’s Work column.

She cites a study by Microsoft on productivity in the workplace. Microsoft found that out of the average 45 hour work week, 16 of those hours were “wasted.” The biggest culprit was useless meetings, with respondents saying that they spend more then 5 hours a week in meetings and 71% of them are “not productive.”

I love the quote from “personal development expert” Steve Pavlina who says, “the average full-time worker doesn’t even start doing real work until 11:00 a.m., and begins to wind down around 3:30 p.m.” He also goes on to mention that employees work an average of 1.5 hours a day.

Being unproductive today is much easier than past working generations. Here we see true signs of technical progress. How did people waste time at the office before web surfing, IM,  email, mobile phones and desktop computers? How unproductive can really by making personal calls and talking by the water cooler?

Our plenitude of slacking options may not end up being something celebrated or cherished forever. In that, Belkin closes by citing a growing trend of ROWE, or Results Only Work Environment. The oft cited example is Best Buy’s move to allow corporate employees to set their own schedules. As long as work get done and goal are met, mid-day movies and downtown brunches are all fine. She notes that “output and job satisfaction have jumped wherever ROWE is tried.”

ROWE is definitely a trend to track; however, I’m not convinced it’s the savior for worker. If it does spread, it will accelerate our distributed work lives, where work life and personal life blend into one. With ROWE, will we be freed from our artbitary office hours, or will we be checking work at 1 am? Will ROWE be liberate us from the office, or permanmently force us to take our office wherever we go?

Learning how to get along.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal had an article entitled, “ Working on your Marriage — at work. It describes how a growing number companies offer marriage training (which apperently is different from counseling) because they believe that marriage problems cause losses of productivity.

It’s strange too see the movement back to Henry Ford’s ideas of welfare capitalism that an employers have a responsibility with their workers maintain a “healthy” home life. Some companies have adapted healthy policies which include anti-smoking initiatives which actually test for smoking in their employees. No one argues that encouraging healthy relationships are good. Quitting smoking is a good thing as well. Of course, privacy alarm bells should be ringing with this shift. The article also notes, that many companies want to avoid potential discrimination of unmarried employees.

However, the bigger, more fundamental question that is posed, is why are more social responsibilities being moved to the jurisdiction of the workplace? We can clearly see that having health insurance tied to one’s job has proven to be flawed. Everyone from the unemployed to the aspiring entrepreneur who cannot leave her day job to the US auto industry which cannot afford to pay for their retirees’ health care sees the limitations to the current status quo.

Why then, should we be moving towards a systems where more social / health programs tied to a job? Why should the motivation for these kinds of programs be more productivity for their employer?

In the 80s, on the Cosby Show, the Huxtable’s Brooklyn Heights brownstone was a realistic home for an OB/GYN (Heathcliff) and lawyer (Claire), especially because it pre-dated the New York housing boom of the last ten years. On the other hand, could a Florida undercover police officer, like Sonny Crockett on Miami Vice, really afford to live on a boat and wear Italian suits and Espadrilles?

MSN has a nice article on the actual median salaries of television characters. It shows that Ugly Betty’s lead character’s position as an executive assistant has a real life median salary of $37,810. Knowingly, it note that she is probably making less than the median because she works “in a notoriously low-paying media niche (fashion magazines).” Of course, she does get the benefit of living at home and free swag for her sister and nephew.

On the other hand, newly announced Presidental canidate Fred Thompson plays New York DA Arthur Branch on Law & Order. They cite the current New York County DA makes $150,000 per year. The article doubts that he could afford an apartment in an upscale New York neighborhood where the average apartment goes for $1 million. Maybe he bought in the 80s like the Huxtables. (I realize that they are fictional characters… really.)

Although these comparisons seems amusing at best, these representations do have an effect on people’s (in particular young people) conceptualization of the workplace and reality. The event planning industry got a boost in employee interesting after the success of Sex in the City’s Samantha. Most people working in PR now need to explain that they generally don’t throw events and get their clients on Page Six.

The relationship between a job’s fictional representation and it’s real world daily activities has deeper issues that will be worth exploring in future posts.