Twitter

Imagine a Blog on which people are constantly updating their current activities. Twitter is a small application that allows a person to post what he/she is doing or thinking right now. It is a strange hybrid between Blog and Instant Message. It has become most popular as a widget that people add to their Facebook or MySpace web pages. Since many people uses these pages as their web home page and the basis for communications with friends or associates, they find tools like this useful for sharing real-time information. This is an application that does not really make sense to a traditional worker who does not use Facebook or have time to be constantly updating their personal status. But one interesting application might be to create remote sensors that are constantly posting their data through Twitter. Anyone interested in the information from that sensor would subscribe to its “twit” and be able to see what is happening. A user would probably subscribe to multiple “twits” and look for an aggregating tool that can pull all of these into a unified picture. In this case the interesting part of Twitter is the publish/subscribe feature over the internet.

Web 2.0 Generation

The Web Browser, HTML pages, and the services structured around these all have a common feel that is the WWW to most people. However, following the dot.com bust a number of unique web capabilities began to emerge that were more powerful and capable than plain web pages. These are commonly referred to as Web 2.0. This usually refers to web services in which the user has the ability to interact with the web site, create and post content, and build networks of relationships. There is no hard boundary around the idea, but common Web 2.0 applications include: Wikipedia, digg, AJAX programming behind the Google Maps and Netflix sites, Social networks like Facebook and MySpace, Blogs like those cataloged at Technorati.com, Flickr photo sharing, del.icio.us, and hundreds of others that are less well known.

There have been a number of articles in the techno and business press about how the high school to 20-something generation that is growing up using these will be a different type of professional employee when they graduate from college. The speculation is that they will be much more creative, independent, and self-directed. They will be less submissive to corporate authority, less tied to a single corporate employer, and less likely to define one office as the place where they spend their working hours. The entertainment, movie, gaming, and web programming industries already work through ad-hoc teams and independent contractors. This pattern has also been showing itself in the defense contracting industry as companies shy away from adding permanent employees and use contractors for much of their technical labor.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0
  
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikinomics

Army Facebook 2.0

My last Blog entry on this subject led to a very interesting conversion with a writer from Fast Company magazine. Ellen McGirt called to get some more details on what the Army was considering regarding Facebook. During that conversation I was able to paint a picture in which the social networks in Facebook could serve as an organizational structure to bring together people who want to train together in a shared environment. Something like this would work for entertainment gamers as well. Imagine that you want to plan out your tactics and then everyone meet to launch into the game at the same time. Facebook is one medium in which you could share information and do the finishing touches before jumping in.

Is the Army working on using Facebook as a group training portal to its online games? No, not yet. But we are talking about what Facebook means to us. What value does it present? What tools could be usefully embedded into or launched from it? Given our security limitations, it is highly unlikely that we would do something like this using the real Facebook. Instead we might instantiate a private version inside of government networks - something similar to what we have already done with Google Earth.

Oh, my talk with Ellen also convinced me to create my own Facebook account. I find it quite fun to play with all of the tools available. I just don't have any friends in there yet, so imagine a party with just 2 people there. But, I have been building quite a network at LinkedIn. It seems my associates are a little more "serious" about their connections and prefer something based on resume stats, rather than personal photos and maps of travel.

• McGirt Facebook article
  
• More McGirt
  

BTW - I am currently in Kansas City, MO. As a result of using the travel mapping widget on Facebook I looked at the rental car map and asked, "How far is it to Nebraska from here?" Because I just realized that Nebraska is one state I have not visited yet. The rental agent told me that people who go to Nebraska do not come back. I think he meant it was a great place to live.

Army Facebook Community

Facebook is one of the popular social networking sites. It is a distant second in number of subscribers to MySpace. However, the largest social group on Facebook is made up of members of the US Army. The network has 43,000 members who have identified themselves as being associated with the Army. Is it possible to communicate with all of these people through Facebook? If so, then how can this network be used to conduct or coordinate training? Given that the founders of Facebook have opened it up to outside tool development, would it be possible to build training or simulation content that is actually accessed and launched through the Facebook interface?

• Fortune Article on Facebook
  
• Wikipedia Description of Facebook