Many of Ovum’s competitors (e.g. Forrester, Gartner, IDC, Yankee) have started official blog networks (Ovum doesn’t have one, but several individual analysts have personal blogs, like this one). Many of both our analysts and our competitors’ analysts are on Twitter (here’s SageCircle’s list) and Facebook. But in all these we’re really feeling our way through the process of creating new ways for clients to interact with us, and have had little direct input from clients on how they’d like to interact.

I’m curious as to whether our clients find any of these methods of interacting with clients useful, and if so, which Ovum should adopt and how. Are any of the other analyst blog networks out there particularly good (or bad) examples of how this should be done? And if we should start blogging through official channels, what should the content of the blog posts be? What should the emphasis be on? If Twitter, what would be useful to see there?

By definition this is a personal blog, and so I’m asking this question as an individual analyst and not as an official survey of Ovum’s clients. But I’m a big believer that we need to be doing more in this space, and I’d love to have some real feedback from clients to either reinforce that view or amend it.

If you’d prefer to comment privately, please send me an email (janovum [at] gmail [dot] com).

Since commenters are shy on this blog, please use the poll instead / as well:

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One of the most transformative innovations on Twitter has been the invention of the @ symbol as an identifier of other users, which enabled conversations and subsequently a broader system of referring to other users of the service, whether in “retweeting”, recommending people to follow on #followfriday, or citing work or meetings with other users.

A couple of times recently, I’ve missed this functionality on other sites – Facebook in particular. I’ve wanted to refer to other users and have some way of easily identifying them with a simple symbol so that others would know who I meant and could find them, but it didn’t exist. I find that strangely limiting. And it’s got me to thinking about how useful it would be if we had a system of universally referring to other people online in whatever setting or service so that others who follow us could easily know exactly who we were talking about and identify them, follow them and so on.

There are several problems in actually doing this. Firstly, there’s the fact that Twitter is an inherently public medium (yes, you can “protect” your Tweets, but very few users actually make use of this function). Other sites are not as public – notably, Facebook, which has many more privacy controls by default. I could refer to someone’s Facebook page but since Facebook by default won’t let me see their profile it’s of limited use – I’m none the wiser by seeing the limited information Facebook will show me. Secondly, there’s the issue that many people aren’t on either Twitter, Facebook or any other social network. That’s one we can’t really overcome except through time (and a long time, at that). But most of the people you might want to refer to in this way will be members of one or other of these sites. Thirdly, even if someone is a member of one or other of these sites, it’s not always easy to find them if we only know them in real life, or through their blog, or as a celebrity. Lastly, there’s the issue of not being able to get the username you want and not being able to condense it to something short as an easy reference point – the @ system is great partly because it’s short and instantly recognizable even off Twitter.

These problems aside, the question then becomes how we can arrive at a universal system of unique identifiers for all the people we want to refer to. One solution is that Twitter eventually gains enough support to become the de facto standard – after all, the @ symbol gives us a very useful solution. But how long will Twitter last? And how useful will it be to refer to all people through their Twitter accounts? The limited information available there makes it a poor solution. So there’s a good chance that some separate identity would be more useful – allowing you to provide more information about yourself, linking to your various online profiles, and yet still providing a short URL or other unique identifier. There are a variety of services out there that do some of this – Retaggr, Plaxo, Google Profiles and so on. But none does all of these things well enough to meet the need altogether, although Google Profiles probably have the best shot through the sheer number of people who already have a Google account for Gmail. Microformats may also have a role to play here as the web continues to evolve. 

Hopefully someone out there is thinking about this and can create a solution that will meet all these needs and more! Perhaps they’ll even combine it with a SIP URI so that you could use the identifier to communicate with people too…

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This past week or two I’ve been spending some of my spare time building up the professional side of my social networking profile. I’ve been a pretty active Facebook user now for a year or so and have Friendfeed and Twitter accounts that I’ve half-heartedly kept up with too. I’d like to use these tools for work purposes too but was always uneasy about mixing personal and business audiences with these various streams of my output. Either I would cut out all the personal stuff in order to enable me to feel comfortable with my business audience, in which case it would more or less cease to be social networking altogether, or I would continue to limit my business audience for fear of over-sharing the personal.

In the end I decided to start doubling up on profiles – one for my personal life, one for my business life – on these major sites, and so far it’s working well. I now have a business-centric Facebook profile, a business-centric Twitter account, a new account on Friendfeed and work-centric IM accounts with all the major providers (janovum on Yahoo!, Google Talk, AIM, Live/MSN and Skype). My choice of username might eventually be a problem if and when I leave Ovum, but for now it’s easy to remember but most of all has the salient virtue of being available on all these services (have you ever tried picking a username that will be available on all of these, including AIM and Yahoo!? Very difficult). 

If you’d like to connect, please feel free to look me up in one of those places – I’ll be happy to “friend” you, add you to a “buddy list” or be followed by or “follow” you. I’d like to make these networks as inclusive and broad as possible, and also hope to make them as interconnected as they can be – I already have Twitter and Friendfeed apps running in my Facebook profile, for example, and Friendfeed itself is pulling in my Tweets, blog posts and shared items from Google Reader. 

Some day, I’m hoping that all these services will allow me to be a single individual with multiple profiles for friends, family and work, for example. A while back I heard that Moli offers such split profiles, and I did try that service out, but until it’s used by a lot of other people it’s not all that helpful. But I do believe that splitting the social and business aspects of your life in a single profile will become an increasingly important feature of these sites going forward. It’d certainly be a lot easier than my current approach, which involves using different browsers for different profiles (when I’d much rather live in Firefox in Windows or Safari in Leopard) so that I can stay signed in to each service. 

How have you handled this problem? Do you just mix both in a single profile and not worry about mixing business and pleasure? Have you found another approach that works better?

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I recently came across Tweetscan, which allows you to search Twitter postings for keywords or phrases. Why would you want to do this? Because people “Tweet” about your product, your company, you, and not just about the fact that they’re on their way to the bathroom, or feeling really hungry, or about to go to bed, or whatever. And although you’ve probably figured out by now how to search blogs and the news sites (thank you Google), you probably hadn’t figured out (or even realised that you needed to figure out) how to search Twitter.

I did a search for the name of the company I work for, Ovum, which yielded mixed results. Some of the hits were definitely about the company and were therefore relevant, while about the same amount were about something or other to do with a human egg going through the process of fertilization. (Note to anyone thinking about naming their company after a biological term: please don’t – bad idea, and not just because of the Google searches.)

But at any rate, it’s a useful tool when it works. I’ve seen posts quoting Ovum research, people pointing out news about Ovum, even one of our editors saying that we’re desperately trying to hire more of them. The best thing about Tweetscan, though, is that you can set it up as an RSS feed. So instead of obsessively checking once a day or once a week to see if there’s anything recent (or more likely, forgetting to check for weeks on end only to find out that someone slandered you last month and it’s all over the web already), you can simply subscribe to the feed for your search, and then check it along with the rest of what’s in your RSS reader. Nifty stuff.

I’ve had it set up in my Google Reader subscriptions for a couple of weeks now and there’s been something in there at least every couple of days. Apart from anything else, it’s been a fascinating way of telling which other Ovum employees use Twitter, and which other people that work with Ovum do as well. I highly recommend it. Summize is another service which offers some similar features.

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As of right now, I am unable to view the Wordpress.com website (Wordpress.org is up just fine). Strangely, blogs hosted on Wordpress, with .wordpress.com addresses, are still up, at least from the look of a couple I checked.

Doesn’t downtime with major websites seem to be becoming more and more regular? Twitter has been notorious of late for its frequent outages, Amazon’s cloud-based computing servers went down last week for several hours (and see here for an unfortunate combination of the two), Flickr had a nasty outage around a month ago… So far, there seems to be no connection between all these outages, but at some point you have to wonder – is there some kind of bug going around that people haven’t cottoned onto, or is it just that traffic has become so spiky that it’s almost impossible to predict peak load anymore?

Either way, it’s a reminder of how fragile online services can still be. Although I’m not an Amazon cloud computing customer, the outages at Twitter and Flickr were bad enough that I experienced both of them as a user just by needing to use the services at times when they were unavailable. Wordpress.com is similar – I never use it since I use the hosted version on my own domain, but I wanted to set up the Akismet comment spam fighting plugin and that requires my Wordpress API key, which, of course, I can only get by going to wordpress.com…

Here’s to more uptime later in 2008.

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