One of the things we’ve been doing at the day job has been turning SharePoint on its head and using it for social networking capabilities. I know it’s one of those catchphrases that are popular now, but in our implementations, it’s done very, very well (and scaled well) in those environments. The Official Blog of the SharePoint Product Group has a great article and links to a white paper that talks about the use of knowledge within an organization.

With some of our clients, we’ve been talking to them about using SharePoint as the source of truth and establishing governance as part of that, and really analyzing their culture.

Just put it this way — MOSS isn’t just about intranets.

How to be A Good Product Manager (which is a phenomenal blog, by the way, and wish I had written most of the content) has this excellent post about requirements, and it applies requirements gathering. One of the traps that we fall into as consultants is that with certain clients, we go into the mode of just gathering requirements and not advising what the requirements should be (read: let’s design the Pontiac Aztec, quite possibly the ugliest car on the road).

Just gathering requirements is a bad idea. Advising on requirements is a better idea, because that’s how you add value.

Sure it’s like herding cats, but the reason many consultants are valuable is there’s some wonderful insight that they may have, however small it may seem, that adds phenominal value for the client. That’s why they are paying consultants what they do.

How so? We start the conversation about what the direction should be, even if it’s the wrong direction at the start. One of the essential points that the article makes is that in many cases, the customer has no idea what they want (a car), and what they may get may be anything from a Hummer or a Prius.

Our job is to ask questions that will lead to developing a better product, and not necessarily questions that lead to what we think the product should be. Many scenarios, it’s impossible to satisfy all parties, because they may ask for a car that is great for the environment (the Prius) and can run over people (the Hummer), because the requirements are conflicting. Our job is to find the best solution, not the solution that meets the needs of everyone.

Or what do they say — trying to make everyone happy will make no one happy?

Advertising Age has a great article on social media. The key statistic is that 78 percent of marketers want to spend on social media, but only 8 percent have any spend decidated in their budgets to it. As part of the article, they link to a white paper by Smash Lab that goes over what social media is.

(I guess the next lesson will be “what is a blog” for marketers. Someone should tell Smash Lab that of those 112 million blogs, 108 million of them haven’t been published in a year, or a dedicated to “entertainment”.)

How do people think, based on Twitter? Click here to discover for yourself.

I’m going to start reviewing the applications of MySpace I come across that I think have some value. Most of them have a serious fun factor — did you really think any of them were going to be actually useful — but there are a few of them that truly extend the profile.

The first is Own Your Friends. This is a fun application, it now has close to 900,000 installs. Staggering.

Own Your Friends is an application where you can buy your friends, almost as trading cards. It works almost as a market model where every time a friend is bought, the price goes up. Of course you also get rewarded for visiting the site every day, sending bulletins, inviting other friends, and giving your friends to others as gifts (the real secret of the application to making money).

However, if you are really into watching your friends’ number go up on MySpace, this is the application for you, because you’ll come back just to see how much you are worth a few times a day (I know I’m doing it on a couple of accounts just to try it out).

Like most of the new applications, the usability has a lot to be left desired — it’s not designed to really take advantage of a limited space, and on the canvas, to fully see everything I had to turn my monitor vertical, and even then, I had a scroll bar. I would offer to help redesign this application just to make it better because there is a lot of low hanging fruit in this one.

From a monetization standpoint, this application is all about page views, because there is really no targeting that can be done, so the application developer is going to have to figure that out. Also, the stability of the application lends itself to the suggestion that this is a homegrown application by someone that has never seen the traffic MySpace can generate.

There are some ideas that could come out of it.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

• Usefulness: 1
• Usability: 2
• Fun Factor: 5
• Stability: 2
• Monetization Opportunities: 2

For the day job, needless to say I do a fair amount of wireframing and writing of use cases, and there’s a lot of “what does this link do?” when reviewing the work with the developers (we try not to just throw stuff over the fence). No matter how much we annotate and clarify, there’s always the usual…

“You know, I didn’t quite think about it. I’ll just remove it for now.”

Part of it is lack of sufficient time to gather requirements, part is sometimes crafting a good user experience where coming up with something really cool is something that you can’t put a time frame on. Sometimes it could take five minutes and hit you on the road, like how to handle comments within an MySpace Open Social application I am working on now. It could take weeks where after you design it, it’s implemented and you realize, “man, that’s just not effective.”

At work and at some of the clients, I push for having an Information Architect around during the development process — not necessarily full time, but just around for questions — because issues will always come up. That’s why I am convinced that waterfall-style requirements gathering works well for building the Space Shuttle, but doesn’t work well for developing web applications because of the nature of the technology (ultimately flexible, low barrier to entry, the approach of “let’s throw everything against the wall, see what sticks”).

With wireframes, there’s always this “lost in translation” moment where Scarlett Johannsen asks Bill Murray, what does this do, and we haven’t quite covered it. I’m convinced it not a tool issue (Axure, Visio, whatever) but just an understanding of what we do is part art, part science. Apple gets it. Some other companies get it.

If you’ve ever worked with creative people or software developers, you’ll find some humor in this famous EDS commercial I stole from Hyperbolation. Classic.

I’m not a big fan of tag clouds. Okay, I hate tag clouds, because I can never make them look good (I need some order in my life, okay?), but here’s an interesting concept that I saw come across my RSS Feed: a SharePoint site that is completely tag driven, built for the New Zealand Ministry of Transport.

This article walks through step-by-step how the Microsoft Partner Provoke created a series of custom lists so documents could be tagged by any number of categories across different groups. While there was a more controlled structure than a folksonomy (the IA’s were driving the bus), this is the ultimate flexible system.

The benefits are:

• Quick information architecture process — what would take months only took a few weeks
• Extensible information architecture structure — just add a new tag!
• Popular tags would bubble up organically, and be displayed on the home page

I’m guessing that the document library lives at the top level.

Ironically, they went with tag lists and filtering because tag could usability is still up in the air — hmmph!

Working for clients is sometimes tough, because they bring up issues that in all frankness, sometimes you don’t care about, and it’s hard to even pretend you care. I’m linking to this article by Seth Godin because he has a couple of stories about “caring”. Sometimes just giving some kind of a statement like “I feel your pain, sorry I have to do this” is better than no response at all, which is what we all get in most customer service scenarios today.