In a follow up to our post on Ambient Awareness, Forbes has an article on Activity streams, and IBM’s strategy on them. (Activity streams are the operationalization of Social Business Apps ambient awareness.)
The article in Forbes stresses the “surprise” that can occur in Activity Streams (although “serendipitous” seems to be the term most utilized “out there” in the blogosphere). This concept of surprise or serendipitous awareness is exactly the kind of effect that ambient awareness builds. However, what is missing from the article is the concept that it’s not just the “ah ha” surprise of one post that a user sees that is important. Rather, it’s is the cumulative impact of hundreds (or thousands) of small pieces of information, some important, some trivial, that over time build into social networks the kind of “ESP” described in our previous post.
Another important thing in this article is the fact that IBM is embracing open standards for Activity streams (as is Trilog Group, our sponsor). To really get the full effect of social business, platform vendors like IBM have to make their platforms very open standards friendly.
