BinaryPlex - People Centric Software
About Me

We are building a social media analytics tool to turn social media monitoring into social media action. We go beyond mentions to let you Explore, Discover and Engage with the tribes talking about your brand.

My Other Sites
       
Contributors
Tags
Get Updates
Filed under

hivemind

See all posts on posterous with this tag »

Farewell HiveMind, Introducing Tribalytic

It's been far too long since we've updated you on what we are up to.  Time to rectify that!  Those that follow Tim on his blog will probably be more up to date, but it's time to let BinaryPlex followers know what's been happening and where we are at.

Like all startups we have our ups and downs and the last few weeks have been no exception.  For the price of entry it's proving to be an interesting ride.

When we formed, our initial goal was to build software to search and locate experts inside large enterprises.   As we started discussing this problem with people who had signed up for our beta we started to see some consistent challenges:

  1. There was incredible diversity in the response to the problem - people had clear views on what it would take to address the challenge, what content should be mined and how structured and unstructured content should combine.  We struggled to find enough consistency to identify which part of the product we would build that could appeal to more than one or two customers at a time, particularly in the beginning.
  2. There was insufficient pull - lots of people were interested, a few were engaged, but generally speaking, the problem was looking like a nice-to-have, not a must-have.  With the economy where it's at in the US and the UK, we decided it wasn't (if it ever is) a great time to launch a "nice to have" business.
  3. There was generally speaking an expectation that it would be a "point and click" type experience.  The reality of course is that the technology required is a fairly complex installation and required some substantive resources both in hardware and time for any meaningful implementation.  We could also see that there were barriers of entry around enterprise technology choices (must run on <<insert technology choice of preference here>>) that were going to be difficult to overcome - our resources were directed at solving the problem in the most efficient way possible (which for us meant Linux and lots of open source), not catering to Enterprise requirements on technology platforms.
Rather than simply drive for the market, we really began to question what sort of organisation did we want to be and what did we want to do?  Some things were clear - with limited resources we need a single point of focus, we wanted something clients could experience quickly and easily and we wanted to develop in the technologies that were best suited for the task.  Finally we couldn't let go of the work we'd been doing with the HiveMind engine - the challenge of finding and understanding people was just too interesting.

With these thoughts in mind we launched Twendly.com to help address point two - let people feel and touch what we were doing.  People really responded and engaged with Twendly far beyond potential HiveMind customers and we have seen sufficient traction that we believe there is a market interested and ready for a solution in this space.  We also realised that a SaaS model would help us address number three listed above.

We took this early prototype, our market research and our response to Twendly to Sydney and started pitching to Angels and VCs.  These are smart people who've been around and throwing ourselves into the deep end helped us learn and iterate very quickly across a week to really focus our idea onto a market with a big enough problem that we could address and help address point one.

Which brings us to today.  We've made the tough decision to farewell HiveMind and instead introduce Tribalytic, a social media analytics tool that shares a lot of common heritage with the work done for HiveMind.

Using the technology developed for HiveMind, Tribalytic goes beyond a simple monitoring of mentions and instead deliver fast analysis and segmentation to help products and brands Explore, Discover and Engage with the tribes holding conversations about them.

While we regret that we won't be delivering HiveMind, we are very excited about Tribalytic and this new focus has helped us drive more rapidly towards a product which we anticipate should be in beta by early April.  If you want to go beyond simply knowing that 300 people tweeted about your brand yesterday and actually start to understand more about who these people are, what drives them and interests them, we invite you to visit us at BinaryPlex and sign up for the Tribalytic mailing list.

* Rollercoaster image by Scott Ableman,licensed under Creative Commons.

Loading mentions Retweet

Filed under  //  hivemind   progress   rollercoaster   tribalytic   twendly  
Comments (0)
Posted 5 months ago by Tim Bull 

Here comes everybody

Here comes everybody, the power of organizing without organizations is a book by Clay Shirky that discusses the power of the group when bought together by the Internet.  One quote in particular that caught my attention is this:

Every webpage is a latent community. Each page collects the attention of people interested in its contents, and those people might well be interested in conversing with one another too. In almost all cases the community will remain latent, either because the potential ties are too weak, or because the people looking at the page are separated by too wide a gulf of time, and so on. - Page 102.

Without splitting hairs too finely (a blog or wiki is a web page after all), I do think that this is an emerging problem in the space of Enterprise 2.0 content.  As we build up internal communities around tools like Lotus Connections, Microsoft Share Point and Jive SBS, we also build legacy content.  When I read a blog post that was posted 6 months ago, I am separated by a wide gulf of time from the community that interacted with it when it was created.

We need ways of linking the conversation from yesterday with the conversations of today, to bridge this gap in time and place.  Two ways that can help with this problem are:

  1. It's all about the people - make it easy to discover the current and active experts in a particular area.
  2. Keep tags current.
HiveMind can help with both of these problems, but it's the second one I'd like to talk about now.

Having created a blog post, most users would not return to update the tags, even if they created them in the first place.  Yet particularly for emerging knowledge, the way in which we understand and describe content changes over time as new words (Web 2.0 anyone) come into existence to describe what we are doing.  Six months from now is the way you described your post the way the organisation thinks of it?

By focussing on the content and it's demonstrated expertise, HiveMind is able to understand when content demonstrates an expertise and should be tagged with it, even if the expertise the post demonstrated doesn't exist until some time AFTER the post was created.  By helping to maintain the expertise tags on content across the organisation, HiveMind can help organisations bridge the content age gap, but ensuring that like posts are tagged alike as people go about their business of creating great content to share.


Loading mentions Retweet

Filed under  //  expertise   hivemind   tagging  
Comments (0)
Posted 8 months ago by Tim Bull 

What a tangled web we weave

Across on Brian Solis' blog, Damien Basille added a guest post on "Social Media Influencers are not Traditional Influencers".

While this has a more external focus than HiveMind which is primarily internal, this particular quote really resonated with me.

The one question you need to ask yourself is this: what is my purpose for connecting? Connecting just to connect is aimless.

I think this gets to the heart of why organisations are implementing Enterprise 2.0 systems; because they believe that there is more to it than just "friending" a colleague.  Business is business and open sharing of information needs to also have a tangible return.  This was a theme picked up the E2.0 Customer Council in their recent talk at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. To quote Greg Lowe:

How do you tie better collaboration to the bottom line? We can save time finding answers, etc. and you can do some correlation, and that’s your cost savings or productivity increase.

It's been interesting to reflect on this briefly.  Clearly from a PR point of view (Brian Solis) the question is about finding Influencers and as Damien's post rightly points out there is a future of influence yet to arrive.  Some of the types of tools that will deliver these feature are similar in concept to HiveMind, while others are far wider reaching in scope.  While I think that seeking influencers (a PR related neccessity) is somewhat different from seeking expertise (an organisational need), it's clear that the next wave of tools will be smart systems that draw from the digital signals you leave to try and automatically understand what it is that you know.

Within the Enterprise, this is a practical function that assists you in automatically sharing what you do with others, and to a degree there is a personal ROI (your employer pays you for your expertise).  Does this have different implications when it's taken outside the Firewall and applied to the world in general?  It will be interesting to watch as this space develops and matures both inside and outside the firewall.

Loading mentions Retweet

Filed under  //  hivemind   influence   ROI  
Comments (0)
Posted 8 months ago by Tim Bull 

Introducing HiveMind

We've launched our first product video over on the website and thought we would also share it here.  This is meant to be a brief, highlevel introduction to HiveMind and the problem that it's trying to solve.  Comments and feedback are welcome.

Loading mentions Retweet

Filed under  //  hivemind   introduction   video  
Comments (0)
Posted 8 months ago by Tim Bull