Recorded over a year ago, together with a small group of high-profile thought leaders in the field of online collaboration (Stuart Henshall, Chris Pirillo, Howard Rheingold, Jay Cross) this is the first good conversation of this new series I am starting to publish today around the topic of the future of collaboration online. After the hyperhyped web conferencing buzz distatefully born by marketing departments after 9-11, and the series of interviews I conducted in 2003 on the future development of web conferencing and related fields, Online Collaboration is finally taking center stage among they key areas required by anyone wanting to look both at increased effiencies as well as to better communications.

The publication takes more than a year after the original recording, as a conscious experiment in seeing how effective these online collaboration experts would have been in anticipating the future and in providing insight that would not be outdated a few weeks after its publication. To you the final judgment on how effective this has been.

Stuart Henshall - Photo credit: Nikkei BP

First up is Stuart Henshall, founder of Mosoci LLC and publisher of the Skype Journal. Stuart is a true independent researcher, an insightful analyst focusing on real-time communication and collaboration technologies as well as on the growing mobile social communications universe and a long-time point of reference for anyone wanting to learn more about the universe of real-time collaboration.

I have interviewed Stuart before on the Future of Web Conferencing, and in both cases he provided lots of truly valuable and rare to hear insight.

In this conversation we talk about "presence", privacy issues, new modes of online collaboration, instant messaging, contextual collaboration, how to overcome IT departments resistance to the adoption of new generation sharing and collaboration tools, video conferencing, and more. We explore new application and uses, interesting new features, the design of interfaces for real-time collaboration tools, open-source, open standards.

Last but not least we look at what those who build these new technologies need to be paying attention to if they want to be successful at all in this new fascinating space.

Here is the downloadable .mp3 of the original interview recording (.mp3 - 15 MB - duration: 42 mins), and right below is an immediately playable streamable version of the same, which you can start listening to immediately by just pressing the play button.

This interview/podcast is sponsored by: GoToMeeting

Full text transcript of Robin Good interview with Stuart Henshall on:

The Future of Online Collaboration

Robin Good: Hello everyone, here is Robin Good in Rome, Italy, for our series on the future of online collaboration. Today with me there is a special guest - once again on the other side of the ocean - and let me send virtually the microphone over to him for his personal introduction. Good morning to you, Stuart.

Stuart Henshall: Good morning, Robin. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm, obviously, the editor and publisher of the Skype Journal, and I have been watching the space for where collaboration is going for the last four or five years, really. So I look forward to talk to you about it.

Robin Good: Stuart Henshall, the editor and publisher of the Skype Journal is a long-time point of reference for what happens in the world of this real-time communication and collaboration technologies, and he has been a particular point of reference for anything that relates obviously to Skype. Much before he launched the Journal, he was the first one to experiment, try out new things, and write about them. Not only about Skype, but about many of the other technologies, opportunities, new tools, and visions that could be created out of the intelligent and smart use of them. So it is a pleasure to have you here with me today, Stuart, and I would like to know, yourself, how do you see or if you have any personal definition of what online collaboration really is.

Stuart Henshall: Well, when I think about online collaboration, I think increasingly about real-time, and how my life has changed because I can touch and reach out, many of the buddies that are on my list. I can have an instant audio or even video exchange with them. And I think that that is very different to the sorts of online experiences I was having a few years ago, which were much more asynchronous. I might find myself in a forum, I'd have to write perhaps a long screed or something like that, and I may get comments back. And so it's the real-time nature for me that, in effect, puts business around the world at my fingertips, that has really made the difference, and I think the audio presence and now emerging video is what will really drive the difference in terms of how we behave.

Robin Good: You just mentioned the word "presence", which not many people are yet too familiar with, though if you strike the word instant messaging, much more of them will identify and remember those popular tools that many of us use. Still, the notion of presence and the advantages, the pros and cons, that it brings with it, are not too clear and immediately synthesizable by the naive non-technical user. Could you help us get a little greater grip on why presence is such a great thing; and if there are any cons, what are they?

Stuart Henshall: I think I look at presences as you mention on an IM sort of system, the classic is, "I'm online", "I'm away", "Do not disturb", "Not available", or even "Invisible", and at the moment, that's still pretty much all we have. We don't have additional information like location, where are you right now for the most part. We don't have the capability to say, I want to be online for my office buddies, but for my evening party friends, now is not the time to be online.

So presence is something that is evolving, and I think for the most part, many of us come to it for the first time and all of a sudden you have got a new buddy list on your instant messenger, you have added maybe four or five people, and you realize you are starting to share whether or not you're online with them. And that makes people in the first instance, I think, very uncomfortable.

However, when your buddy list is like mine, and it gets up so you have got a couple of hundred people that are on your buddy list, and you then have 75 or 80 people that are actually online all the time, it starts to give you new advantages and new opportunities. And the one I like to share is, the sort of obvious opportunity, is the one that says, "Okay, Robin, you and I are having a conversation right now", and there's some new piece of information or there's some question that's actually brought into it, you know.

In my Skype sort of world, I just simply reach out, create a conference call so it's an ad hoc conference call with a buddy: I may text them first, but I can reach out and bring that third party in. Same thing, if we were closing a selling deal or something like that, and I wanted to bring my boss into it to finish it off, when we can reach out and bring additional people into the conversation. I think that's where the transparency, the presence perhaps provides, enables us to start operating differently.

Robin Good: Yes, Stuart, indeed, I much agree with what you say. But what about those situations that I see more and more frequently around me, where people stay most of the time in an invisible presence mode, because they are getting too much intrusion for their being, showing their presence. Or, in fact, they are overloaded by incoming messages or people wanting attention. How do you manage, what is the evolutionary path for this type of situation?

Stuart Henshall: I think of this, this is a really interesting area. As I got more involved with Skype, I found that many people and in fact I think the number is something like 40% of all people that take Skype, which starts off as a ring-centric client, they actually convert it to in effect being text-centric, so when you click on it, rather than calling you directly it will open a text message as the first thing. But even text messages are intrusive, if as you say you get twenty of them opening up on your screen all at once.

Part of the problem is that, as we create new access, we actually need better ways to manage that, and we haven't yet been given all the tools and we haven't shared with people how to make that work. And a good example of this is that, rather than perhaps sending you a text message; a text message is something that I really would like an answer, perhaps not immediately but it provides context, it's a good way to open a conversation and things like that, but if I know you're a busy guy, and my real interest is just inviting you to a barbecue on the weekend, it's probably better for me to send you a voice message, which doesn't ring your phone and doesn't necessarily open up your IM client.

Now, I could do that by an email, but I must admit I like the sort of personal nature and persuasive nature that you can do when you introduce something like that, a voice messaging component in conjunction with these other tools. And I think that we really need to balance better, provide more controls in terms of which groups you perhaps prepare to speak to at certain points of time. And that's coming. In some of the IM systems already, I can put one group so I'm offline to one group and online to another group, and things like that. And we'll see more of that as we move forward.

Robin Good: Oh, definitely, I look forward to see that, can't wait to be able to do a little more and set some priorities to wherever they can contact me or not. But indeed, it is apparently very difficult outside of those early adopters and technically talented people who enjoy testing out the tools and been exposed to them for a long time, to communicate easily and educate the new adopters of these tools, to understand that this is not the telephone or the traditional classroom whiteboard or any of the traditional means of communication. And as a matter of fact, they become sometimes worse in the hands of these people who have not had the opportunity to explore a good use of them, then using the traditional ones, which I find very interruptive and very intrusive in my life.

If I'm in front of my computer, and let's say I don't have my headset connected and somebody is going to ring me out of the blue on Skype, that feels even more intrusive because I cannot even answer before I plug in my stuff and etc.

So, what is your suggestion as to what to do to speed up adoption, understanding, education, awareness of the new way of using these tools, the appropriate one?

Stuart Henshall: I think one of the first things is actually something that's quite simple. And that is, you need to get as big a buddy list as you possibly can, quite quickly. And at the same time, you obviously need, to a certain extent, to educate, share with your friends, and people learn over time what certain sort of status they actually mean and how you want to be connected and contacted. I sort of look at this and think many times that when I was in a large office, if it was open plan - that's one type of environment - and then obviously if you have sort of office up and down the halls in a more traditional environment, and then there was the old thing about the open doors policy.

In this world, where you provide some visibility and some availability for yourself, those sort of semi ad hoc connections that you might make, the things that you actually overhear sometimes in effect in an office; those capabilities are perhaps transferring so that we can take advantage of them in an online and highly-distributed type of world.

When you can make thosetypes of connections, I think we all start learning faster. And if we are not using these tools to sort of accelerate the way we learn in organizations, then the tools really won't be picked up and used. When we think about presence and we say: "Well, why should we share it?" think about how much missed communication happens in an organization because voicemails are left and not dealt with in a timely fashion, or when someone left a voicemail and someone else could have actually answered it right then and there, time is wasted, that person is sitting still.

So we have to get a different mindset, I think about how we think about these things. They are not necessarily interruptions: they are part of your business process, how you get things done.

Robin Good: It would be nice to discuss this in a little greater depth, I'd like to challenge some of those things and actually be proven wrong, that there is a great deal to discover in that direction. But let me ask you, rather, if you see as I do, lots of resistance within the medium to large size organization in the adoption of these real time communication tools. Is this your experience as well?

Stuart Henshall: Where I see the adoption most of products, like Skype at the moment, are highly-distributed groups; obviously any group that is interested in cutting the cost of communications, where global collaboration is involved. That's making a real difference.

Where time zones are involved, then presence information helps because I can be at home at ten o'clock at night, and if I want to share, connect with people halfway around the world, then they now know that they can send, say, a text message to me. I think that those types of environments are very open to change. The corporate environments, I think, are more concerned about issues around security rather than asking themselves how a combination of these tools might actually improve the way they all communicate.

Robin Good: So what are your suggestions and strategic advices to those organizations when people from production or development departments would like to adopt such technologies, but encounter strong resistance from IT?

Stuart Henshall: I think I start to give them examples. This one is not a direct: let's just use the sort of business example I was giving a little bit out before. You are a potential sale from me, I have been online for a while, we have a directory up which my boss can see on his screen, and it says currently that Stuart is in a call with Robin, they have been talking for 15 minutes, and the topic is online collaboration.

So my boss says: "Okay, fine, I wonder where they are at ", he texts me, and then I say: "Well, yeah, it's a good time", and I introduce him to you, and we in effect close the call, or change it. Now, that changes the sort of power relationship, it actually changes the way we might be able to help or assist the customer. The same example would extend one step further, that says: imagine for a moment that I'm a legal firm, and so I'm a lawyer in it. As my clients come online and start to use something like Skype and things like that, they'll probably want some more access to me as the lawyer.

And I'll obviously want a billing system that will help to answer how I bill my Skype time, [laughs] that's a separate little issue. I would like the example, the piece there that says: "Well, okay, fine, what additional value can I create for that person that perhaps has legal requirements?". And then again I can bridge or introduce them or link them to other people in the company more quickly, and substitute them, and that's enhanced customer service and value creation.

There are lots of opportunities in that area for that. And some of the financial institutions are already experimenting with it in terms of text messaging and IM, but you add voice and video and components like that to it and the experience might many times richer.

Robin Good: Yes, indeed, excellent answer, thank you, Stuart. Are you familiar with the term "contextual collaboration"?

Stuart Henshall: I'd like you to redefine it for me.

Robin Good: According to sources, contextual collaboration may be either the ability of future real communication tools to disappear within mainstream applications, as to extend their abilities without intruding with the learning curve of a new application. Or, the ability for major software developers to augment their operating systems or mainstream applications with real-time collaboration functions; as to again not to have to open another set of tools just because you want to share a document, talk over it or do something like that.

Stuart Henshall: Okay, makes sense. So if I pick up a digital camera and I've got a question on it, I ought to be able to call customer service off the camera.

Robin Good: That's right. And do you see this coming? Do you see this as science fiction?

Stuart Henshall: I don't think that's science fiction, I think the voice is already now been proven that it's just a software application, it's just bits. As these devices are all connected up and networked in different ways, there is no reason I'm probably given for things like cost and things like that. There is no reason those sorts of extra sharing or collaboration opportunities might not
come there.

What it does suggest is that perhaps where we should be looking first is sort of more in terms of mobile phones, PDAs, things like that, that sort of way, well, how do these things start to move off the desktop and into our hands, because that is where we are going to use them.

Robin Good: Yes, indeed. Among those two roads, existing real time communication collaboration tools, disappearing within mainstream apps, or major OS developers and application builders extending them with the same tools or others, do you see any of those two trends dominating the other?

Stuart Henshall: I look at where Microsoft Office is going, their desire to integrate with Live Communication Server, every document and every product I see will actually shift, I get an email that comes in on one side that says, okay, fine, and Robin is online right now, or these are the people that participated in the document, perhaps I can share that. And I think that that is very likely that I'll be able to track better or network into a document better with others that may have touched it over time, and it would be nice to search in Google or something like that.

When it comes to "how important is that", I'm not sure that it's as important as in effect using an instant messaging system as a sort of a remote control for life. I think email is an asynchronous mechanism, and we're really moving into something that is more real-time, and so I want more control through my sort of IM-type devices and my presence device, and I think that's what is most likely to drive things in the future.

Robin Good: So let's dive into that. How do you see tools changing in a year from now, when it comes to real time collaboration? What are the new things that are appearing on the horizon?

Stuart Henshall: I think the thing that is going to have the largest impact in the next year, potentially, is actually video. Video is going to come to the desktop in a way it hasn't come before. It can automatically be launched with every call, people can actually ask for a video call, things like that, and latency, the lip-sync will be good. We won't be looking at just flick, sort of occasional frames of someone changing anymore. You will almost be able to read their lips all the time, as long as you have good broadband lines.

That will bring in a new set of devices and it will probably change the way we look at even some of the conferencing type capabilities. I think there is some really neat thing some of the kids do with some of the IM chat systems, whether it's in trying to tie them into gaming or increasingly little bots and things like that that are either managing multi-IRC chats or doing things like retrieve the following RSS feeds for me, or search in chat, things like that. Those things are coming, too.

Robin Good: Do you see some major innovations in the way we're going to use P2P capabilities?

Stuart Henshall: I think the part that has sort of fascinated me most, the one I think many of us want to get rid of, is actually this issue of "I never want to update your contact details again". Anytime you want to change them, I would like them to be updated in my registry, and I think our capability to network through those things become more and more important. But I do look and see that there's a new opportunity that's coming out, I don't know how it really evolves, but I use the following sort of example: Skype has centralized their contact list so that now, even though it's a P2P system, whenever you log in it checks with your original data in the cloud and if you were on a new client it downloads your contact list.

Now, if we add to that contact list a voice dialing capability, and voice recognition, and even things ultimately which is video authentication, in terms of "this is who you really are", then there's a whole lot of interesting things that we can do in terms of authentication when calls come in. It also means that any time I want to call you, I just simply call you by name and that starts to change the user interfaces dramatically, because all of a sudden we can log onto all sorts of devices just by saying, whatever, "Hello, Skype Home, Stuart here".

Potentially, now you are logged in and you are online and it knows where to feed you your calls. The capability to move that information, that small amount of information, around from like the centralized Skype contact list, but to be able to access it on your mobile phone or access it on any PC anywhere, provides some sort of unique opportunities.

It would be very interesting to see how that starts to work, and it can also work in terms of how you share a different type of presence information in terms of location and things like that.

Robin Good: Yes, indeed. And you have been mentioning of interfaces. How important are interfaces in your opinion in the future development of these real time collaboration tools?

Stuart Henshall: I think it's key. It has to be simpler than anything that came before it. It's all about eliminating steps. When a message is left for me on a traditional phone, I always have to leave the phone number. When I get a message or a voice message, Skype to Skype, the answer is, I don't have to leave a phone number. I simply have to click on that person and decide which way do I want to respond, with a voice message back, with a chat, or should I just call them straight away. That eliminated a whole lot of steps, and in fact, some complexity in terms of how we actually manage these things, and so it's faster to get playback, all those things that go along with it. I think there'll be more of that.

Robin Good: Great, thanks again for this good answer. What about the issue of open standards? Where do you stand relative to that?

Stuart Henshall: I think we would all love to have open standards and open source systems. Usually, when that type of question is pointed at me, I feel like it's: am I in favour of SIP, or not? The Session Initiation Protocol, and the answer for VoIP, and for the most part, the VoIP sort of IM soft phone clients that have been brought into play, have just simply not matched up to Skype in terms of performance. Now, Skype obviously does use some SIP because they have an interconnect to the PSTN or historical land line phone system. But other than that, it's closed. I think that the place to look and the place you'll want more standards is in where the future of some of these collaborative things go.

There are no answers in traditional telephony for collaboration, how should you be connecting desktop to desktop, and how it might be shared or what might make it more efficient. There is limited sort of standards set around video. I don't know of any real standards that are set around presence. So, at the moment, those are all open areas that could be developed, created, and formed, but where you have a client like Skype, who is basically running ahead developing some of those things, there's actually an open opportunity for anyone to actually define how those things will actually work in the marketplace. And the best product will win at the moment.

Robin Good: Maybe people ask me, in fact, as they are confused about this, whether Skype is indeed a tool that supports fully open standards or not.

Stuart Henshall: [laughs] What open standards are we referring to?

Robin Good: I don't know. I'm asking if the standards that Skype is using are in any way to be considered open standards by all means?

Stuart Henshall: I think some of the things that Skype is using are based on open standards. I mean, they are using VCards, for instance, for exchanging your contact details for someone else, or uploading information from Microsoft Outlook and clients like that. The audio codec they use, part of one of them is an open standard, the other one is, obviously the Global IP Sound audio codec, which isn't an open standard. But many are using it.

The issue about openness is, well, which systems are allowed to interconnect with another one. At the moment, almost all these various systems interconnect through some relationships with the historical PSTN, and very few of them are actually connecting, if you will, network to network. Although that may come, and hopefully it will change, hopefully that will open up.

Robin Good: But I do see indeed that Skype with its open API has made it possible for other tools to come out in the market that offer similar features and facilities, and allow to interconnect with Skype itself. As a matter of fact, I would be wondering why we have been waiting so long to see a tool that would allow us to integrate all of the major instant networks as well as Skype together, I don't know of any such tool now, maybe there is one.

Stuart Henshall: I don't know of any tool that brings them all together. I think the difficulty is that the ones that have, Trillian, GAIM for Mac, that allow you to in effect manage multiple IM clients at the same time, none of those actually escalate effectively to voice calls, and voice is stickier than just the IM and chat. That capability to escalate the call very quickly into other modes is becoming increasingly important.

The challenge, in terms of integrating them, is "What are you integrating?". We really are looking at a new type of client, it's a second generation of IM clients that are radically different than the first ones, which are actually based much more around voice and potentially video and other collaboration things than just being a chat client. And we don't have many of them yet.

Robin Good: I see you are involved often with groups that are very dynamic, on the cutting edge, who pick up these technologies quite easily. Would you say, then, that many of these distributed situations you have described before, the adoption of new, effective tools, creates effective new opportunities right away, or is there any quantity of workflow change and process approach as to be amalgamated with the integration of tools to make collaboration more efficient?

Stuart Henshall: I think, to make collaboration efficient, you have really got to have a clear focus and context for what you are doing. I'm fascinated when I get into a new wiki space and find that it has no structure there. And sometimes there are individuals that sort of really know how to fill it out and start shaping it, and then all of a sudden it's a lot easier for other people. And I think that's true of many of these tools.

Many of us need quite a lot of structure to be comfortable with how something works; people need to train and learn about these things, and you need to share the stories, and get people going home and running a little test so they can see what the new value might be. And it's part of an experiential learning curve. And that can be laid out for people.

Robin Good: Thank you. What do you see as being the greatest challenge for those who design and develop these tools?

Stuart Henshall: I think one of the biggest challenges for some of these tools is probably twofold. One, I think, and it may just be perspective, but for the most part, there's too many guys developing these tools. And there's not enough women involved. So I frequently talk to people that are very, very text-centric, they really don't want to talk to you and they don't like the interruptions and things like that, and I actually believe there is another group of people that are social in different ways, to the sort of the traditional systems, programmers, developer's environment, which is not actually the way that the real world works.

The real world works around mobiles, picking it up and calling people and things like that. I think that somehow that has got to be made a lot more, a lot easier and a lot more social. If we can get the sort of social information - particularly into mobile devices but also bring them back into desktop - and helping people to share the right sort of profiles and directory information more effectively, then we will have many richer and better conversations.

Robin Good: In fact we have here quite a few listeners that are developers and corporate executives within conferencing, collaboration, live presentation tools, and if I understand well, you are suggesting first of all to increase a little more the ratio of women to men in the business of developing, designing, refining and testing these tools, as well as in having an increasing awareness of the importance of social tools and their value and they are well-integrated to this. Any other advice you would give out to the corporate executive guys running these companies?

Stuart Henshall: Well, there is the classic one that just says: "you have got to look at what the young people are doing, and how they are operating and using these things, and how you get them involved". I mean, I see that in some cases and some products. I don't see it in others. But I see even my own kids, that will be soon coming out of high school and off to college, and they already use the tools dramatically differently to how I ever did.

At the same time, there is a much older end of the spectrum that needs to be educated, brought up to date on these things. And both ends are very important. I know many people that are well and truly into retirement that are enjoying a product like Skype for calling around the world, and yet that is not typically an audience that would be looked at in terms of collaboration. I think there are some extremes that are always worth looking at, and they may generate new opportunities.

Robin Good: So, if you were to point again at executives and people running companies that produce technologies for real time communication and collaboration, where are they to focus, to see present sets of limitations that they are imposing on their users and that they are not seeing right now? Product development, interface, usability, marketing, price... tell me, where are the issues?

Stuart Henshall: I think the number one is that the majority are not actually focusing on the sort of enhancement of real time experiences. I think that's actually where it's at, and more and more is actually happening on either an ad hoc basis or we reach out and get the information now, and it's actually how you facilitate those exchanges so they can happen faster and more effectively.

Robin Good: Great answer, Stuart, and I really appreciate your insight and view into many of these things. It is so mind-opening for being different and for exploring opportunities and ideas that I, myself, have not even considered that. I truly find it a learning experience every time we talk together. So thanks again for participating in this series about the future of online collaboration, and my best wishes to you for your endeavours, projects, and experimentations, because you share so much of what you test out that creating value is you keeping, having fun and trying business things and discovering the ways that we can all interact better. I leave it to you for the last hellos to our listeners. Thanks again, Stuart.

Stuart Henshall: Thanks, Robin. You know, the one that I like to leave with people with is the sort of example that I see on the social networking sites, the moment where you have got eight million registered users, and yet only 2.000 are actually online. If you actually choose to be part or a member of a community, and if you are running a community like that, then what you really want to do is, you want to have four million people actually online right now, because the odds of you actually talking to the right people and communicating with them are much greater.

That's what happens, when you actually reach out and extend your buddy list and bring others into the fold, you make all sorts of interesting connections. And without the collaboration tools we have had, you and I would never have met and started having these discussions, whether it's a combination of blogs, or wikis, folklives, Skype, etc., and I thoroughly enjoy the world that has opened up for me. So, thank you.

This interview/podcast is sponsored by: GoToMeeting