In those days at the company, we used to have these things called BillG reviews, at which Bill Gates personally went over every major new feature. At the time, he was already famous and on the cusp of being named the world's richest person. The day before my BillG review, I was told to send a copy of my spec to his office. It consumed almost a full ream of laser-printed paper. 

————————————————

Finally, the killer question. "I don't know, you guys," Bill said. "Is anyone really looking into all the details of how to do this? Like, all those date and time functions. Excel has so many date and time functions. Is BASIC going to have the same functions? Will they all work the same way?"

————————————————

What did I take from all this? Bill Gates was amazingly technical, and he knew more about the details of his company's software than most of the people who worked on those details day in and day out. He understood Variants and COM objects and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables -- and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date and time functions. He didn't meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn't bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual programmer.

Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn't know how to surf trying to surf. Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again. The cult of the M.B.A. likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don't understand. But often, you can't.

文中还涉及了一些观点，作为同样是一个技术人员的我，很有共鸣。Bill Gates对于职业和事业的态度，细节追求，都值得每个职业人思考。

曾经何时你的成功只需要取决于自己，这时一切彷佛很顺利；突然有一天你发现你的成功不能只取决于自己而是别人、一个团队，你开始承担领导管理的职责。或许你会变得困惑、犹豫、无助，一切不再简单，不再顺利。原因是多样的，每个人都会有自己的故事和理由。

前些日子写了一篇“每天的工作都是祈祷”，那些日子真的很焦躁。看到这句话后很感慨，其实一直寻找的答案很简单，和原来一样一切还是取决于自己，只不过是忘掉那些所谓的技巧、博弈，将最好的管理放到自己身上，从自己做起来。

源于下面几个方面：

1）老话说：律己律人，成人成己。同样的道理。

2）如果你认为你找到了适合组织的目标和价值观，请自己首先作为实践者。

3）做好自我的管理，你将变得十分的坦荡，无所畏惧。

4）自己作为被管理者能最快最直接的发现并解决出现的问题。

5）你给人感觉是一个靠谱的人，而不是一个站着说话的人。

6）焦虑？不！你没有时间焦虑。

BTW：我看好葡萄牙！！！

The Architecture

Lessons Learned

There are lots of definitions of social software out there, ranging from the clinical ("software that enables people to connect through computer-mediated communication") to the pragmatic ("stuff that gets spammed").

While doing research for a recent workshop, I came across a useful list of seven social software elements. These seven building blocks--identity, presence, relationships, conversations, groups, reputation and sharing--provide a good functional definition for social software. They're also a solid foundation for thinking about how social software works.

The original list was assembled by Matt Webb (who was expanding on a list created by Stewart Butterfield). Here's a brief definition of each element:

• Identity - a way of uniquely identifying people in the system
• Presence - a way of knowing who is online, available or otherwise nearby
• Relationships - a way of describing how two users in the system are related (e.g. in Flickr, people can be contacts, friends of family)
• Conversations - a way of talking to other people through the system
• Groups - a way of forming communities of interest
• Reputation - a way of knowing the status of other people in the system (who's a good citizen? who can be trusted?)
• Sharing - a way of sharing things that are meaningful to participants (like photos or videos)

Not every social software system has all of these, but most of them have three or more. And the most popular social websites implement many of these building blocks, but focus on just one or two. For example,

• Flickr is for sharing photos
• Slideshare lets you share Powerpoint presentations
• Twitter aims at presence
• Instant messaging applications like AIM and MSN are about conversation
• LinkedIn tracks relationships

For the workshop, I borrowed an idea from Peter Morville's user experience honeycomb and created a social software honeycomb. I put identity--the most basic requirement of any social software system--at the center with the other elements grouped around the outside.

Underneath the main honeycomb are examples of three social websites and how they use the building blocks. The dark green hexagon is the focus of the system; the light green hexagons are the supporting elements.

Once you dig into Digg, Flickr, Slideshare or Twitter you'll find that the actual implementation of each piece will be different. And not just different, but nuanced in a way that helps establish the overall ambience of that system. For instance, it's interesting to observe how the ease of interaction in Digg drives the swarming behaviour of its users.

The challenging thing about designing for group interaction is that people bend the tools for their own social purposes. I've found these building blocks to be a good conceptual framework for understanding social software. With these in hand we can start to look at how people use these systems to satisfy their personal and social goals.