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A few weeks ago, I suggested that this activity could be further qualified by an urgency specific to it, and that this could be compactly coded (cf. the Star Priority Notation. *T0 would indicate; *Q9 would indicate a very urgent question.) Obviously, for this to gain wider usage, the codes could be filled in through a series of selection boxes.
We can extend the questions further.
Context
Twitter encourages users to code an event or theme with a tag preceded by a hash (a hashtag) . Del.icio.us users can specify any number of tags, and often suggests them for the user.
In theory, a social media client could pull a relevant ontology given a particular tag (for example, a conference could list sessions; a product could list features).
For an event, the poster can be prompted for date/location information.
Any post of “currently working on” could well tie into a project management system.
For reviewing other media works (articles, books, movies, etc) it seems natural to prompt the user to rate what they have posted.
Shareability
Posting to Twitter effectively stuffs the inbox of all followers. The consequence is this limits the number of people one can follow. Why not give the poster the option to choose whether to broadcast it or not? Similarly, setting an urgency could be handled differently by each follower.
On the other hand, sometimes you want to bring special attention to a recipient. Facebook and LinkedIn both allow posters to explicitly name recipients. Twitter does not; one has to craft an additional message to contact people.
Questions have the most potential; the user may choose to submit them to networks such as LinkedIn. I’ve found that LinkedIn, for the average user (without thousands of followers) can broadcast questions to a much more diverse community.
In addition, how about supporting anonymous posts, as Craigslist does? Obviously, that goes against how Facebook and Twitter have been conceived. But the social media process is bigger than any single vendor has so far imagined it.
Quality
What do you mean when you say you’ve made a bookmark? Do you mean that it could be helpful to you at a later time? Or is it the sort of thing you want people to read now? Or is it because you are criticizing the content at the link? These are addressed by the Quality Tags, which includes 3 scales: positive, negative, and remedial reactions.
Implementation
Obviously, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Twitter will be laying claim to this area. But any vendor in the BPM or “Enterprise Social Media” space should also contribute to a standards effort ought to play a role as well. These are elemental social processes, so they should underlie any business processes.
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