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Earlier this week, Peter Morville and Mark Burrell presented a UIE virtual seminar on “Leveraging Search & Discovery Patterns For Great Online Experiences“. It sold out! And I thought Pete Bell and I had done well with our seminar on faceted search!

But I’m hardly surprised. Although I wasn’t able to attend it myself, I gather from Twitter and the blogosphere that it was a great presentation. I enjoyed serving as a reviewer for Peter’s new book on Search Patterns, and I contributed a bit to Endeca’s UI Design Pattern Library while I was there and Mark’s team was developing it.

In reading reactions to the seminar, I was particularly intrigued by a post entitled “Search and Browse” by Livia Labate on her fantastically named blog, “I think, therefore IA“. She raised a question that I think needs to be asked more often: when is (or isn’t) faceted search appropriate?

Her conversation with readers in a comment thread offered some possible answers:

• Faceted search helps users who think in terms of attribute specifications as filtering criteria.
• Faceted search supports search by exclusion, as opposed to by discovery.
• Faceted search requires a set of useful facets that is neither too small nor too large.

I’d like to propose my own answers. Here are the conditions for which I see faceted search being most useful:

• Faceted search supports exploratory use cases, in contrast to known-item search. For known-item search, users are better served by a search box to specify an item by name, or a non-faceted hierarchy to locate it. In contrast, faceted search optimizes for cases where users are either unsure of what they want or of how to specify it.
• Faceted search helps users who need or want to learn about the search space as they execute the search process. Facets educate users about different ways to characterize items in a collection. If users do not need or want this education, they may be frustrated by an interface that makes them do more work.
• The search space is classified using accurate, understandable facets that relate to the users’ information needs. As I’ve discussed before, data quality is often the bottleneck in designing search interfaces. Offering users facets that are either unreliable or unrelated to their needs is worse than providing no facets at all.

Given the above criteria, it’s not surprising that faceted search has been a huge success in online retail: shopping is often an exploratory learning experience, and retailers tend to have good data.

But the success of faceted search in retail overshadows other domains where faceted search may be even more valuable. My favorite example is faceted people search, most recently demonstrated by LinkedIn. I would love to see other entities (locations, businesses, etc.) receive similar treatment, at least in contexts where exploration is a common use case.

I think Livia is right to be skeptical about any interface that introduces complexity–and facets do introduce complexity. I hope that my guidelines help answer her question as to when that complexity is worthwhile and perhaps even necessary to help users satisfy their information needs.

Weren’t we just talking about what’s different about mobile search use cases and about how to make web search more exploratory? I may be biased, but I think that Google’s recently launched “near me now” button is a step in the right direction (no pun intended!) on both of these fronts.

I’m curious to hear unbiased feedback from iPhone and Android users who have gotten to play with it.

Social media will continue to penetrate the enterprise in 2010. And if past discussions are any indication, we should be able to look forward to a healthy discussion around similarities and differences between consumer-facing social media, and social media as deployed behind the firewall.

We can agree, I think, that in each case, it's as much the users that makes social media work as it is the tools themselves. No social media application functions without its users. In fact, all social media require the tacit and implicit cooperation of their users — and are evolved and iterated on the basis of use.

Whether you believe that the tool/technology comes first, and initiates changes within a social field; or that social needs and interests develop for which tools are then created to address those needs, you will need interaction models that account for both tool features and uses as well as corresponding user and social practices. Implementing social media, whether for use in the consumer space or in the enterprise, works only to the extent that implementation leverages these social processes.

In other words, a good interaction model is as important, if not more, as your functionality spec. Developing that model is a matter of articulating not just what you want from social media use, but how it actually unfolds in practice. And the dynamics of the workplace social are entirely different from the dynamics of the open social: what creates order in the open social field can lead to disorder in the workplace.

But the consumer social "space" is organized and works differently than the enterprise space. Where in consumer-facing social media the challenge is to create and sustain self-reinforcing social practices (user adoption > commercial hit), the enterprise social space actually presents possible strategies of resistance.

Open and consumer social spaces take work to get organized, constant activity to sustain interest and involvement, and social differentiation so that users can easily individualize themselves and become invested therein.

By contrast, "closed" corporate social spaces, even if they are semi-transparent to the outside, are already functionally organized and differentiated. The social dynamics of water cooler conversation usually serve to infiltrate functional organization with normal and natural social interests.

Social relationships pre-exist social tools in the enterprise, and the kinds of workplace social relations that most companies seem interested in leveraging are those which have formed personally, not by role, position, or function. Social media tools are usually pitched as a means of extracting value from the informal, not the formal, social workplace relationships.

But because these relationships pre-exist the introduction of social media tools, they are as likely to subvert and resist employer social tools as they are to welcome them.

Where the task, simplified, in consumer social media applications is to seed self-perpetuating social dynamics, the task in the enterprise may be to span gaps in the organizational chart and to erode calcification in the ranks.

So there is an important distinction to be made then between formally structured and organized social relations, and informally structured relations.

• In open social media spaces, sociality emerges around informal relations that may become increasingly formalized, as social differentiation and complexity develop over time. (Twitter lists are a direct example of this: it took three years for the soft and informal emergence of groups referenced by tweeting practices like #FF to become architecturally formalized as a list feature.)
• In closed social spaces, the formal sociality organized by workplace relations and job functions stands to benefit from the know how (information, knowledge) and communicative practices of informal social practices.

It can seem that social media in the open port directly to social media behind the walls. That the social is what these two use cases have in common. But there is no such thing as a generic "social." All forms of social organization exist only because relationships "exist" and are maintained by communication and interaction.

This is a pretty straightforward point — but one worth making. For tools in themselves are not capable either of organizing new relations nor of re-organizing existing relations.


[Just for fun, we can compare and contrast the social organization parodied in the workplace comedies The Office and 30 Rock. In The Office, a farcical and incompetent leader struggles to contain and shepherd his baffled employees, who bandage their disbelief by organizing in spite of, through, around, and without their comedic leader — hence the use of one-on-one on-camera confessional interviews with employees, used to disclose plots, wranglings, conflicts etc.

In 30 Rock, a comedy unfolds amidst an organization's effort to stage a successful comedy, the joke being that reality itself is more funny than the show made for television. Actual employee shenanigans trump the scripted humor, and work is itself more funny than the comedy the work is supposed to produce. Informal comedy, in other words, is better than the comedy attempted by means of formal comedy writing.

Employees are always smarter than the organization — and today, more brazen.)

Happy New Year to the Noisy Community and everyone else in virtual earshot! I hope everyone is entering 2010 well-rested and ready for great things. And I don’t just mean shiny new gadgets.

For me, 2009 marked the end of a decade-long run at Endeca, where I focused on bringing HCIR to enterprises. I’m particularly proud of two professional accomplishments: writing a book on faceted search, and organizing the SIGIR 2009 Industry Track.

But past is prologue. I spent the last several weeks of 2009 as a Noogler, and I launch into 2010 living and breathing search on the open web.

What’s on my mind? Here are some top-of-mind questions to which I hope to have better answers by this time next year:

• Exploratory Search: how should we determine that users want a more exploratory search experience, rather than one that minimizes time to a best-effort result? How should we respond to queries that clearly don’t have a single best answers, such as queries of the form [category] or [category location]?

• Mobile Search: should it be just like non-mobile search with a few tweaks to accommodate the device form factor? Or does / should mobile search fundamentally change the way we interact with information?

• Real-Time Search: is it more than real-time indexing plus emphasizing recency as a query-independent relevance factor? What are the use cases, and how should we be addressing them?

• Social / Collaborative Search: should we be looking to microblogging or other social media signals to augment (or even supplant!) link-based citations as authority cues? Should we be supporting mediated search by linking people to people, rather than directly to information?

• Transparency: is it possible to offer more transparency in relevance ranking without losing ground in the battle against spam and black-hat SEO?

To be clear, these are simply the questions that are on my mind–I’m speaking as an individual and not as a Google employee. That said, a great thing about being at Google is that there are people working on all of these areas. So I expect 2010 to be an exciting year!

Curious to hear what problems are on other people’s minds as we enter the new year. Comment away!

In 2009, when Ray Ozzie stepped into the ring with the news that Microsoft was launching a full-on social lab, it was clear that the Enterprise 2.0 movement was moving into a new phase.

Now comes the question of what effect Microsoft will have on the way Enterprise 2.0 evolves and what roles the players that are early to the game will play in its future.

Sponsor

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Ozzie is Microsoft's chief architect and one of the most respected people in tech circles. Lillian Cheng will lead the Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs and report to Ozzie. Cheng is a luminary in her own right, leading a number of research efforts for Microsoft, including the Vista UI.

FUSE will combine three labs: The Creative Systems Group, which has been led by Cheng, and the Rich Media Labs and Startup Labs, now commandeered by Ray Ozzie.

In an email to Microsoft employees this week, the message was pretty clear about the direction the company will take with its technology development. In essence, the tea leaves say that pretty much every product at Microsoft will include social or sharing features. FUSE will serve as a resource for the product groups. In Ozzie's words:

Myriad scenarios involving the notion of 'social' have now gone far beyond communications and collaboration and are transforming experiences that are key to our customers and key to our business, in leisure & entertainment; productivity & teamwork; experiences extending how we use the OS itself.

The three groups being combined have concrete skills and code in areas where 'social' meets sharing; where 'social' meets real-time; where 'social' meets media; where 'social' meets search; where 'social' meets the cloud plus three screens and a world of devices.

FUSE Labs will bring more coherence and capability to those advanced development projects where they're already actively collaborating with product groups to help them succeed with 'leapfrog' efforts. Working closely with (Microsoft Research) and across our divisions, the lab will prioritize efforts where its capabilities can be applied to areas where the company's extant missions, structures, tempo or risk might otherwise cause us to miss a material threat or opportunity.

Microsoft's apparent deep commitment will create a rising tide for the Enterprise 2.0 movement, which is already in full swing. A number of best-in-breed applications are being used by business people. Microsoft's high-profile commitment will further fuel interest in these applications.

Part of this is just the natural order that is taking place. Corporations have historically relied on document-based systems such as Sharepoint. Web pages reflect the next extension, but they, too, are essentially a form of a document. Enterprise 2.0 is forcing a change by fitting social layers that surface information from traditional data silos. That shows no sign of slowing down. FUSE will push the effort forward in its work with the product groups. It will be a wholly different kind of approach that has its roots in IT more than in the business departments.

A Different Development Burden

Microsoft faces a different developmental burden than what faces the young best-of-breed companies that are building social applications for their business customers.These companies are building products from scratch that they can quickly change without worrying about software upgrades. Their products will continue to fill a gap for the business manager. This means that the Enterprise 2.0 movement will see a dual form of growth, both from business and IT departments.

How Will The Customer Fare?

Perhaps more interesting will be the changing dynamics for Microsoft customers. I spoke with Tim Young, CEO of Socialcast about this topic. The advantage of social technologies is their ease of use and how they fit into a line of business. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools can be treated as an expense. They perform a service. Business users like that model. The applications are easy to use and affordable. They do not require an IT team to put in place.

Business users have been free to use these technologies at will. They have been pretty much ignored by the IT Department. But recently, Microsoft has been pressuring their IT contacts to upgrade to Sharepoint 2010.

People we speak to say that IT is now starting to ask business users about the social technologies they are using. IT is skeptical to some extent. They have relationships with Microsoft that are important to maintain.

But unlike in the past, business users are the early technology adopters and hold a bit of power. They have started using social technologies and are not looking back. They have crossed the chasm and are looking to employ these applications even more. The news from Microsoft just proves that the social enterprise is here to stay.

Microsoft is not in such a bad space. Companies are still heavily reliant on spreadsheets and email. Documents remain the crown jewels of the organization. Their social offering only stands to improve with FUSE now in place. Several companies, like Jive Software, are integrating their products with Sharepoint, providing an edge they previously did not have.

We expect Microsoft will play a heavy hand in how Enterprise 2.0 evolves. But the foundation has already been established to some extent without them. They have their own allies in the enterprise. Now it's just a question of how fast the culture shifts.

Discuss

For the last few years Richard Watson of NowandNext has created annual trend maps based on city subway maps. This year he has been more ambitious, creating a highly detailed map with five time zones, ranging from 2010-2015 out to 2035-2050.

For the previous three trend maps (shown at the bottom) I collaborated with Richard and we co-branded them with Future Exploration Network, however time pressures this year meant that I haven't directly contributed to the 2010 map. It is still as rich and glorious as ever - spend some time delving into the trends ahead!

MEGATRENDS OF THE TREND MAP
- Ageing
- Power shift Eastwards
- Globalisation
- Localisation
- Digitalisation
- Personalisation
- Volatility
- Individualism
- Environmental change
- Sustainability
- Debt
- Urbanisation

Click on the images below for the original blog posts and full-size pdfs.

2009 Trend Map

2008 Trend Map

2007 Trend Map

Other 2009 summary posts
Top blog posts of 2009: 6 on Twitter and the media
Top blog posts of 2009: Enterprise 2.0 and organizational effectiveness
Top blog posts of 2009: The future
Top keynote speech presentations/ videos of 2009

And one more summary of my blog posts that have attracted the most interest this year, this time on the topic of influence, which has become very central to my interests and research.

1. Launch of the Influence Landscape framework (Beta)
A visual framework to explain the role and mechanisms of influence today

2. “Influence is the future of media”
Why influence is at the center of where the media industry is going

3. Sponsored Tweets opens up the world of monetizing influence
Ways in which the world of paid influence is coming to the fore

4. Influence research: Duncan Watts and the debate on whether “influentials” really matter
Watts research has been very influential but there are limitations to his approach

5. Influence research: what are the real influence networks within Twitter and social media?
What is the difference between followers and influence?

6. Five key trends in how influence is transforming society
Article that received a lot of attention in the lead-up to Future of Influence Summit

7. What are the business models for influence and reputation - today and in the future?
One of the most interesting topics - the strategic landscape and where the money is

8. Will Influencism supplant Capitalism? The emergence of the influence economy
Reflections on the influence economy in the wake of Future of Influence Summit

In his excellent book The Meaning of the 21st Century, James Martin asks when in human history you would most like to be alive.

For me there is no question that it is now. The coming decade will be the most exciting in human history. The very challenging year of 2009 that we are preparing to bid farewell to helped to tear up the fairly linear progress of the first decade of the century. Now, technological and social change are poised to accelerate far beyond what we have become accustomed to.

A critical uncertainty is how well we will respond to this extraordinary pace of change, both as individuals and as societies. Will we be able to adapt and change, or will severe dysfunctions emerge? Just one dimension is the manifold ethical dilemmas that are raised by gaining extraordinary technological capabilities.

Here are the ten trends that I believe will be most fundamental to the decade ahead. I hope to present these and associated trends in an interactive visual format before long. For now, here are the 10 trends for 2010.

1. Information Intensity
We will soon consume more media than there are waking hours, by virtue of multi-channeling at most times. Billions of people and places will be media producers, including video streaming from most points of view on the world. We are just at the dawn of an incomprehensible daily onslaught of news and information – some valuable, much useless.

2. Collective Intelligence
Yes we are swamped by information. But we are now creating a collective intelligence that will filter and respond to what is worthwhile. Reputation measures will drive who we meet, do business with, and date. Machine translation will enable the people of the planet to communicate. A key question is: If human society is now a global brain, how do we cure our schizophrenia?

3. From Organizations to Networks
The pace of growth of virtual work is phenomenal. By the end of the decade close to half the workforce will be working independently, often across national boundaries. Companies will function on social networks and gaming platforms, professionals will work for many firms or clients. Traditional organizations will be gradually supplanted by shifting networks of expertise and resources.

4. Energy Shift
We don’t know what the climate of the 2010s holds for us. But we do know that the way we use energy will change faster than ever before in human history. Renewable energy sources, electric cars, and strict energy accounting, driven in part by carbon taxes on fossil fuels, will transform large chunks of the economy and how we move about.

5. Culture Jamming
Remix culture will surge, with everybody taking and jamming up slices of everything and anything to express themselves, while intellectual property law fails to keep pace. Every culture on the planet will reach everywhere – the only culture we will know is a global mashed-up emergent culture that changes by the minute.

6. Global Economic Shift
The sheer weight of China’s burgeoning economy together with India’s rise will change the business world’s center of gravity. The Far East will fund the continued profligate spending of the West. The weightless economy based on innovation, media, and professional services will dominate growth.

7. Exponential Bio Technologies
Now that biological and genomic technologies are largely driven by information technologies, they are on the same exponential trajectory. Medicines personalized to the individual, genetic modification of our children, drugs to increase intelligence, and life extension will all become commonplace.

8. Robotic intelligence
Many decades of predictions will finally be matched by technological developments in fields such as language recognition and spatial navigation to create a world in which physical robots and virtual agents interact with us and do our bidding. Household robots, voice conversation bots, and emotional robots that we bond with will be part of our everyday lives.

9. Augmented Humans
More than ever before, we can transcend our human abilities. Traditional memory aids are supplemented by augmented reality glasses or contact lenses, thought interfaces allow us to control machines, exoskeletons give us superhuman power. Machines will not take over humanity… because they will be us.

10. Haves and Have Nots
Across communities, nations, and the world, there is a keen risk of increasing separation between those who have access to technology, tools, and basic needs, and those who do not. This is not inevitable. However it will require concerted action around the world to avoid an increasing schism between us.

If you find these interesting, also have a look at:
The 10 TENsions That Will Define 2010

In his excellent book The Meaning of the 21st Century, James Martin asks when in human history you would most like to be alive.

For me there is no question that it is now. The coming decade will be the most exciting in human history. The very challenging year of 2009 that we are preparing to bid farewell to helped to tear up the fairly linear progress of the first decade of the century. Now, technological and social change are poised to accelerate far beyond what we have become accustomed to.

A critical uncertainty is how well we will respond to this extraordinary pace of change, both as individuals and as societies. Will we be able to adapt and change, or will severe dysfunctions emerge? Just one dimension is the manifold ethical dilemmas that are raised by gaining extraordinary technological capabilities.

Here are the ten trends that I believe will be most fundamental to the decade ahead. I hope to present these and associated trends in an interactive visual format before long. For now, here are the 10 trends for 2010.

1. Information Intensity
We will soon consume more media than there are waking hours, by virtue of multi-channeling at most times. Billions of people and places will be media producers, including video streaming from most points of view on the world. We are just at the dawn of an incomprehensible daily onslaught of news and information – some valuable, much useless.

2. Collective Intelligence
Yes we are swamped by information. But we are now creating a collective intelligence that will filter and respond to what is worthwhile. Reputation measures will drive who we meet, do business with, and date. Machine translation will enable the people of the planet to communicate. A key question is: If human society is now a global brain, how do we cure our schizophrenia?

3. From Organizations to Networks
The pace of growth of virtual work is phenomenal. By the end of the decade close to half the workforce will be working independently, often across national boundaries. Companies will function on social networks and gaming platforms, professionals will work for many firms or clients. Traditional organizations will be gradually supplanted by shifting networks of expertise and resources.

4. Energy Shift
We don’t know what the climate of the 2010s holds for us. But we do know that the way we use energy will change faster than ever before in human history. Renewable energy sources, electric cars, and strict energy accounting, driven in part by carbon taxes on fossil fuels, will transform large chunks of the economy and how we move about.

5. Culture Jamming
Remix culture will surge, with everybody taking and jamming up slices of everything and anything to express themselves, while intellectual property law fails to keep pace. Every culture on the planet will reach everywhere – the only culture we will know is a global mashed-up emergent culture that changes by the minute.

6. Global Economic Shift
The sheer weight of China’s burgeoning economy together with India’s rise will change the business world’s center of gravity. The Far East will fund the continued profligate spending of the West. The weightless economy based on innovation, media, and professional services will dominate growth.

7. Exponential Bio Technologies
Now that biological and genomic technologies are largely driven by information technologies, they are on the same exponential trajectory. Medicines personalized to the individual, genetic modification of our children, drugs to increase intelligence, and life extension will all become commonplace.

8. Robotic intelligence
Many decades of predictions will finally be matched by technological developments in fields such as language recognition and spatial navigation to create a world in which physical robots and virtual agents interact with us and do our bidding. Household robots, voice conversation bots, and emotional robots that we bond with will be part of our everyday lives.

9. Augmented Humans
More than ever before, we can transcend our human abilities. Traditional memory aids are supplemented by augmented reality glasses or contact lenses, thought interfaces allow us to control machines, exoskeletons give us superhuman power. Machines will not take over humanity… because they will be us.

10. Haves and Have Nots
Across communities, nations, and the world, there is a keen risk of increasing separation between those who have access to technology, tools, and basic needs, and those who do not. This is not inevitable. However it will require concerted action around the world to avoid an increasing schism between us.

If you find these interesting, also have a look at:
The 10 TENsions That Will Define 2010