Aperte.org Jeremy Handcock

One of the reasons that Twitter has become so popular is that it is a successful ambient awareness tool. With each tweet from a friend or person of interest, you get a subliminal sense of what he/she is up to. Each tweet also represents an opportunity for ad hoc, informal communication between Twitterers:

In Wired Magazine and then more recently in the New York Times Magazine, Clive Thompson discusses social proprioception, his term to describe the social 'sixth sense' that comes with microblogging. Proprioception is a really wonderful metaphor for describing ambient awareness and I think it can extend beyond social settings into the workplace as well.

Yammer, for example, is your Twitter at work. I've never seen Yammer in action, but I think it's a really interesting idea. Just as you publish your lifestream on Twitter, you publish your workstream on Yammer---micro-level updates about what you're working on. Say you only have a once-a-day standup meeting with your team in the morning. Wouldn't it be nice to get more fine-grained details of what everyone is up to throughout the day? I could also see microblogging at work as a great way to close some of the distance in a distributed team. You get regular updates from team members afar, potentially a greater feeling of social connectedness, and opportunities for ad hoc communication.

Microblogging at work is a fine idea by itself, but what about combining workstreams with artifact streams inside a microblog? The developer awareness tool that I created for my research was the artifact stream part---Aufait feeds you discrete tidbits about how your project artifacts are changing. I focused on source code, bug reports, documents, and automated builds, although the artifact could really be anything. If I put these artifact streams alongside a team's workstream, I get something like this:

To me this seems like a natural fit. It augments all of the nice things about microblogging with additional awareness information that is really important for software developers. You can use a hash (ie. #sprocketdev) to publish a conversation to your team's channel and of course you can poke around other channels and people just like on Twitter.

The screenshot above is Jaiku on AppEngine. Jaiku is Google's freshly open-sourced microblogging platform and it works pretty much like Twitter. Getting the aritfact streams in there is just a matter of publishing events (ie. version control commits, bug report updates) into Jaiku via its API. From there, you can get your hybrid workstream/artifact stream from Jaiku's web interface, RSS, or even using its API.

I'm going to take this up as a project so I'll let you know how things come along. If you have any feedback or are interested in collaborating, feel free to get in touch!