There's a worrying trend in Bollywood these days. Producers have started to believe if they follow numerology and spell their movie names with an extra character or two, they'll happily get to a hit!... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

Once again, I am on the road on to another business trip. This time around to Boston, MA, to attend and present at *the* Enterprise 2.0 event of events. Of course, I am referring to the Enterprise 2.0 Event, a.k.a. #e2conf. So over the next few days you will see how this blog, once again, is going to go a bit dormant, as I doubt I would have some spare time to keep writing some articles; you know how it goes for these kinds of live events, face to face social networking will trump all attempts and efforts to go virtual this week, at least, for me, so I think I’d rather focus on attempting plenty of live tweeting while the event takes place, reporting further on the various sessions I will be attending, and then on my way back home, and seeing how I don’t have any other business trip coming up any time soon I will do a proper catch up on the blog about the event posting another series of highlights entries. But, for now, I thought I would go ahead and leave you folks with that other article from the series of the Social Business Forum event that took place in Milan a few days ago, and which I was due one last update. The remaining breakout speaker sessions and one final keynote. Thus let’s go ahead with it. Let’s do it! After the break from the first initial round of keynotes, the breakout sessions got kicked off into three different tracks: Employee Empowerment, Customer Engagement and Open Innovation. Obviously, I couldn’t attend all of them, since I had a couple of customer commitments and press interviews I had to attend to, but from the ones I attended I learned a great deal of new and interesting sites and thought I would go ahead and share those over here. For the remaining sessions you will probably have to wait for the recordings to become available to get a glimpse of how they went. I, too, would be looking forward to those! I got started attending the excellent presentation from Phillip Schaefer, Head for IDEO Munich, on "Driving innovation through collaboration and connecteness", where he talked about the various different challenges that distributed organisations face when trying to collaborate and share their knowledge effectively and how good design thinking could help address some of those various different issues. In fact, he focused on describing, and quite nicely, I must add as well, five different principles for collaborative tools that work in any context, in any environment: Build pointers to people Reward individual participation (Which I guess I was hoping to see some progression from the traditional issues that have always come along with rewards and incentives in a knowledge sharing culture, but didn’t) Demand intuitive interfaces (Which surely confirmed how knowledge workers should never get tired of demanding for better quality products when interacting with social tools, on the contrary) Take the road more travelled Iterate early and often Overall, quite an interesting session and a very nice job well done by Phillip, specially, when he mentioned that one of the key elements from collaborating effectively was to make it fun and I couldn’t have agreed more wholeheartedly with him on that argument. It’s the fun part of work what makes work worth while, not only, because of the huge potential of facilitating better relationships and connections with fellow peers helping increase trust levels and social capital, but also because fun@work should always be the main trait from any social business out there; the alternative, as we have seen over the course of decades is rather ugly and should be avoided at all times. It’s now a good time to realise that not doing that is just basically helping us all waste more than one third of our lives not having fun and that’s something that I am not sure about you folks, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable with it. At all. Why neglect, when you could embrace it fully and get the most out of it? Here is the embedded Slideshare deck from Phillip, so you can have a look into it and watch through the slides: Designing Collaboration: Building Systems that Really Work - Philipp Schäfer View more presentations from SocialBizForum The next breakout session that I attended was conducted by my good friend Cordelia Krooss, who spent a few minutes talking about one of my favourite customers, BASF, describing their fascinating journey of becoming a social business with "Connect.BASF. The Online Business Network". Indeed, to date, the BASF story continues to remain one of the most inspiring out there, because it details a few things that most social businesses need to realise in order to embrace such social transformation. As a starting point, the fact you no longer need to be in the IT industry to become a fully integrated social business. the BASF folks have done it; in fact, just recently, they celebrated their first anniversary from when connect.BASF was born and still going rather strong. Secondly, they continue to prove how becoming a social business is a task that involves every single part of the organisation. Not just the IT department, or Marketing, Communications or HR. It involves all of them. It involves a new kind of leadership where you inspire changes to take place in order to provoke such social transformation from your entire business by empowering every single business unit of your organisation ensuring they all share that co-responsibility of wanting to make things right, which, in my opinion is as good as it gets and why I keep saying that Social Business is not owned by anyone, but by everyone, in equal parts, sharing the same responsibility of wanting to make a difference and drive that change. Thus, without much further ado, and in case you may not have seen the excellent slideware that Cordelia put together to describe such a wonderful journey for BASF, here is the Slideshare embedded code, once again:   connect.BASF: The Online Business Network - Cordelia Krooss & Dr. CheeChin Liew View more presentations from SocialBizForum After a couple of customer commitments and the lovely lunch that followed, it was time to come back to the next round of breakout sessions. This time around it was my turn to deliver a presentation on "Organisations or Communities -The Socially Integrated Enterprise", which I will take the liberty of talking about it, more in detail, at a later time, once the recording becomes available, so that I can continue adding some additional nuggets that would explain how networks and communities are starting to become the new state of the workplace, i.e. how work gets organised and done, versus the traditional hierarchical structures we all have gotten so used to. Too bad I missed the always insightful, and good friend, Sameer Patel on "The Connected Enterprise", as both our sessions were taking place at the same time. Well, another good reason for me to catch up with the recordings whenever they are ready From there onwards, the next breakout session I attended, at least, half way through before I had to deal with some press interviews duties, was one I was really looking forward to as well, specially, since it was coming from one of the folks from whom I have learned the most, over the course of the years, around the topic of Learning & unLearning (Social Learning, even) and that we, finally, had the chance of meeting up face to face after all of these years following each other on the blogs and tweets. Yes, that inspiring speaker, and good friend was George Siemens who talked about the topic of "Analytics in knowledge and learning". In that presentation he covered how the "crazy abundance" we have been calling Big Data from all along is changing and shaping up the way we learn nowadays, even more when that growth is exponential with the continuous exposure to the Social Web. His perception of sensemaking in such abundance and complexity was brilliant (Check slide #20 for more on that topic!) and surely quite an incentive for me to catch up with the rest of the recording, as that was the time when I had to step out, but certainly the way he described how learning happens nowadays, trying to make sense of it all, is no longer yesterday’s Learning methods. Quite the opposite! And all of that influenced by the huge impact of Social Networking tools, whether internal or external. In fact, my all time favourite tweet from the entire conference came out from his session, as it was beautifully captured by Cordelia over here: "@gsiemens at #sbf11: If you are on facebook, you’re the product that facebook sells: information on you provided by you or your network" Just brilliant! Then it was the turn to tune into one of the most interesting panels I have seen in a long while. This time around with  Bertrand Duperrin, Keith Swenson & Mark Tamis on the topic of "Exceptions are not exceptional. Organizing for Unpredictability", where they engaged with the audience on a fascinating conversation on the topic of Social Business and Adaptive Case Management, which reminded me of this absolutely masterpiece on ACM by the always rather resourceful John Tropea. I would need to come back and revisit this particular topic on ACM and how it relates to Social Business, but I can surely tell you that I thoroughly enjoyed the various connections made around the topic of social business and how much it relates to business processes, unpredictability, embracing of failure, just as much as success, knowing and embracing your limitations, delighting your customers, etc. etc. Lots of meat on this one to digest further. Watch out for the recording whenever it comes out! And, finally, the last session that I attended at the Social Business Forum was that keynote session from Keith Swenson where he talked about "Enabling quantum organizations as a new level of effectiveness", where he introduced a new kind of organisation under the concept of "Quantum Orgs" that I can surely relate to big time! He defines them as orgs dominated by the "Pull" model, vs. the "Push" model from previous decades. Once again, Newton came up (See Slide #7) to help reintroduce the topic of how we are moving from Newtonian Orgs. to Quantum Orgs (Slide #13 displays a beautiful comparison chart that is worth while every single word!). Those Quantum Orgs. are actually defined by limited precision, turbulence (Which, I agree with Keith 100% is a healthy behaviour!), relationship based and unpredictability. And they clearly separate the newtonian orgs. which are mostly labour based, from the quantum orgs, which are mostly knowledge work based. His description of what a knowledge worker is in today’s social computing environment is just wonderfully inspiring and, if anything, a really great guide of what will shape up the next generation of the workplace, if not already: The Knowledge Worker 2.0. And his conclusion slide #38 is a must-see to understand the challenges we are going through to explain that social transformation I mentioned above. But I will let you go ahead and watch through them on this Slideshare embedded code: Enabling Quantum Organizations as a new level of effectiveness - Keith D. Swenson View more presentations from SocialBizForum And that would be it, for me, folks, for now; hope you have enjoyed this series of highlights blog posts that I have put together for the Social Business Forum event that took place in Milan on June 8th and there is still one more entry to come along, which is the one where I will point you all to the links for the recordings of the various presentations, so that you can replay them all at your leisure. Hope you have enjoyed the ride reading through these just as much as I did attending the event. And, for now, get ready to take a short break of a couple of days and come back again, as I get on my way through the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston to capture plenty more new insights, key learnings, new relationships, continue to nurture good old ones and a whole bunch of other stuff. The vibe is pretty good so far. The conference will be *even* better  … And I will be more than happy to share further thoughts on it for those folks who may not have been able to make it this time around! Thus stay tuned for more to come along shortly … and, once again, a special Thanks! to the Open-Knowledge folks for their kind invitation to the Social Business Forum event! I’ll see you all next year!

This is a really tiring, exciting and fulfilling time of my professional life. I'm in the thick of ThoughtWorks University. ThoughtWorks University (TWU) is our graduate induction program where we've... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

Once again, it’s been a little while since I put together a blog post over here, but this time around for a very good reason. As most of you folks know by now already, I have just returned back from my last business trip, one of the longest this year so far, for sure!, as I got to attend the Enterprise 2.0 conference event (a.k.a. #e2conf) in Boston, MA, the whole of last week. One of the most wonderful experiences I have enjoyed so far in attending a tech conference. And I do realise that I keep saying that very same thing year after year, but this time around I can certainly confirm it 100% it’s been one of the best I can remember and for a good number of reasons! Yes, I am now back to work, back to the social grid, back to carry on with my usual blogging mojo. And that means it’s time to kick off another series of blog posts where I am planning to share some of the major key highlights from the overall event itself, as a way of sharing with you folks a few glimpses of what I found the most interesting this time around. Thus from here onwards, and over the next few days, I’ll be putting together a series of entries, where I will talk about the conference itself, i.e. keynotes, breakout sessions, workshops, networking opportunities, etc. etc. And will try to mix it all with a few other interesting things I have bumped into over the last couple of weeks, so it won’t bore most of you folks. I will also share with you all some links of the phenomenal live blogging that happened throughout the event, specially, coming along from very talented, and good, friends like Mary Abraham, Emanuele Quintarelli and Bill Ives. And at the same time I will be pointing you to some of the great highlights and write-up blog entries that a bunch of other good friends and thought leaders in the 2.0 space have been putting together in the last few days. It’s going to be a busy time, but with plenty of good fun! However, before we go into all of that, I thought I would resume my regular blogging activities sharing with you folks the inspiring video clip of the week mixed with what’s been one of my major highlights from the overall Enterprise 2.0 conference event for yours truly: the offline social networking interactions! Indeed, if there was a single key highlight I would want to stress out from the event itself, is how, once again, the offline networking was absolutely fantastic! Superb!  … To the point where I think it was the very first time at a tech conference, that I can remember, that I spent more time talking offline to folks than being online, both, before, during and after the various speaker sessions I attended. And that’s a new one, to be honest, because time and time again I always had that urge of wanting to check things online, see what people were thinking and commenting on, catch up with blog posts, etc. etc. And it surely was quite an exhausting activity. Well, not this year! That’s right! A couple of days before the event I decided I was going to change things slightly on how I would approach attending the conference. So, except for the live tweeting I did for the various presentations I attended, I was basically offline for most of the time, talking and connecting with people in the real world! And, boy, was that such a wonderful experience?!?! My voice struggled quite a bit trying to keep up with the pace of conversing with some many good old and new friends. I am also ok with the fact that I gained a few extra pounds after all of those wonderful conversations over coffee breaks, lunches, networking gigs, dinners, after dinner drinks, late night drinks, etc. etc. It was totally worth it! Big time! That’s something that I should probably be grateful to the Social Business Forum event, held in Milan, Italy, a few weeks back, because, once again, it showed me how important, and critical, it is to converse, share and learn from those around you, face to face, at such events. It’s amazing how the Social Web can take you away from those offline interactions, just because you may want to be in the know, when what really matters, probably, in most cases, is those very same face to face conversations we do with people who share the same common passion we have for all of this social business stuff. It’s true that I knew I would be capable of catching up with the online Social Web thanks to the absolutely wonderful piece of work from Jim Worth who created, once again, the Enterprise 2.0 Boston Social Web Coverage June 20, 2011, but this time around I thought I would try to be as disconnected from the online world, as I could, specially, before and after the main agenda was covered and dealt with. And, goodness, did I make the right choice?!?! It was brilliant just hanging out with plenty of good friends whom you have kept in touch with through the Social Web over the course of time, as well as meeting a bunch of news ones during the event!, and do real, proper catchups! I wouldn’t change that for anything, to be honest! In fact, if there is something I have learned from that whole offline networking experience from last week is that I need to learn to become less dependent on the Social Web, and, instead, converse more with people in real life. Face to face interactions still do have a place, even in the workplace!, and they are critical for us all to build better, more trustworthy relationships, that we can then continue to nurture and cultivate online till we meet up again! And that whole experience was quite an eye opener to me, to the point where as I was coming back home, playing that catchup I mentioned above, I decided it’s probably a good time to start now break loose from the dependency on the Social Web and continue to enjoy those offline interactions, even while at home! Which is why I am going to make a connection with the inspiring video of the week to show you what I mean with this. Yes, you all know, it’s now summer time! The weather is gorgeous probably in most places where you are, but instead of enjoying it all going outdoors, mixing and mingling with other people, you decide to stick around your computer for that little longer, which, eventually, turns out to be a couple of extra hours, here and there! Well, not anymore! At least, for me! And here is the main reason why: You may be wondering why I am sharing such a lovely musical video clip titled Something Good Can Work from Two Door Cinema Club, right? Yes, I know! It’s not a summer song, by far, but, hang on for a minute, if you listen to it carefully and let yourself go for a bit, it does sound like perfect for the summer. Even more when you watch the video clip and you come up with some of those wonderful imageries, which is why I wanted to share this video clip this week, because the footage from the entire video, except perhaps the first few seconds, has been done in the island where I live: Gran Canaria! In fact, a couple of the places shown throughout the video clip are just like 5 minute drive from where I live myself, which, making a connection with the rest of this blog post, you would understand what I mean with spending a lot less time online than what I am doing now to enjoy those outdoors. Who wouldn’t, right? Well, they say that striking a good balance between work and life is perhaps one of the biggest challenges knowledge workers, specially, remote ones!, face in today’s working environment; there is no easy solution, for sure. In my own case, I have learned to switch gears and move away from that balance and, instead, strike for that work, life full integration. And I’m surely finding it somewhat ironic that I had to travel over 5.000 KMs away, to attend #e2conf, to realise what I really have been missing over here in the last few months with all of that frenzy happening at work and elsewhere on the Social Web… So a big highlight for me, from the Enterprise 2.0 conference, is a big Thank You!, to everyone I conversed with, learned from, shared common experiences with, etc. etc. yes, you know who you all are!! (Too many to mention all of you over here in a single paragraph! And to those other folks I never managed to catch up with, unfortunately!! Will need to fix that next time around!), who showed me how important and incredibly paramount it’s to nurture, cultivate and enjoy to the highest level possible, face to face conversations and interactions with those close to you. Even if that means on the way back (I enjoyed a delightful weekend in Madrid, in between, as well!), or even closer: at home!

Something beautiful happened at ThoughtWorks University today. For the first time we tried an Open Space format to facilitate informal learning in the group - which incidentally went quite well, I... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

It's been a really busy time which has left me with no time whatsoever for webinars, PKM, tweeting and everything that makes life on the internet really interesting. Anyways, I've spoken to my team... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

Hopefully I'll have better luck with this webinar than I had with the last one. Without too much stage setting, let me get straight to the topic. Steve Ash, Director of LINE Communications will speak... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

During the course of yesterday, my good friend, the always insightful Ana Silva was wondering, over in Twitter, and in her own blog, too!, under the heading "The Cluetrain Manifesto on art, work and life", about potential new books to read during the summer vacation. A bunch of us dropped by and shared some suggestions that would surely make for quite an interesting and diverse reading. I mentioned a couple of them, but one that I really enjoyed reading for how thought-provoking, refreshing and liberating it was, to the point where despite the fact I finished it up a couple of months back, it’s still lingering there in my mind, was Steve Denning‘s "The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management". It’s just one of those books that’s very easy to read, with some great storytelling! (Of course, Steve is very good at it!), and lots of new, fresh thinking of the new role that leadership will need to embrace, if it would want to survive in the 21st century, but, most importantly, a new role management will need to embark on and live fully, if they would want their own businesses survive in the current knowledge economy for decades to come! Now, I will be putting together a much more in-depth review of the book itself and what I actually learned from it, while reading it, in an upcoming blog post, but I just wanted to share with you folks over here a video clip that tells a very powerful story and that, while going through it, reminded me of Steve’s book in setting up the stage of that new radical management and what that new generation of radical leaders would be like. The video, of course, once again, comes from the inspiring KarmaTube Web site; it lasts for just a few minutes, and it tells the story of Haruka Nishimatsu, CEO of Japan Airlines, describing how he "takes the bus to work, eats at the company cafeteria and buys his suits at discount stories". Not the typical CEO, you may be wondering, right? Indeed, by far! But it gets much much better. You would have to watch the video clip itself to find out more about another example, in my opinion, of what radical management is all about and why it’s this new kind of leadership the one we need to get us out of the financial crisis we have been living through the last few years. Yes, it’s that good! My favourite quote from the entire interview probably sets the stage of what would differentiate managers, executives and leaders of the 20th century with those of the 21st century: "If management is distant, up in the cloud, people just wait for orders. I want my people to think for themselves" Priceless, don’t you think? I am not sure what you folks would think, but I feel the world needs, and pretty badly, plenty more CEOs like Nishimatsu-san.

A few weeks back you may have read my recap of Jane Hart's webinar on choosing the right social learning platform. Jane outlined a variety of parameters that you should use to select your social... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

Like I have mentioned yesterday, it’s been a few days already since I jumped the shark and joined the bunch of early adopters who have been hammering down, and taking for a spin, the latest iteration of Google to get social with Google Plus, right after Google Wave and Google Buzz. And I guess the experience has been somewhat rather positive so far, because a few days later, I’m still there, having a blast. So since a bunch of folks have asked me to share my thoughts about the overall user experience I thought I would put together this particular blog entry where I could describe a little bit what it is like: well, to me, it’s like being all over 2007, once again! But let’s get started with things properly. As most of you folks already know, my first exposure to social software was inside IBM, back in 2001, with a Profile Social Aggregator called Fringe; then I started experimenting with the instant messaging social capabilities of IBM Community Tools (a.k.a. ICT) around the same time; in 2003 I got things started with my first internal corporate blog, followed in 2005 with my first social bookmarking site called Dogear. From there onwards, and in 2006, Cattail (an internal Personal File Sharing space) came along, just as I was getting started playing with micro-blogging / sharing tools like BlueTwit, as well as Beehive (Now SocialBlue) and a whole bunch of other pilot social networking tools made available to us, fellow IBMers, through the absolutely wonderful Technology Adoption Program, a.k.a. TAP. Quite an exciting journey, if you would ask me, from the perspective of having that golden opportunity of living on the cutting edge of technology, although sometimes it’s been more along the lines of bleeding edge. Either way, the result was phenomenal since it gave a few thousands of us a unique opportunity where we could explore the potential of social networking for the enterprise, and still going strong!, and all along it’s been quite exciting being ahead of the curve from other waves of adopters or the mainstream itself. Even for us. However, you can imagine how, as time went by, most of us ended up with a whole bunch of various different profiles in a good number of internal social networking sites resulting in spreading thinner than ever and eventually jumping into what some other folks have been calling social fatigue. Pretty natural, most folks seem to claim, and I would probably have to agree with them to a certain extent, since I, too, noticed such fatigue over the course of the years. Till 2007. In that year, IBM decided to productise all of those wonderful social interactions and create, as a result of it, a single product: IBM Connections, formerly known as Lotus Connections. So in the end employee profiles, blogs, social bookmarks, files, activities, wikis and communities (And now Forums) became all integrated into a single point of entry: Connections itself. No longer would there be a need to keep up with multiple social networking environments, with multiple networks, with multiple levels of interactions. It was all coming along, rather nicely, into a single, unified experience. And we were all rather grateful! Yes, sir! All of a sudden, all of that social fatigue vanished thin air and a new re-energised effort to consolidate both connections / networks and content was born! All of a sudden there was a single space where fellow colleagues could all interact, be social, get the job done doing their work, but still have plenty of good fun along the way, without having that sense of walking the talk thinner than ever. Yes, sir, we *are* all grateful! Well, hello Google Plus! Welcome to my 2007 integrated user experience! Glad you could finally make it and very happy to see how you will help me fight that social fatigue I was starting to experiment with the Social Web and integrate all of my core networks into a single one, and all of that with a plus! Now, I am sure that plenty of folks out there would not feel very comfortable with me advocating for a ONE, single social networking tool that could eventually rule over all of the others. But the thing is that, if things continue like that, Google Plus will eventually rule them all! And here’s why. I am not going to bother folks sharing a good number of the rather interesting and insightful blog posts that other early adopters have been sharing so far in their own blogs. However, what I would like to do is to share with you folks why, if Google Plus continues to evolve nicely, like it is at the moment, even though we are only at iteration #1, I may well kiss good-bye to a good number of the social networking tools from the Social Web that I have been using over the course of the years. Starting with the no-brainers, both Facebook and LinkedIn. Why? Well, because G+ seems to have done their homework properly and understood how much more benefit they would be getting from a rather understanding and compromising Terms of Service, something that both FB and LI still have got to come to terms with it. Then followed by Flickr. If you have been using the Photos option within G+ you will surely agree with me that the user experience is far superior to Flickr’s upload of pictures, which is eventually what we would all want to do, right? The fact that you can import bulk uploads really easy makes it a breeze to move away from other photo-sharing social networking tools, like I recently did for Instagram with Instaport, and probably Flickr soon, too! Oh, I am now waiting for the iOS Apps to become available and that’s where my mobile photo-sharing will be going, eventually… The next one coming down nicely would be Delicious… Why would I want to go and share my bookmarks and whatever other links in an external social bookmarking site when my core social networks, i.e. my social graph, the one I care about the most, are all hanging out in Plus. Why force them to go and do a couple of extra clicks to get access to interesting and relevant content when you can do that right there! Mind you, I haven’t been doing any external social bookmarking for the last few months, after the recent debacles and hiccups with services like Magnolia / Gnolia or Delicious itself, respectively. But I can see myself using Plus to share my favourite links with my social networks, in context, i.e. in Circles, which means we all get to hang out at the same space! Moving along, the next one on the line of threat would be our beloved Skype. I am not sure whether folks have been experimenting with Hangouts (See this rather quick YouTube video clip on it) in G+ already or not, but if you have, you know exactly what I mean. They totally rock and I could surely see myself using them more and more as my core networks continue to make the migration over. And, finally, the single one I feel would be the most threatened of them all: Twitter. And I know that this is probably going to hurt quite a few folks, when I say such thing, but I am already seeing it myself judging from how drastically my time in Twitter has gone down and how that time has been re-invested in Google Plus. I am a big fan of Twitter, as most folks know already. It’s been my single, most important social networking tool of them all! I live there. Or, at least, I used to. But the thing is that Twitter has been enjoying a good number of annoyances over the course of time that have provoked that love / hate relationship to evolve into one where I can’t care less anymore: Search: Looking back not even a week’s worth of tweets, both your own or others’, is not good enough, I am afraid! Specially, when you are doing live tweeting at conference events and a week later it’s all GONE! As if it never happened! Timeline: It used to drive me crazy I can only go back up to 6 hours of tweets; I know and understand the Social Flow and everything, but let me decide what I want and don’t want to read, please; I am already old enough to make such decisions. Replies & Mentions: They have never worked the way they should, have they? And that’s been like that for years, creating and generating unnecessary hassle for what I do believe is one of Twitter’s core capabilities… reaching out to people! Spambots: They may be doing something about it, but not good enough, in my opinion, when too much of it is out of our own control! Just like with email! Silly Twitter API limits: One of the reasons why I keep following very very few people, as opposed to the ones I know I should / could follow. Again, let me decide, without limits, the number of folks I would want to follow or not. Don’t make that decision for me, please. Twitter API new rules: That have crashed most of my favourite Twitter clients user experiences and no questions asked! Latest example, the recent changes where I cannot longer see DMs in my favourite Twitter client for Mac: Nambu. I do know it would happen eventually, but let’s face it, Twitter is what it is today because of its entire ecosystem, not because of the tool itself; if you ignore it, or kill it, be ready to suffer the consequences… Lack of support, All of the issues I mentioned above have been reported to Twitter by yours truly a few times, and I am still waiting for their first response on any of them :-// Hold a simple (Not even complex!) conversation: In Twitter? Yeah, right, good luck with that one! You will need it! Its lack of integration with other services: That I know will be addressed to a certain extent with the upcoming iOS 5 release, but then again probably a bit too late already, if we would have to wait for over 4 years to such integration into an entire social ecosystem.  If you would look into each and everyone of those issues you could say that Twitter would be in trouble. But the thing is that Twitter *IS* already in trouble, because Google Plus addresses, AND fixes!, each and everyone of those annoyances and it does it beautifully, if I may add, even something so relatively simple like sharing clean URLs that you could then curate and re-share across. Now, I am not sure what you folks would think about, but I am, for once, getting really excited about the huge potential that Google Plus has got to be a smash hit in the Social Web. Its unique opportunity to be pervasive enough to be part of Google’s entire ecosystem makes it tremendously powerful; its mobile capabilities (The Android App is brilliant!) will be par to none, as soon as the iOS App hits the Apple Store (Hopefully, this week!) and the other half of the mobile world gets down to business with it. Its simple, yet wonderfully insightful approach towards Circles (Think of Twitter Lists with a purpose) will help folks tame the info overload beast that most other social networking tools tend to have as they grow bigger. And the list goes on and on and on… Indeed, you can colour me excited. I haven’t felt this excitement about the Social Web for a long while, probably as far back as when Twitter went mainstream, but I must confess that after having played with Google Plus for a good few days, I am still enjoying the experience, just as much as the first day, despite the learning curve, despite having to re-build my networks, despite the fact that there are mostly geeky early adopters in there, while we wait for the rest of the masses, etc. etc. It hasn’t faded away and probably it won’t. At least, for me, because right now I am just waiting for Google Plus to open up the doors and give us an opportunity to invite others, so that we can get that second and third wave of early adopters and from there onwards go mainstream. Now, the final key question I am sure you folks would be wondering about as I get to wrap up this blog post. Will I ever leave all of those other social networking tools and move just to Google Plus? My personal gut feeling is that, just like I did with IBM Connections back in 2007, if my core networks (Specially the ones from Twitter) decide to move I’ll be making the move myself. So far, I am just two thirds of that move to be complete and then you could say that Google Plus would be, for me, at least, the one that would rule them all. Just like Connections does for my Intranet social interactions. And somehow that feels rather liberating… For a change.