tibbr is a real-time communication service designed to deliver the right information to the right person at the right time.

We achieve this through the use of subjects. Everything in tibbr is a subject. A subject can be anything. It could be a user created subject like silver.news or it could be a person (i.e matt). People can subscribe to subjects. Subjects are multi-tiered so subscribing to news.tibco means that a message posted to news.tibco.interesting will also be delivered.

The use of subjects decouples people from content - allowing a greater degree of flexibility in what information and content/context a user wants to see.

The problem we were trying to solve was pretty simple. In any company there are many topic experts. In any company there are many discussions and conversations occurring through many different mediums be they email, wiki, content management and f2f. The challenge for any company is making sure that the right information and conversations are happening with the right people.

Here is a simple scenario. Imagine I had an idea for a new product after seeing a customer. How I start a conversation and a dialog with peers and experts on this new idea?

Traditionally you would start by getting lots of different people in a room or on a conference call. You would discuss the idea and create lines of communication and next steps. The problem with this starts right from the get go: Who are the experts and who needs to be in the meeting?

The other approach would be for me to email and/or call around people that I know within the company who I think might have an interest in this new idea. But am I certain that the people I know are the right people at the right time?

As companies grow larger the challenge of effective real-time communication and decision making gets worse. I don’t know everyone in my company. It is likely that I have pockets of expertise where I didn’t know it. Worse still - we are all overloaded by information, so often times important content and context is lost in the noise.

It is a situation that is rapidly spiraling out of control . So much information is being lost, mis-directed or just plain confusing that it is becoming difficult to take appropriate action at an appropriate time.

In the enterprise we have added wikis, content management systems and adopted email/meeting/concall processes to sort through the mess.

We built tibbr as an attempt to provide a unified communication platform to sort through this mess. Lets take a fresh look at the previous examples.

Having come from the customer site with this new idea I publish information (a tibbit) to tibbr. Now I have a choice. I can simply publish it with no additional information. In this case people who are subscribed to me (my followers) will receive this information.

However in this case lets say I refine it a little bit more. I publish my new idea on a couple of subjects:

Tibco.innovation

Discussion.newtech

Tibco.customer.innovation

These three subjects represent potentially a wide group of people (maybe) that are interested in new ideas. Now - I don’t know who is subscribed to these subjects or who is actively interested in this. I also don’t know how the user is actually getting the information delivered.  But this is the point. I have decoupled the communication vehicle from the discussion allowing a potentially larger group of people to participate.

Now lets say (for sake of argument) that there are a couple of people subscribed to one or more of these subjects that takes an interest in the idea. In a traditional world this would lead to point-point emails and side meetings etc. In tibbr we keep the context by allowing you to essentially start a conversation around the post.

People subscribed to those original subjects will also receive the follow ups and discussions.

Now the flaw in what I have laid out is that this could lead to a huge volume of traffic. One of the early contentions with most communication vehicles is that the volume of unsolicited traffic can get in the way of getting things done.

There are two points to consider:

1.       A user subscribed to a subject voluntarily because they are interested.

2.       How often and in what format messages are delivered to the end-user is configurable.

When you subscribe to a subject you have the tibbr website which keeps an active log of all your tibbr communication. However you can configure the way that information gets delivered to you. This configurability allows a user to decide how and how often to receive information.

Lets say that the CTO was subscribed to tibco.innovation. The CTO would configure how that information was delivered. He or she could decide that innovation is paramount and for new tibbits to be sent directly to the primary communication device (say SMS to a cell phone).

Alternatively the CTO may prefer to get a daily digest of interesting innovations delivered to an email address so as to read them at night - perhaps giving a broader perspective.

So lets take another look at the differences:

We really go back to the central concept. tibbr is about delivering the right information to the right person at the right time. At a more personal level it actually is ‘Deliver information to me that I might be interested in but do it in the way that I prefer at the rate I prefer it’

Stayed tuned for the next edition of this blog where we will talk about how we came to realize tibbr from a technology point of view.