Awesome.

It seems the engines of innovation are operating at lightspeed while the intelligence of these “solutions” remains stuck in neutral.

No wonder so many publics remain in buyback mode.

http://www.scpr.org/blogs/economy/2011/1 2/27/4060/were-not-ready-end-email-yet/

Publish once available to all that need to see is nothing new by a long shot and social networks actually are a horrible place for these types of communications because of the politics of deciding who gets to see what.

Asking a generic tech question is easy in this environment . Asking a question that by default points the finger at someone else who should have known the answer is not so easy. Many would defer from posting at all before throwing a fellow worker under the bus, which means the question goes unanswered.

there are solutions, but social networks isnt an easy answer to the problem

The main “advantage” of social networks is that people haven’t screwed them up very badly yet. Give the technology a bit more time, and they’ll get as badly misused as email is.

As for technical information, or specific interests, newsgroups were designed exactly for that purpose shortly after email was invented. From time to time, I’ve seen the concept re-invented. First it was Internet forums, now it comes in the shape of social networks. To be honest, I never figured out why people felt they needed anything beyond newsgroups, I can’t see that Internet forums or social networks provide anything extra that improves dramatically the experience you get participating in a newsgroup.

Point being, it’s not about social neworks, per se. It’s about technology making information markets more efficient.

People were solving problems this way in 1985 using Usenet. They’ve been able to do it a whole lot more efficiently since Google. They’re able to do it in a slightly more structured way using sites like Quora and StackOverflow. None of this has anything to do with “social”.

ESPECIALLY in a technical context, who cares about restricting the discussion of a problem to “friends”, however defined? What you care about is obtaining a solution, from any quarter, and once you get that solution you can fairly easily validate it — you don’t need it to come from a “trusted source”.

In other words: the ability to publish a large amount of information on the internet, and the ability of search engines to find what’s useful in that information, make our lives a lot easier. Wow — that’s a new discovery.

I’ve no idea quite what point Andy Mulholland is TRYING to make; but the point he IS making is banal beyond belief.

As for social media – which one of the many? Are they confidential? Will they even be here in three years time?

The reason companies try to decrease the use of email is to encourage the use of richer communication tools, mainly the telephone and (god forbid) walking the twenty yards to go over talk to someone.