I think I can safely say that most remotely tech savvy internet users have their own MySpace or Facebook account or some other spawn of the same line of thought. In fact just ‘Googling’ “social networking” returns a large number of results for sites where you can create your own online presence in and add all of your RL or OL friends. What separates these sites are their various motives and agendas, for example in the early days of the popularisation of the internet, one would frequently see annoying flashing ads for “Find your classmates”[1] which would appear to have the intent of reuniting you with your classmates from 1972, however being the wary user; I never clicked the flashing banner. Other online communities are there to help people find true e-love such as RSVP and matchmaker.com, both of which have nothing to do with online collaboration.
The major players in the social network league are MySpace and Facebook with MySpace being the alternative for the angsty teen who wants to dabble in terrible, gaudy and downright bad web design. Meanwhile Facebook appears to be the thinking person’s network with its inability to change the colour scheme, once unique live feed as well as friend relationship map. It is the latter two points which are particularly interesting in relation to collaboration where a ‘live feed’ could help members of a larger development team inform each other on a mass level without having to send an email to groups of people. Letting the file jockey know that you need to get them to move the latest version of your model into the reference folder would simply mean opening a web browser and typing your message leaving a worklog for both the employer and workmates to keep track of what is left to be done.
In a CNet News article on IBM looking at adopting social networking as a means of internal communication, Michael Rodin of IBM said
“The real phenomenon of Web 2.0 is the concept of community."[2]
This supports the notion of a collaborating team being there to support one another as a community where everyone shares their skillset with one another which is vital in today’s corporate environment where specialisation is essential. The social network approach to corporate communication makes more sense to me than emails or phone calls which interrupt your thought process as well as being unable to transfer lines of code, 3D models or images. In terms of messaging one another versus emails, the benefit is in the nested response of comments or wall posts which exist all on one page instead of having individual replies or forwards from everyone you emailed which is less efficient and doesn’t show the logical thought progressions which could occur in comments.
In terms of a company the size of IBM, a social network site could be very handy since there are offices across the globe. A networking site could connect these offices thus bringing even more people and skills into the scope which is what Karen Hober, a CMS Analyst of the Burton Group, was referring to when she said:
"We think that's a pretty powerful concept--you've just gotten 10 experts together, that may not have known each other, to collaborate on a business problem. That's a powerful tool."[3]
Thanks to the internet, we live in the age of the global community and outsourcing, thus having social networks connecting team members, it is no longer mandatory for development teams to work in the same office, although from experience it is still easier to develop ideas.
In terms of group A and our collaboration, at least five of us, Matt, Derek, Sam, Graham and myself seem to be primarily communicating through synchronous messaging using primarily MSN Messenger and occasionally Gmail Chat which is much better than our original dialogue via partially anonymous emails due to some people using their student email account. As of this week our team is now using BaseCamp which is an online collaboration suite which allows for tasks to be handed out as well as task scheduling so that each member of the team knows roughly what over people have done and what’s still left to do!
Other Links
[1] Wikipedia - Social Network Service Accessed 1/4/08
[2] IBM Warms to Social Networking Accessed 1/4/08
[3] Ibid
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