The best boss I ever had—Ed Hahn, who directed Organization Development at Mattel—made it clear: You’re only work colleagues until you get to know each other. After that, you’re friends, acquaintances, or enemies. Work, Ed said, is social.

via Facebook at work isn’t an either/or proposition

Email overload

In this post, Shel Holtz talks about how Facebook is becoming a more responsive form of communication than email. Too often, important messages get lost in your email (sometimes on purpose). I have emails in my inbox which have been there for months just waiting for me to action them one day. I’ve even taken the little red flag off some because I know I’m not ever going to get to them.

Email has been around now for decades. It’s a staple of our information diet and we’ve learnt how to deal with it. We have even developed specific behaviours around email, mainly because there is just so much of it to deal with.

Shel describes a distinct difference with social networks. The difference being that there is a strong desire to respond when a friend contacts you via Facebook, Twitter or other “social” tools.

• Is this just because social networks are still a new phenomenon?
• Is it because the “status update mountain” is still a molehill, unlike the “email mountain” becoming Everest?
• Or is there perhaps something else at play here?

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I’ve been playing with Google Wave for a couple of weeks now and am very impressed with the engineering feat they’ve delivered on. It is quite a rich application on a very extensible platform which will be interesting to watch grow. There are however some things I feel that need to happen before this can become truly mainstream.

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This reuters article about Facebook and YouTube at work making employees more productive has been doing the rounds lately. After reading the article, various blog posts, being in a “feedback” style meeting yesterday and then listening to a This Week In Tech episode that mentioned it (albeit only briefly towards the end), a number of threads began falling into place for me.

For me, this issue is more about the duality between your work and non-work self rather than what technologies you’re allowed to use at work. Let’s explore this using two examples …

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In an attempt to get this site fired up again, I thought I’d post something about this twitter stuff I’ve started using. As usual, it’s been around for a while now but I’ve just gotten onto the bandwagon.

Twitter is kind of a micro-blog. Whilst blog posts tend to be a past description of events and somewhat wordy, a twitter is much more temporal, to the point and immediate. I’ve only got a few “followers” so far but am following 14 others. Haven’t yet had that light bulb moment, so am still unsure on how this will eventually be useful for me.

I have discovered that it’s becoming difficult to keep all my bits and pieces up to date. Between twitter, facebook and this blog, it quickly became overwhelming. So, with a few plugins and rss magic, here’s where I’m at now …

Twitterific

This is the desktop (Mac / Windows) tool I use to keep up to date with other people’s twits and to submit my own into the ether. It saves me from having to go to the twitter website to keep up to date.

Facebook – TwitterSync

This is the facebook app I use to automagically turn my twitter updates into facebook status updates.

Wordpress – Twitter Updater

This wordpress plugin automagically sends a twitter message whenever I make a new blog post. TwitterSync from facebook picks it up and then everything knows about my new profound posting.

I’ve wanted to do something like this for 11 years now. I could have waited until after the election but I just couldn’t help myself …

And then this. Ahhhh, relief at last!

On the timecapsule theme from earlier, Yahoo! have released their own electronic time capsule.

For 30 days, from October 10 until November 8, Yahoo! users worldwide can contribute photos, writings, videos, audio – even drawings – to this electronic anthropology project. This is the first time that digital data will be gathered and preserved for historical purposes.

Whilst not really a capsule which will be unveiled at a future date, the idea is somewhat interesting. It would be even more interesting if it were to be sealed and re-opened in say 100 years. Infact, the description makes it sound more like a piece of art than of history or anthropology.

The interface itself is also quite “artistic”. The viewer can roll the sphere around and randomly hit one of the panels. This panel represents a user/profile in the capsule. Whilst the site is built mostly in Macromedia/Adobe Flash, it does have some nice search and tagging facilities.
Finally, I would much rather submit some images to the archive, knowing that they would be sealed and unseen for some time to come. This for me is much more interesting. It also gives the future generation a point in time to reflect back on what was.

I’ll give the whole idea a little more exploration and perhaps submit a few things myself too.