Once upon a time the architecture of the corporate messaging system included the water cooler, the copy room, the break room, the bathroom, the quick walk down the hallway and the cafeteria.
Within the framework of business intranets new messaging sytems have evolved, from email to bulletin boards to the latest branch of messaging evolution the executive or administrative web log or blog, giving us real time messaging from on high . . and sometimes from the hip.
Electronic media has always been social, i.e., people created “it”, people interacted with “it” – the media that has forever mostly been comprised of text. As the costs of storage, processing and transmission (hard drives, CPUs and bandwidth) have dropped the social element of media – essentially sharing stuff – has expaned to include audio files (think “Napster), static images (Flickr, photo sharing sites/service) and video a la YouTube.
So it is inevitable that, as similar services were integrated into intranets, people would now think of and discuss intranets in terms of “the social intranet”, giving rise to new services, new consultants, and new issues.
With the emergence of the social intranet will people reveal their inner self as they once did , and many still do, in the copy room, the break room, over the partition walls, . . . or as they huddle at the water cooler?
Do companies want such socializing “on the intranet”?
The questions that must be addressed: “What do we really want to know and when do we want to know it?”
The social intranet opens up new possibilities of effective real time communication and new issues.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }