Current Article

Social Computer?

By Mark on Apr 11, 2008 in Social Media

It’s funny how fast technology moves. In the 1990s email was the avant-garde way of communication. It didn’t take long for the the volume of email we receive to become overwhelming. Now there are new technologies replacing email.

A few years ago I had a conversation between a coworker and myself where he relayed a story from his 13-year old daughter. He told her he spent a lot of time working in email she said, “Dad that’s so old school, you should be texting.”

Text messaging has become the electronic communication technology du jour. It’s short and to the point but it’s typically used for point-to-point communication.

Now the SMS network that carries our text messages has even been mashed up with the web via Twitter. Sam Lawrence suggests that maybe what’s next is a two way social computer that combines short messages and questions to your company or other groups.

The two-way social computer

There are two hard drives in the two-way social computer. (1) Your social network, and (2) your company. You might only have one box for both. Type your question, answer or complaint and you get response from both hard drives. I see this happening already in the big Twitter packs of employees banding together around the corporate provisioned software in order to take part in the flow.

There are times I may want to put 140 characters in the box and expose it to only one hard drive or the other. Either way, I�d get different but equally powerful benefits.

I am not sure if that’s the next evolution but it’s an interesting thought.