It is the cause of that immune reaction which is interesting. Companies tend to create closed systems that minimise communication with the outside world. Social networking breaks down these barriers, admitting the outside world, a deeply unsettling experience so corporations automatically erect barriers and rationalisations, as your list shows.

Why then do they create closed systems? I put it down to our attention horizon. To manage complexity we shrink our attention horizon as far as possible. This tends to settle on corporate boundaries. Once that happens our energy and values become focussed on mintaining the internal workings of the corporation and the outside world, in particular the customer, becomes an unwelcome distraction.

Once the attention horizon has become formalised another phenomena comes into play. Information swamps develop around the corporate boundaries. These swamps delay, distort and even halt the flow of information into the company.

Now some brave soul asks the busy corporate executive to shift his attention boundary beyond its comfortable confines and even suggests that he wade through the information swamp!

Fat chance.

I need more subscriptions in my feed reader like I need a hole in my head, but Confused of Calcutta is way too good not to add it. (And he quotes my friend Lars, so that’s another plus.) My Google Alerts just caught up with the delightfully articula…

For the Generation M readers of this blog, here is Inzamam-ul-Haq’s hilarious dismissal in the first innings: Inzamam hit wicket

Mota aloo indeed!

thanks for the answer.

Wikis and boards are different at least in one essential thing, as Dom points out: conversations. Boards are designed to support multiple concurrent conversations in a persistent way. Wikis (such as wikipedia) need to enable board-alikes when they have to discuss something.

Of course you can discuss in blogs, or even on IM. But blog discussions are centered around the blog articles, and much less agile. IM makes an even bigger mess of handling large numbers of separate conversations, and does not leave easily accessible record (so is much harder to consult and reuse).

About my comment that wikis are generally project-oriented :-). As far as I’ve seen, more than 90% of them are devoted to documenting progress in a project or co-write a particular paper. Among the 10% that aren’t, very few indeed are healthy. Then there’s wikipedia, the apparent exception… which is indeed bent on a project: writing an encyclopedia.

Concerning WYSIWYG, easy user interfaces, et al… most modern boards are as easy to use as blogs, and far more than wikis (and email lists are the epitome of familiar use).

They are not (this may be a key difference) so easy to set up and get running; they sometimes need a technical component that most blogs do no longer need. And then… there’s the social component. You can set up a blog on your own. You can set up a wiki with three coworkers. But what’s the sense in a bulletin board unless you have several score people interested?

Food for thought :-). Best regards,

Miguel

Maybe we need a Short Bets site, where people put down things that will happen quickly.

If threading and subject/title/tag and related bulletin board facilities are important, then they will be added to the social software constructs we have today.

The market will do that. If the market perceives it is a good thing.

Democratised innovation, open standards and web infrastructure, when taken together, mean that the barriers to entry for adding functionality are lower. If people want it they will build it. Whatever it is.