When an employee is performing well on a project or is producing quality code, her stock rises. Whereas poor performers have their stock plummet.

I can see how Facebook, and other enterprise social software platforms, could fufill this idea. Fellow employees would use the social software to “buy” or “sell” into their peers.

The biggest critics of today’s social software environments are drawn from those who were expert at using the old versions.

What we are seeing is not evolution but revolution. The people are different. Their ages are different. Their level of access is different and more heterogeneous. The nature of the devices used is different. The ubiquity of the applications is different. The persistence of the connections and the data is different. The provision of ancillary and infrastructural tools is different.

Sure we have lessons to learn from the past. But sometimes these lessons can also constrain us from seeing the future. Or, in this particular case, the present.

Change is upon us now.

And the change will happen, whether or not IPOs happen, and whether or not the IPOs are successful. You seem to have a real hangup about Facebook being a feeding trough for banks and investors. I’m not sure why this is the case.

I was reminded, when I was reading this, of an organisation that I was involved with recently that had an obsession with meetings.

There were some that everyone must attend, others that were closed and people were excluded from – not malevolently, but because someone else had decided who would go and who wouldn’t.

Few had clear objectives (eg this meeting, or series of meetings, is for the purpose of …. ), and none had a means of scheduling items for discussion, or for bidding for time.

The agendas got longer and longer and items were discussed in matters arising *and* again in their own right on the agenda! Conversely, taking a draft discussion document to discuss with your colleagues to develop some kind of collaborative approach to an issue or a problem or a dilemma was likely to be lost in a welter of photocopied spreadsheets and lengthy discussions over trivial items that one or two people could have resolved elsewhere.

As I was reading your post, I wondered what would have happened if all these meetings had been made voluntary – open meetings that you could attend or not, as you wish/see fit/want to prioritise your time/attend to the politics of the organisation.

Each employee still carries the responsibility for ensuring they meet the specific requirements of their projects – spend, outputs etc – and the policies of the organisation, but are free to choose the routes that are most helpful to them.

I did introduce the idea of open meetings – short meetings, with a one item agenda – to which everyone was invited wherever they sat in the hierarchy. I was interested to see that these were taken up by other people – either for consulting and collaborating or for briefing and sharing specific information. They tended to be one offs, people coming together for the purpose, and relevant people (which became apparent through the meeting) continuing to work together beyond that.

I rarely took notes for that seemed to inhibit the process. People became either more concerned with the bureacracy, or abdicated from taking responsibility in the meeting because the notes would tell them later what they were to do.

Facebook provides an easy means for facilitating and examining some of this activity by eg setting an event and then viewing the popularity, that is, the people who say they will attend. Do we care about the numbers who actually attend? I guess that tells us something about whether we were able to sustain people’s interest and *attention*.

Or maybe it doesn’t matter, and we use the principles of open space meetings or unconferencing?

Let us consider the case of break room notice board. Will the cutting edge adapters post their ‘Caring and Sharing’ in the board. How long will it sustain?

How long it will take for the present Social Software to be reduced to the state of the good old break room notice board.

Are tools that important? Is hare(people) more fundamental? Will (better) tools amplify your luck? Will what amplifies the (adoption) head, amplify tail too? Where is the evidence in the context of Telephone, Telex, Fax, PC, bulletin board, compuserve, Usenet, email, mailing lists, forums, , twitter et al?

Are social software the ‘Banks’ that intermediate the People Information and making them more liquid? Will you trust your bank if its sustainability depends on a good IPO?

I’m tempted to add that I’d rather wait for tiddlywiki like social software to emerge. That is too simplistic, and does not reduce the complexity of what we are attempting to learn.