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There has been a lot of talk recently about the social networking approach to collaboration, mostly under "enterprise 2.0" discussions. There are many collaboration software where collaboration is centered around facebook style profiles, and activity streams (as opposed to traditional collaboration and intranet software, where everything is centered around "group workspaces". There is even talk of microblogging, the latest hot social technology, having the ability to serve as a collaboration platform. I came across a very insightful article from Patty Ankam of theappgapp.com. She draws a critical distinction between a collaborative and a social network:- It boils down to whether the emphasis in the network is to make connections to share experiences, contacts, ideas; or to collaborate, engaging in activities to produce something. It’s not an either/or, of course. Web 2.0 has made us aware of the vitality of that comes from socially-generated content — comment streams on blogs, activity streams in microblogging, and so on — which can be precursors of collaborative activity.
Traditional collaboration tools, like a document manager help participants get together and produce a substantial amount of information in documents. Even business email which has traditionally wrongly been used as a collaboration tool, goes to some extent in helping produce information. The information produced in social networks on the other hand, is never voluminous, and can be categorized as shared ideas, concepts or information. Think of yourself on FaceBook, you are either sharing videos or articles, posting status messages, or making comments. The context is not ideally suited for producing collaborative content. Social tools can provide a very important precursor to collaboration, a place where people can brainstorm, connect to the right person, but when it comes to actually getting together to produce something, traditional collaboration tools are ideal.
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