We Need to Tear Down the Social Media Silos
by Bill Ives
There was an interesting post by David Chartier, The Future of Social Media: The Walls Come Crumbling Down. He focuses primarily on the consumer Web and writes, “But for the social web to evolve into its final stage and take flight, the walls that separate these services, their users and everything they create will have to come down.”
David then goes on to quote Leo Laporte, a broadcaster who runs the TWiT network. Leo calls the phenomenon “the social silo,” and he does not feel it can last much longer. “People are pouring all this content and value into individual sites,” says Laporte, “but they aren’t going to want to keep dealing with Facebook, and Twitter, and FriendFeed, and whatever is next.” I could not agree more.
David then offers Google Wave as one possible solution. He writes that any user-generated content placed into a Wave-based system will be accessible by anyone that has been granted permission. The philosophies of openness and accessibility are baked right in to the tool. If Wave becomes pervasive, then the web of the future might only a need single log-in. I will take his word on this until I can take the time to finish viewing the hour plus video on Google Wave highly recommended by Paula Thornton.
The same thing is happening inside the enterprise with many tools. Some search tools, like iQuest, can go across most, if not all, enterprise content and data systems. Many others, like SelectMinds, are providing integration between selected tools. These are both good initial steps and others are taking them. However, we need to tear down the application walls inside the enterprise, not simply build better ways to cross over them. This will require industry cooperation. I hope this can happen or enterprise 2.0 will have trouble realizing the full vision of transparency and collaboration.
