Creating Collective Intelligence

Several years ago, Google ran a study to determine what made teams effective, and later published the results, including sharing a summary in a New York Times article. While one might think that an effective team depends on having the most capable individuals, Google’s researchers discovered that the members of the team mattered far less […]

Defending Twitter and Facebook status updates

Over the holidays, I got in a conversation about various social technologies like Twitter and Facebook, and found myself defending them as useful (which is interesting because six months previously, I said I “dislike the minimal information content transmitted via Facebook status messages or Twitter messages”). Other people couldn’t understand the point of posting one […]

Why social software

Why does anybody use social software? I talked about some possible uses in my last post about affordances, but there’s more going on. Grant McCracken wrote a great post about how social networks work where he describes the concept of “phatic communication”, which he describes as “communication with little hard, informational content, but lots of […]