The interesting thing about this project was looking at how the different Social Networking tools were chosen as collaboration tools. My feelings on using Social Networking sites for collaboration are mixed. I do not think that the likes of Facebook or Twitter are meant for that time of use. Twitter is very much, "How I feel right now" in as few words as possible. With several different "tweets" going at the same time, is is difficult to have an online "chat".
Skype at least is linear as you can target a specific user for chats and they are chats as you can write as much as you want to get the message across, and is more similar to IM or IBM Sametime, which is an industry level chat tool.
Facebook, well, it is Facebook isn't it. it is more about who is talking to who and what they are saying. The chat function is fine but again, at what stage would you use it for collaboration in projects, and how serious would it be taken.
I think that these tools would be used out of context for collaboration work, and also, as it is not secure, you do not know who has access to these records.
I've seen Twitter used by technical writers for collaboration in technical know-how.
ReplyDeleteOne of them will encounter a helpful blog post about some obscure feature in FrameMaker, for instance, and tweet it. The tweet will be re-tweeted umpteen times, and in this way, technical writers who follow each other spread the word about said helpful blog post, thereby helping each other. I agree it's not the most intuitive form of collaborative tool though. It involves a fair amount of immersion and commitment to Twitter.