I started a new Facebook group recently, and am finding the groups application a bit sluggish. When I went searching on Google for a way to upload a document to Facebook, I discovered a whole new set of collaborative tools.
Here's a few of the ones I found:
Scrib'd -- a free service that lets you upload and publish any document on the web, and also embed it in many different formats. To solve my problem with Facebook, for example, I would upload the document, then link to the document's permalink in Facebook. Problem solved. Read their FAQ here.
ThinkFree Docs -- they describe themselves as YouTube for Office documents. They have a Facebook application already set up, and are working on iPhone integration, according to the ThinkFree blog.
Adobe Share -- discussed on Tim O'Reilly's blog. Adobe Share will be a place to upload or download any digital object, and share it with either a specific group, or the whole digital world. Mr. O'Reilly also referenced Adobe's recently acquired Buzzword, which is an online word processor that also allows collaboration.
It turns out that I'm not the only one who wants better group functionality on Facebook. Some companies are starting to use this platform for business purposes. Serena Software in California reports that they are launching Facebook Fridays (part of their recruiting and profiling strategy), and also launching an employees-only Facebook group. Reported in Businessweek, second BW story here.
My take
Web 2.0 is really about working together online, not just putting up information. It's not just two-way traffic, it's more like multi-dimensional traffic. It's the brain xynapse model on a computer.
Social networks may be a starting point, but they are going to morph into work networks as well. This means -- once again -- that weensie enterprises will have access to similar capabilities as huge enterprises. Such as collaboration tools.
I spent a lot of money on a collaboration tool for the client part of my web-site a few years ago. It was only a qualified success. I will soon be able to supercede it's capabilities for free, or very close to free.
And this development of document sharing online is also another major democratization to publishing, just as web sites initially were, and blogs now are.
I recently conducted a study [on my own dime, or I couldn't tell you this] on teens and technology. Canadian teens are fully expecting to be amazed and delighted by the new technologies that come their way. And I'm 100% with them on that. It's just really cool. Our challenge as business people is [a] staying on top of this stuff and [b] figuring out how to leverage it. Equally cool, but somewhat more difficult.
What's your take?
