Have it my way
Social Networking Software: Have it Your Way
The greatest challenge for developers of Social Network Enablement software will be to allow each of us to portray our knowledge and our network(s) any way we want to represent them.
Dave Pollard has clearly been thinking about this for a while. It is an excellent description of how customization should work. Each of us like their personal information (contacts in this case) displayed in a certain way, whether that is a simple list of names or the more fanciful version Dave presents:
The point is that we should be able to do this - and not just with contact information, but our entire information space. I really like PersonalBrain for letting me do some fun things with laying out my files and thoughts and weblinks. But it doesn't integrate with my personal information management tool (Outlook) very well.
Maybe this is asking too much, to expect technology to accommodate personal styles of thinking, communicating, and organizing. I think we can and should ask no less. The technology is there to serve us, damn it. And imagine what the 'translation' software could teach us about how we communicate and how we learn, and about the 'signal loss' in both and how it could be reduced!
Agree mostly. The factor that would drive the greatest leap for the applied force (what I call "torque"), is if Personal Brains can be cognitively mapped against each other. IMHO, that would enable a few things, if you had a meta map that indicated "connections" (lines linking people who have semantic equivalence...the same kind of thoughts expressed in the same kinds of words), indicated "parallel thinking" (lines linking people who have the same kind of cognitive map, but use different terms/words/ expressions to verbalise them, and indicated "likely failures" (lines linking people whose cognitive maps are very different).
If you mapped that, you could:
1) Most effectively build SWAT teams for *small* projects that should move quickly. Time spent aligning semantics would melt mostly away and other "overhead" functions would diminish. Consensus, or close to it, would be most easily achievable.
2) Choose in a smarter way Big Brothers/Sisters for new employees to see they are enculturated effectively.
3) Most effectively organize facilties and build teams for big critical projects by making sure that each of the indispensable members has a bridge (cognitive) to all the other indispensible ones.
It would have many other applications as well, methinks.