Darkling Wood

Go forth and buy Starbucks, Hummers and other shiny objects

I just bought a new PC. Actually, it was an old PC - a refurbished Dell laptop. I spent $400 on a beat up brick, instead of, say, $1,900 on something shiny and new for a few reasons. One is that I'm a terrible maximizer and am still trying to decide which shiny and new machine I should get. Another is that I actually need two machines - one shiny and new, but also a stopgap machine for one of my team while her Lenovo goes back for repair. And the Dell is a perfect stopgap machine. But most important of all is this:

I'm scared because of the "The Economic Crisis"

Liberté, égalité, fraternité, ou la grève

I, like the rest of y'all, can't say for sure that the mega-bail-out is going to have the desired effect. But exactly what is the desired effect of this?

The Facebook Thing

I've discovered Facebook. Actually I already knew about it since my kids use it. But I'd always had the impression that it was simply a LinkedIn, but for, well, kids. However, someone at a local CEO group I attend was raving about it, so I decided to give it a try. I think I underestimated it. It seems to combine many of the good things I've already seen with blogging, IRC, yammer, twitter, video messages, and so on.

One particular dynamic I'm noticing with all these channels is - well, three things really:

1. My various contacts can be divided into groups, as they can be in "real life": business contacts, past acquaintances of various types, friends, close friends, very close friends, family, and so on
   
2. A group is, in effect, a set of people who are similar with respect to how relevant/interesting/appropriate they will find some snippet of information I want to share.
3. The groups overlap (e.g. someone can be a friend and business contact)

So, I guess I'd like some way to manage those Groups Of Common Relevance. It's not too hard within a company. Yammer and IRC allow threads of conversation. But social media seems to be growing to encompass entire lives - business and personal. The last thing I want is to think, "Hmm, I should post this information to FB, yammer personal, and Twitter; but not to LinkedIn, yammer work, or IRC".

Anyone got any thoughts on this? For example, is there a Facebook for corporations (like yammer is to Twitter)? And is it worth the bother? Or does "corporate-izing" something like Facebook break in the face of those multiply-overlapping groups?