<braindump> I like the idea of Action Streams. Here Adrian Chan posits a connectedness between social apps:
Action streams would not only share status/activity update meta-data but also permit updates to function as actions. For example, an invitation update posted in twitter could be accepted in Buzz. The vision for action streams thus involves a distributed and decentralized ecosystem of coupled action posts, rendered by third party stream clients and within participating social networks.
Wouldn’t it be good if we saw this in the enterprise too? Vendors like Jive and Newsgator are already adding social layers onto SharePoint. Why doesn’t this go across the board? If I was a CIO worth his or her salt I’d want a fluid social architecture where Salesforce Chatter could synch up with EMC’s offerings (Documentum) and SharePoint. What’s more I’d want it to cross beyond the enterprise, joining up lines of business and different businesses.
This is the joy of e-mail, a simple mail transport protocol. Do we have anything like this at present? Will Chatter chatter withYammer and allow tweets into Twitter?
If not, or until then, we’re not going to really see the “distributed and decentralized ecosystem” inside and across, flowing over the firewall that the more nimble enterprises will discover as a means to competitive and collaborational advantage. The way forward without could see more monolithic structures, ones that will not be able to transform and evolve to the sorts of changes these very technologies are unleashing.
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