Facebook as collaboration on the cheap?

by Tris Hussey on June 30th, 2007

With all the new social media tools out there, you might wonder if I could use stuff like Ning or even Facebook for business. Well I guess if Twitter could be for business…, Chris Brogan thinks Facebook might just be the ticket…

Chris Brogan: What if you had a completely turnkey solution for managing multi-threaded interactions with teams? What if this application handled scheduling, status updates, RSS feeds from collaborative blogs, group messaging, 1-to-1 messaging, photo and screen capture sharing, and more? What if it permitted secure group communication for people inside and outside of your company? And what if you didn’t have to convince your IT department to install it?
Sounds powerful, right? Sounds useful.
Facebook Does All This Source: An Unlikely FREE Collaboration Management App - lifehack.org

I’m not so sure. Okay I think I might have some bias here since Facebook was designed for lighter topics, but link the newcomer Pownce, maybe having your social activities and your business activities in the same site might be helpful, maybe more efficient. I made that point when writing about Pownce on my own blog last night, but as I reflect on it what if you have business people who you add to your network of friends on Facebook (because you’d have to to collaborate) and they start seeing a side of you that you’d rather them not see.

It becomes, perhaps, a question of boundaries. Not really if Facebook can be a collaboration tool, I’m sure it could, it’s a question of whether it should be used as one.

What do you think? Facebook for collaboration? Twitter for business? Pownce, really cool only because Kevin Rose is involved?

Should there be business versions of these tools? You tell me.

Technorati Tags: collaboration technology, web-based collaboration, Facebook, Ning, Pownce

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