Thoughts for the day...

So I learned a great deal about collaboration software in terms of what is happening and

what could happen. And here are some random thoughts.

I looked at facebook and some of the discussions around Facebook. Where I think this will change is how facebook can take itself on the road into deeper places. A mobile version perhaps with presence information that can share location. Businesses using Facebook (with person's permission) to view their tastes in coffee. I think either Starbucks or a similar company will start offering advertising on facebook with coupons for coffee, and in turn people will use Facebook in coffee shops.

The next logical step is for facebook to start selling digital downloads on behalf of other companies. This includes Music. A rumor about this already has started. So first music then e-books, makes sense, download an e-book to read while surfacing facebook, maybe even use your Sony Reader book to download the book. Next is movies, but of course Apple has cleverly designed a way to now download TV shows and movies on their iphone so you could literally (with hooking up to iTunes) download a movie to your

iphone or perhaps even watch a movie. It makes complete sense why Fox bought MySpace however in the context of MySpace, they are now limited to a market from entertainment from Fox and perhaps that is how it will go, that established Media Channels like TV will look to take advantage of new platforms to reach people. But imagine from a consumer's perspective and here is where Google is smart. People with a

Myspace account will want to communicate about media other than Fox. The question is, will Fox embrace this and learn from it? Google is smart because they are trying to stay away from a specific media platform other than the internet. It is better to let the people choose what they like in terms of entertainment. After all, of all the shows you watched, were all of them on 1 network, and what about cable?. So Google is better at understanding the future than those other companies, even though those companies will still learn how to make a significant amount of money from their own platform of entertainment.

It reminds me of show and tell. Most companies get up to the class and show what they have brought, telling you about their product and why you should use it. Google on the other hand differentiates itself by clearly first illustrating the show and tell of the people in the classroom. They understand that while some objects will be the center of attention, time changes everything and most people all don't like the same thing. And just as important they enjoy discussing why each of them like or enjoy certain objects. Now imagine thousands of classrooms but now within all of these students groups start to evolve and experiences are shared. This is the essence of life, communication, collaboration, and enjoyment where ideas are born and people understand more about the world and eventually themselves. This is something Google understand will never change no matter what type of favorite TV drama is playing on Wednesday night at 9pm.

Keeping with that thought...Google understands that the people in the class aren't really looking at person in front of the class because they want to, they are doing it because its an activity decided by the teacher. The students in the classroom will pay attention to what they are interested in and the best way to do that is to let them explore just like many of us do when we search on Google to find documents, groups of people, video, etc. The basic idea is that the future

I imagine what I just described in the last paragraph is an element of basic economic, behavioral and social theory. If not I am calling it Mike's theory :-)