Can the pace at which technology drives our connectedness and challenges our ability to keep up continue to increase? I fear it can but thanks to Identity Woman Kaliya Hamlin via a Facebook exchange at least I have a meme to describe the condition:
"social overwhelm"
What I didn't realize until Facebook friend Ron Liland pointed me to 8Hands is that a whole new tools genre called "social network aggregators" is emerging. Already in July Mashable.com listed 20 ways!! The 8Hands tour video provides a taste. Reflections from an early adopter who discontinued use remind us about smart adoption of new tools.
I've been paying attention to "attention" since hearing AttentionTrust.org co-founder Seth Goldstein speak but what I'd also missed is the emergence of APML, Attention Profile Markup Language and that Google had acquired Jaiku.
My searching around 8Hands, and "social network aggregators" also brought me to "Lifestreams". My reading included Ross Mayfield, Brian Solis and Steve Rubel but it was the title of Stowe Boyd's October 11 post:
"We Build Our Tools And They Shape Us:How Lifestreaming Is Shaping Web Culture"
that caught my attention. Stowe in sharing the abstract for his Web 2.0 Berlin presentation writes:
"What are the long-term impacts of this new medium on media, business, and society?"
Indeed.
In an earlier post regarding Facebook Stowe offered the following observations that I see businesses best heed:
"In the final analysis, Facebook and its cousins are inevitably going to be business tools, because business people are too smart to not adopt better technologies to help them get their work done. In a hyperconnected world, getting things done increasingly means harnessing the network, not just doing piecework.
Again, the companies that get wise to this fastest will be the first to benefit; and those that wait will lose." ~ Stowe Boyd
