Social media for the Paranoid

So the Financial Times met Facebook this weekend with the headline;  ”Facebook becomes bigger hit than Google“.

One interesting point they made is that in September MySpace was bigger than Google, but that lead faded. Perhaps that should be the subject of this post, but the more interesting point (for now) was made by Lucy Kellaway – and she made it in the headline to her column; “Generation game plays out on Facebook”.

For those of you that were not watching British game shows in the late seventies “The Generation Game” on the venerable BBC involved two family members of different generations having to work together to compete against three other families to win a bunch of prizes that rolled off a conveyor belt, and as far as I can remember consisted mainly of cuddly toys and hair curlers. It also probably included flared jeans, Donny Osmond and “Saturday Night Fever” LPs – not to be confused with “Saturday Night Live”.

The seventies was the time of “Telephone Booth Stuffing” in case you wondered what else people did without social networks – basically an older version of adding people as (very) close friends.

Anyway I digress. What was funny (if anything besides the platform shoes) about the TV game show was the inability of people from the same family, but different generations, to understand each other sufficiently to even organize a phone call in a phone box.

This is the point Lucy makes in her normal, understated, style; “This isn’t a small thing: it’s a ginormous non-meeting of minds between two generations over what is not just a different way of communicating, but a different way of living”.

As she goes on to say that from her perspective (and from mine, if I am honest – after all we both drank far too much Pimms at the same University at roughly the same time, so it is not surprising we have similar social norms); “By contrast, the idea that communication becomes a random broadcast to 500 “friends” about what you were up to last night is perfectly incomprehensible.”

But seriously, in the same way that an older generation did not understand the impact of email (“what is wrong with writing a letter, or picking up the phone?” – the Lucy / David generation risks completely missing the impact that training an entire generation to share everything with their “friends” – at least when I shared a phone box with a friend or two I did not tell them with whom I spent the previous night. Each generation is having shorter conversations, more frequently, simultaneously with a wider and wider circle of “friends”.

If you are running a global software development project – perhaps this is the best news ever, as social media become the new collaborative platform?