Wednesday, August 15, 2007

The Internet is a Time Machine

It's 3:30 pm I have just received an email from a colleague. I decide to see if he is online to chat about the email, he is on my Instant Messenger list and he's online.
It's 10:30pm yesterday and my friend is sitting on his sofa sipping some wine and answering emails. He receives a 'ping' on Instant Messenger from me.
This world has got so small in the last few years.
Think back 10 years, yes you could communicate with people all over the world with ICQ and email but somehow the ubiquitous nature of of IM and email have really changed the landscape in the last 5 years and it seems that the social networking websites that have become all the rage in the last couple of years are merely fueling this change.
So what does this mean? (apart from a good title for my blog post)
I expect it means we are moving closer to a global community. I hope it means we are slowly breaking down the physical boundaries that define countries and cultures.
While I like to see the upside of this mass communication and constant connectivity, there are some challenges that it creates, such as my 3am online meetings :)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The paradigm which is emerging (I Believe) is that user driven development is now attaching to the web. When you look at web technologies such as Sharepoint and Infopath, boldy empowering users to implement content from their browser consoles...

Test driven development in this environment? Man we have end users putting what they want where they want it in an internet based client... if they get what they want the app survives... if not it is discarded...

Mind you, the value comes in the dealing with the consequences... the what comes after... the work flow and data validation...

Neil.