Work in Groups

摘要

Working in groups with free online tools has become an American passion. In his great 19th-century, two-volume work Democracy in America, Alexis deTocqueville estimated that there were more independent associations in America than there were individuals. With the late-20th-century phenomenon of Bowling Alone (as described in Robert Putnam's book), we grew more isolated as couch potatoes and screen-agers, but with the exponential growth in social networking services and groupware tools we seem to be getting together again. If deTocqueville's estimate is not true today, it is likely to be soon. Social networking websites such as MySpace and Facebook have hundreds of millions of users, with half a million new registrations a day. I found it hard to get reliable estimates of collaborative groupware tools and the number of groups using them. Some of the newest ones are not designed primarily for social networking, but for working together online and sharing resources over the web, which has been the main use for Lotus Notes for 2 decades. Notes has 135 million users, according to IBM.