I don’t mean to boast, well, not a lot, but I got my Google Wave account today.

I’ve only had a short play with it so far, so it might be remiss of me to say this, but it seems like a lot of hype for a worthwhile business tool that integrates everything we were doing already into a nice, neat business application.  Maybe I’ll see greater value in the future, but this is how it looks at the moment.  That’s not a bad thing, by the way.  After all, it should eventually make collaboration easier.

While playing with Wave, the following Tweet came in: “LinkedIn is the new Facebook; FB is the new MySpace; MySpace is the new GeoCities; @ GeoCities is dead”.

It got me thinking.   LinkedIn, the business social networking platform,  is indeed the new tool of business. But the communities around our country are not moving that way. They like facebook for the social features, the informal networking and, on occasion, the way it blurs the two.  Additionally, these same communities are using facebook and twitter to communicate and, occasionally, organise.  But, if they do organise, they are still taking their notes using pen and paper and have little use for Google Apps, let alone Google Wave.  When they talk, they don’t use visual aids, so SlideShare does little for them.  They don’t produce podcasts for other people, so I doubt thei’ll be using AudioBoo anytime soon.

“Ah, but you’ve missed the point”, one of you shouts, “Google Wave is a business tool”. Right you are. So are so many of these new social media applications.

Now, don’t get me wrong here, I’m not suggesting that social media tools for business are a bad thing. The opposite in fact. But I come from the informal education sector, a sector which, I have often argued, is tearing at the seams as it is driven towards a learning for work agenda.

Again, don’t get me wrong. Getting people skilled and into work is and will remain a major community development agenda. It should be on the radar of any informal learning tutor or community worker.   But, at the same time, there is far more to informal adult learning.  Indeed, if communities are empowered to make their own choices, to strengthen themselves, to skill themselves, many of them will find work anyhow, without needing a separate agenda.

The point was made during a debate on my facebook pages, around the subject of whether Bookcrossing would be a good tool for communities (I’ve reproduced that debate at the bottom of this post).  Bookcrossing is an activity in which books that have been read are left in public locations and logged on the net.  People can then pick up these books, log into the net and log that they have them, read them and then pass them on in the same way.

There’s no regulation to this.  Sometimes, people don’t pass them on.  Sometimes, people don’t log them on the net.  But that doesn’t matter.  On the whole it works well.  A community that chose to engage with this (there’s a fair bit in the debate about whether they choose to engage or not) could benefit as individuals if they got more access to a wider range of books as a result.  In learning how to bookcross, they could build up their digital and general literacy skills, learn a bit about geography and participate as a community.  There would be no need for them to use these skills for work.  They would have learned these skills for them, for a community purpose.

However, back to the world of learning and such is the back to work drive that the fun, social and developmental courses of informal learning have been, arguably, stifled.

I’m wondering if the same is true of social technology. So busy is the agenda over how money can be made, how workplace efficiencies can be developed that we’ve lost sight of the fact that social networks offer far more than a bit of help to business. They can network communities.

Here again is a sticking point.  I’m all for communities organising and I’m in little doubt that social networking is a catalyst for this.  However, a community can simply network and be empowered, they don’t need to be engaged with services to function.

As a result, if I can get some contributions as comments or emails, I’m going to a follow up blog post on ten social media tools normal people can use in their normal lives. I suspect GoogleApps and Slideshare won’t be on the list.

FACEBOOK debate:

Kevin Campbell-Wright Very sad: 1 in 20 homes has fewer than 10 books, & those with boys have fewer than those with girls” http://ping.fm/raRso

AR: I’m surprised it’s that good, actually – I would have thought 19/20 having >10 is quite positive?