Who's Been Touching My Tools?

I keep coming back to this interesting idea about people swarming in different areas of a software application -- and how developers will innovate around that activity. It was from the piece on Groove. Listen to what Ray Ozzie is saying -- I think it might be fascinating when applied to a number of applications.

I see the swarming around tools a bit like the women swarming around tables at Filene's Basement. There's something about someone else picking up the fuscia blouse and WANTING IT that gives it value. Ever seen how women shop and if one is gazing longingly at a garment, sudden every other woman wants it. I have to remember to ask Ray if he's been hanging out at Filenes.

"If you found a tool within a space, that was very important to you and [if you] really wanted to be notified when something happened, you could optionally set a mode on that tool to send a notification when a change is made.

We found that started to cause some swarming around those tools. When somebody made a change within a tool within a space, you'd suddenly find a bunch of other people coming to that space immediately. In Version 3 we added features that suddenly make swarming pervasive. It's just so cool. There's a new automatic mode that all tools in all spaces are in by default. It watches?do you pick up this tool a lot, do you really care about what is going on in this dialogue?and notifies you more proactively for the things you care about and doesn't notify you for the things you don't seem to care about."

"Then we added taskbar and audio alerts that let you know when data has changed in a space [and] audio that lets you know when people enter a space to look at stuff that you might care about. The Launchpad lets you see visually who is in a space, the number of people in a space."

Seriously, in terms of a wide range of software -- like many of the social software tribal apps -- Friendster, LINKEDIN, etc -- it might be very cool to know what parts of the application are getting heavy use? If everyone on Match.com is doing a certain survey, wouldn't you like to know that? Wouldn't that make the value of that applet increase?

In a way, isn't that what blogging does -- it says "this is hot, this is interesting, everybody's reading about it now, everybody cool is writing about it now." And we swarm over certain ideas.