Reach together with symmetry and equality were the things that made the Internet such a radical social innovation.
The real genius of Napster was the way it made collaboration automatic. By default, a consumer of files was also a producer of files for the network.
The big challenge for many organizations is to do things in a much, much simpler and more responsive way. The sad truth is that it is easier for managers to grasp the threat of competition than the risk of simply becoming obsolete.
I believe that Napster gave us a glimpse of the future. The architecture it pioneered is going to be a viable model for the agile value constellations of the very near future. Client-server is not the only truth and Facebook is (just) a modern version of a Telco. Facebook is not the same as the Internet.
Last month, I blogged about the choice I gave my statistics students between using Diigo and Pinterest for the social bookmarking assignments in the course. I floated two possible reasons why most of my students selected Diigo over Pinterest:
Hypothesis 1: Students choosing Diigo over Pinterest selected the service that seemed more academic.
Hypothesis 2: Pinterest has the reputation for being a site mainly for women. Most of my engineering students are men, so they opted for the less gendered option, Diigo.
Hypotheses are all well and good, but I wanted some evidence, so I asked my students on their end-of-semester survey why they selected the platform they did. Of my 71 students, 45 responded to this question.