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This is an important development in social networking that would allow collaboration between people living in very remote areas with limited Internet access.

I guess Wave didn't die after all :) I hope the new features in Google Apps take people (the ones I work with at least) away from email as their primary project management and collaboration tool. It's worth a shot.

My new use of social media is to create new things and to find others creating in similar ways. I want to know who is using the tools to build real communities, support causes, heal hurt, collaborate to make something bigger than what each of us can build alone.

Facebook is opening up their server technology used in their data centers. Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said he hoped the unusual technology-sharing program, which Facebook is calling the "Open Compute Project" would encourage industry-wide collaboration around best practices for data-center and server technology. "By sharing this, we will make it more efficient for this ecosystem to grow," he said.

Open systems encourage community collaboration and can produce incredible results quickly, growing and extending systems beyond the imagination of the initial designers. I think that's is what the church has recognized. Hacking is just a term for extending closed or limited systems.

The Organic Farmer radio shows in Kenya use mobile and radio technology as a platform for collaboration and sharing farming information in local communities. "The Organic Farmer shows the value of using SMS and radio together. While text messaging offers a method of interaction with listeners, John says, "We can't rely on SMS alone, since we can't send a whole paragraph, only the basic information." Radio provides a platform to explore topics in depth, but John suggests, "Radio is not a stand-alone medium - radio must be supported by other tools. SMS allows us to do that.""

Tip on using social media for deeper collaboration in the workplace.

When Toronto law firm Hicks Morley started its own internal social network in 2008, it was mainly to relieve lawyers of email overload so they could find important information more efficiently. But the firm found that by adopting several tools that mimic Facebook, Wikipedia and Twitter within the confines of a corporate firewall, collaboration between employees increased dramatically, and there was a marked increase in employee productivity.

Need to use Mind Mapping software but don't have an extra $400 laying around for MindJet? Here's an alternative, there's a free version which you may outgrow quickly, but the paid versions are reasonably priced.