Social media is a new name for an old technology field, brought up to date with a few recently arrived tools.
Its old monickers include Groupware, Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) and document management.
Yi-Tan's Fast Camp 4 Social Media offers a way to get savvy quickly on the elements of social media and the effects they are having on business, politics and society.
That said, it may be misleading to think of Social Media as a separate category of tools or as collaborative features we add to our everyday productivity applications. Perhaps a more productive approach is to think of collaborative capabilities as being built into our productivity tools at a very basic level, so that every window in every application is shareable and editable, if the author so chooses.
The Linkido project proposes such an architecture.
