- Why are conversation and collaboration tools so underused? Is my list of 7 reasons missing anything? Are any of the reasons predominant?
- Is the answer making the tools better? If so, how? If not, what is the answer?
- Given time, do you think people will eventually learn to use these tools, despite their shortcomings? Which tools, current or envisioned, will be the winners, the killer apps for online-enabled conversation and collaboration, and why?
- What one simple thing should we do/learn to most effectively enable people to become better conversationalists, and how would we do this?
- Most people are still unfamiliar with the tools in the middle and right columns.
- Many of these tools are unintuitive and hence not easy to learn to use.
- The way you have to use these tools is not the way most people converse and collaborate, i.e. they're awkward.
- Most people have poor listening, communication and collaboration skills, and these tools don't solve (and can exacerbate) this underlying problem of ineffective interpersonal skills.
- The training materials for these tools don't match the way most of us learn and discover (i.e. by doing, by watching others, and iteratively by trial and error).
- Often the people we most want to converse or collaborate with aren't online.
- Often we don't even know who the right people are to converse or collaborate with, so we need to go through a process of discovering who those people are first, which these tools cannot yet effectively help us with; once we've discovered who the right people are, we're likely already talking with them using the ubiquitous tools in the left column above.
From Dave Pollard's original blog post.Social Networking: Why are Conversation and Collaboration Tools so Underused?
