Facebook Generation on Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration Technologies

I joined facebook a few days ago to check it out and to get an idea about the approach's relevance to enterprise applications. I need to use it some more before I reach any conclusions, but since I am at the Enterprise 2.0 Collaborative Technologies conference this week I decided to use the new facebook poll feature to see what the facebook crowd thinks about collaboration as they enter the workplace. The poll feature is limited (1 multiple choice question) but it provides direct access to the tens of millions of facebook users and you can choose from a couple of demographic options. Also, you can get the results very quickly - in my first poll I received 500 responses in about 9 hours!

I will blog about the results more later and will also include all the graphs, but in the meantime, everyone I mentioned the poll to at the conference has wanted the results, so here they are the basics:

Question: Which collaboration technologies will you use the most in your job in two years?

• SMS text messaging 6% (30)
• email will continue to dominate 66% (328)
• instant messaging 16% (53)
• facebook-like social networking tools for business 11% (53)
• blogs and/or wikis 2% (8)

Keep in mind that the 500 responses all came from the 25-34 age group who are presumably mostly in the workforce. I just started the same poll with the 18-24 age group and will provide those results for comparison later tonight. UPDATE: The combined poll results are now available.

Between the two age groups we will have some info direct from the generation that Don Tapscott, Andrew McAfee and others are making predictions about (we refer to some of this here). This is of course a very informal poll, but interesting nonetheless. I wish I had the results in time to provide Andrew and Tom Davenport for yesterday's debate!