Today I saw an interesting article in the Economist about improving online collaboration by moving beyond email.  They mention alternatives like Google wave and Facebook.  I notice that they did NOT mention ways that online collaboration is becoming more like real world meetings, with video conferencing, etc.  Actually, the world is moving in the opposite direction, and making "real world" interactions more like online interactions.

I see the trend when I watch my teenage kids.  They spend a lot of time using Facebook to communicate with their friends, and they spend less time going to see friends then I spent when I was their age. That doesn't mean they do less socializing.  Far from it.  But, in a lot of circumstances, the online version is at least as satisfying.

This doesn't mean that their friendships are "virtual".  Their friends are very real.  I have always avoided using terms like "virtual teams" and "virtual collaboration" to describe working over the Internet.  "Virtual" means "not real", and these distributed teams are very real, and they collaborate in a very real way.

So what is different?  Mostly, it's multitasking and time shifting.  When you use IM / Facebook / Google Wave, and Assembla, you can have multiple conversations running, and come back to them at different times.  There is a place for single-focused, real-time attention.  But, that seems to be a very special place that people go to on special occasions.

These kids will be in the workplace very soon.  As noted in the Economist, their tools are already here, bringing changes.  I won't say that these changes are good or bad, but the trend is clear.  The work team of the future is not going to be like the teams of the past that got together in scheduled, single-task meetings.  And, we are not seeing a mass movement toward video-conferencing and other tools that make distributed teams feel like they are present in meetings.  The work team of the future is going to use online, multi-tasking, time-shifting tools.