FT's new Podcast Player

The Financial Times Digital Business has its podcast since November 28. The first edition has a 'funny' commentary from Nicholas Carr on the contrast between formal business software applications and informal social networks like Facebook and MySpace. "It seems increasingly clear to me that the social networking phenomenon will, in some yet-to-be-determined form, invade corporations. If you scratch the surface of any business, you’ll find two very different organizations. There’s the formal organization - the one that can be represented by the boxes of an org chart. And then there’s the informal organization, the one shaped by the day-to-day interactions of employees – conversations in hallways or in airport lounges, exchanges of messages through email and voicemail, glances and whispers in meetings.The formal organization is important, if only because it tends to determine how much one gets paid. But it’s nowhere near as important as the informal organization. It’s the informal one that governs the real flow of information and influence in a company, that defines who’s in the loop and who’s not, what’s important and what can safely be ignored...That brings me to MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and the various other social networks that have become so popular on the Web. In stark contrast to corporate IT systems, social networks shape themselves to their users rather than forcing the users to adapt to preset specifications. Given their benefits, I think that social networks will inevitably be adapted to corporate use. Of course, that’s not going to be easy. And the implications for corporate politics will be, to say the least, interesting"