Repeat after me: social is good

Humans are inherently social. When we witness something tragic, dramatic, or something amusing – whether it’s a traffic accident, an amazing touchdown in a football game, or an entertainer’s joke, we tend to look around to see how others react. More to the point, we gather strength and knowledge from those around us. Thus, while email has been an amazing tool, it has hit its limits from a business standpoint. It’s too easy for people to shoot emails around in a “tag-you’re-it” fashion, basically moving the onus for action on to others. By contrast, when people are sitting face-to-face, they can frequently hammer out details, make decisions, and decide on actions that would otherwise require days (and dozens of emails).

Social media has this potential for business. Surveys show that, while businesses are wary of incorporating public social feeds into their organizations, they are starting to realize that they want to achieve that same kind of intimacy and collaboration within their own organizations and on a private basis.

That trend will inform application development going forward. Applications need to have social built in, not applied as an afterthought. Companies need this and end users are demanding it.

This is why we just launched our new community platform to better connect the people millions of end users of Powered by Progress applications. It is also why Progress is building social and community aspects into our Pacific platform; we want to enable people who build applications using the Pacific platform to embed the social features that are becoming a required element in every application.