How the cloud makes social apps better, faster.

Alex Williams at ReadWriteCloud just wrote an interesting post about social media and business, based on a new IDC survey stating that “57% of U.S. workers use social media for business purposes at least once per week”. According to the survey “While marketers are the earliest and largest adopters of social media, these tools are now gaining deeper penetration into the enterprise with use by executive managers and IT.”

What Williams adds is that it is not just social computing: “if social computing represents the new business process then cloud computing is the delivery mechanism.” That’s a nice point - the two have developed in step. The cloud is group-friendly. It is much easier to maintain participation in a group when backing up or transferring data across hardware is not an issue, and sharing is helped hugely by platform independence. A newer phenomenon, being able to use whichever device is at hand including smartphones and netbooks, makes communication much more fluid, too.

However, another factor may be even more important in the development of social apps: the cloud makes it easier for users to switch, combine, and experiment. A few favourites apps of mine are Stixy, a kind of online cork board, Doodle, great for planning meetings and get-togethers, and Slideshare, for uploading and sharing presentations. But there are hundreds (or more) of useful cloud-based apps that can be used alongside the major application suites and even mashed together.

The result is a high rate of evolution of social apps, with winners offering the most useful features and the most intuitive interface. Application suites then have an incentive to get into the cloud, so they are in the same ecosystem and co-evolve.  These phenomena mean that the overriding limitation for users is not the platform, and not even what applications are available, but simply how clear they are about their group’s aims, processes, and how well they can select the features that fit them.