It’s been a challenging week at the office. You know what they say about opinions and everyone having one? This is a reality that we cannot escape, but it continues to be a challenge when the occasional client gives our team virtually no say in how a project takes shape. It’s like watching a hurricane gaining on you day by day, when a project takes conceptual wrong turn after wrong turn, and ultimately you know that it cannot succeed as a result.

A project manager brought up an interesting analogy today. It’s like hiring a financial advisor, and then telling him or her exactly what stocks to buy. Isn’t that what Etrade is for? Why on earth would you hire a consulting firm with years of experience in a very specific field, and proceed to dictate every detail of how they should plan, design and develop a project? I don’t know the answer to this, but I can say that when someone says that they trust our creative judgment and actually seek our input as a team, it’s like angels calling down from the heavens, light shines through the clouds, and my heart skips a beat. Yay for teamwork! (more…)

I have recently noticed a new trend in social network development that is facilitating social connections in a simple, but more focused way. Group-centric networks have taken the broad “everything and everyone” concept of Facebook and Twitter and whittled it down to a specific niche and are not only offering, but fully focusing on group creation and membership. I think this speaks to the reality that you can only post general updates into a status update space for so long. At some point, it does get boring and where do we go next? Well, it would make sense to find a way to communicate with other people who share specific interests, with whom more in-depth conversations can be had.

Here are a handful of social networks that are engaging their communities with unique, interactive groups.

www.yourgroups.com

YourGroups is an original social network allowing members to create one or more private groups. The site structure and group privacy ensures that your group experience will give you the privacy that Facebook lacks. Whether its your closest friends, family, work group, sports team or school connections, yourgroups provides a private place to support those day to day communications. Here are some of the features it offers:

• Immediately contacting all or a part of your group via push messaging
• Sending a location and time for the group to meetup via push messaging
• Setting up future events for the group to attend
• Check-in to events once you arrive and see who has checked-in
• Posting a message for your group to see
• Sharing pictures relevant just to the members of the group
• Using your phones GPS to set destinations to meet

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