Social Networks: Remember Them?

It's difficult, during these dark days, to think about hyped-up technology like social networking.

You remember that, right? Facebook. MySpace. LinkedIn. Blogger John Sviokla thinks that there's a sleeping giant in the social networking space: Outlook. "In your email is a latent network of most of the people you know, and how often you talk with them," he writes, noting that a third-party company has built an application that looks at who's cc'd on emails and builds a network out of that. "It would be easy for Microsoft to simply ask your permission to contact the people in your Outlook contact database and ask them if they were willing to join your Microsoft social network."

That would make the "Outlook Social Network" maybe something more integrated than LinkedIn (which Sviokla has praised before) but less noisy than Facebook et al.

Back to the financial crisis -- where else? Bill Taylor is working through the stages of grief and has landed in deep cynicism. And that was before news broke that the FBI is investigating many of the financial firms at the heart of the crisis. Tammy Erickson believes that managers and leaders must fight the instinct to retreat in "nerve-wracking" times.

Finally today, for some perspective on our relative despondency about the state of things, Scott Berkun surfaced a story from India, where a CEO was murdered by a mob of sacked workers.

The head of India's Ministry of Labour and Employment did not criticize the murder, but was reported to say: "Workers should be dealt with compassion ... Workers should not be pushed so hard that they resort to whatever happened"

What's more, the reader comments on the original news story tell you everything you need to know about the global zeitgeist right now. A shocking number of the 81 comments posted so far appear to take the side of the workers.

I'm with Taylor. Sometimes, deep cynicism seems like the only appropriate response.

By Scott Berinato  |  September 25, 2008; 10:00 AM ET
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