It’s the 21st century and the workplace has changed.

Telecommuting, teleworking, virtual teams and a host of other “idioms” have become mainstream terms for large, medium and even small business management.

Many of us who work virtually tend to limit our connections to voice, email, video conference, web forums and web meetings. For the baby boomer generation, these are the technologies we know best, what we’re comfortable with, and what works for us.

But, for the younger workers, particularly the Gen-Y populace, virtual teams are moving beyond mere video conferencing into an era of “social networking“.

Per Wikipedia,

A social network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, idea, financial exchange, friends, kinship, dislike, conflict, trade, web links, sexual relations, disease transmission (epidemiology), or airline routes. The resulting structures are often very complex.

The best known virtual communities (also known as e-communities or online communities) are MySpace and Facebook. How they are now used in the business environment is the subject of several recent articles

Business finds a place on MySpace

Why Social Networking Can Mean Serious Business for Your Virtual Teams

with surely more to come.

Stay tuned.

search for : Telecommuting, virtual teams