I observed in my April newsletter that we may be approaching an inflection point: the next generation of workers may not be as eager as their predecessors to “Live in their Email” – they may well choose to live in Facebook, or some equivalent, instead. Some of the younger generation already forgo using email today: they want to talk to their social circle, and doing so in Facebook, where they do indeed live, comes naturally.

Whether this will also happen (at least in part) in the workplace is still unknown, but it’s worth considering – is being considered, I’ve seen, by the more forward-thinking in management circles. If you haven’t thought about it, you should too. Of course this doesn’t necessarily mean corporate employees will use Facebook itself; they may use equivalent intra- or inter-company social networking tools like Lotus Connections.

Until then, Facebook is expanding its scope in other ways, bent as it seems to be on attaining digital world domination. Of relevance to this blog (and no doubt many others): when I started blogging in 2006, comments to my posts would invariably appear on my blog. Today most of them actually show up on Facebook, as comments on my status updates that inform my friends about new posts on either of my blogs. This is an interesting change: it means that the more permanent record – the blog itself – has less interactive discussion, but it also means that my social circle – and those of my commenters – are more closely in the loop. And since I have many more unique blog readers than friends on Facebook, it also indicates that friends are far more likely to engage in commentary on one’s thoughts.

We’ve come a long way since the days when journalists wrote articles in print media, and the rest of us could at most snail mail a letter to the editor about them…