Writing in his blog, Benedict Evans highlights the new wave of startups focused on personal productivity, “dozens of companies that remix some combination of lists, tables, charts, tasks, notes, light-weight databases, forms, and some kind of collaboration, chat or information-sharing.”
The cycle of bundling and unbundling functionality isn’t new:
There’s an old joke that every Unix function became an internet company - now every Craigslist section, or LinkedIn category, or Excel template, becomes a company as well. Depending on the problem, that might be a new collaboration canvas, or a new networked app, or a new network or marketplace, and you might switch from one form to the other. Github is a developer tool that also became a network - it became LinkedIn for developers.
What is new is the social nature of the experience. Old-school computing was lonely: the user interacted with his/her computer alone. Even if the system included communications software, such as email, interactions with other people were limited to that software alone. Today, we expect web-based applications to be collaborative by default.
We experience software differently when we assume other people will be sharing the place with us. As I’ve written before, we may ultimately discover that the purpose of social media was to teach us how to collaborate with people in information environments.