Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do the same with our operating systems and applications (web or local)?  System administrators can already make profiles with a variety of configuration tools, but it’s not at all based on user behavior, it’s based on what the sysadmin thinks to plan for.

What if everyday computer users could share their favorite email setup, easily as they share a link? What if IT was social?

Last week I saw to glimpses into the future of what I’m just gonna call “Social IT.”  Sorry. New Word Alert. Social IT.

JOLICLOUD

First let;s take a look at Jolicloud. I haven’t used it yet, but the screenshot is pretty clear.  Your OS is social. I don’t mean it has a dashboard of view of other social apps. I mean information about the OS can be social.  Jolicloud’s “First look” preview showed an interesting screenshot where the user could see everything theirs friends installed, and even suggested that you could subscribe to info about any topic:

There was also a group feature which was not really screenshotted thoroughly, but one could envision subscribing to notifications about all apps relating to music or business intelligence when you don’t subscribe to a person who knows about that stuff.

FIREFOX PLUGIN COLLECTIONS

Next, let’s look at Mozilla’s Firefox Plugin Collections.

This does two things.  By installing a Collection, it saves you the hassle of downloading and installing each extension manually.  It also lets you browse by collector rather than plugin.  So if somebody had good taste about web developer tools, they might also be trustworthy about ad-blocking.  Firefox Collections is a great service, but the social part is a little under-designed for.  It was hard to just browse various users’ collections.  It also would be nice to have more cross-linking, like a list of everybody who likes or uses a certain collection. But the service just launched, and these shortcomings are just another way to perceive the huge potential.

UBUNTU PPA

Last I want to mention something that’s been here for a while.  It’s a little different from the services above in that the individual actually touches the software, rather than merely sharing their usage of it, but Ubuntu’s PPA is a great idea that lets individual contribute software that might otherwise be hidden from users.  It’s also meant to be used by advanced users (whereas I see the trend of Social IT to be something that all regular users will participate in.)

GUESS WHO’S NOT CRAZY

Before you think this vision of personal computing is just a crazy dream of a system administrator, there’s reason to believe “regular people” want to easily share infomation with their friends, family, and professional peers, saving them the hassle of manual tweaks and step-by-step instructions.

Earlier this week, I saw a provocative tweet from @turoczy, wishing he could share Tweetdeck setups more easily.

I see this configuration sharing happening not just with local apps, but even hosted apps.  Obviously applications that already store meta-data in a relatively portable format will have an advantage, but I don’t think this will be limited to open source software.