One day, quite a long time ago, I realised that my younger (10 years younger) brother would always be better at computer games than me as he was born to a world of multiple buttons and consoles rather than my world of tapes and single button 'Quickshot' joysticks. I imagine my granny had the same realisation about the VCR too...

This memetic effect has made me ponder the question of "social networking": what does it mean for the workforce of tomorrow and therefore the enterprise of tomorrow?

Configuration and Multi-tasking (perhaps mainly communication) seem to be the peculiar skills of the current technical generation. I'd also suppose that by 'generation' I mean only a couple of crucial formative years such is the speed of digital, internet change.

I understand the technical make-up of start pages and social networking sites with platforms for extension (such as Facebook) because I'm a techy, but the non-technical users of these sites now 'just get it'. Combining sources of data and configuring a portal so that it presents identity through aggregation are now simple, day-to-day matters. Popfly, Pipes etc. will ultimately make data personalisation (flow and content) simple and natural.

These people will be working for you in a couple of years. What opportunities does that present in terms of services and access to corporate information to drive value from these behaviours? Exploitation of well-formed enterprise SOAs could potentially lead to more dynamic business capability through allowing (and indeed encouraging) personalised definition of business processes.