Of course, since I look at everything through a litigation lens, that’s no surprise.
Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don't need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public "status" on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.
Source: The End of the Email Era - WSJ.com
Most of the hype over e-discovery is a scam. I’ve been on the IT end of it, and I can assure you that it’s not a big deal for a corporation’s IT department to produce every email or document with a certain word in it. I had to do that very task for a 25-30 person financial services firm, and it took me about two hours. I have no idea how I’d go about aggregating every employee’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, and other social networking profile in such a search. I don’t even have a Google Wave invite, so that’s just another issue to think about for future discovery disputes.
Because you’re an idiot if you think that corporate employees aren’t using third-party services to exchange communications and documents. Some do it specifically to make sure the communications aren’t discoverable. Others do it because their IT policies suck. And still others do it because they’re just workaholics. But the bottom line is that anyone suing a corporation better make sure they go over the personal email/social networking info for all the fact witnesses.