Fast Company: Where Ideas and People Meet


As a beta tester of Fast Company’s new business community site, I am fascinated on what they are trying to do, it’s a little bit of everything: LinkedIn, Facebook, iGoogle. So far it seems it works for me, its interface is intuitive, I understand what goes where and where I would find things and the different things find me. Of couse, for those of us that have been around long enough, know it’s the second generation Fast Company community site, after Company of  Friends.

This Site has everything you would want of a great community site of the second generation. A job very well done! What I very much appreciate is that I am not bombarded with advertising on every page, and the ads are are not animated/video ads, that flicker in front of my eyes and I am able to concentrate on the content – very much a plus. Now I just discovered that I am able to create my own blog on the fastcompany.com domain, which I find quite generous. The “beta” in front makes it bit geeky, and for a techie like me, there is no downside to it. (Google had their Gmail site in beta for about three years, before they went public with it, hadn’t they?)

After about five month intensive explorations on Facebook I am now relieved that I am again allowed to keep my business content organized on one site. Bookmarks, newsletters, feeds, and contacts: everything is about business, business technology, business ideas. Now these things don’t intermingle anymore with my private and semi-private and my charity interests like they do now on del.icio.us or on Facebook. I still am very much able to have them ‘bleed’ through by using the feeds but the collections and the administration is now
separate. And I very much like that. Fast Company I like that the “Company of Friends” are back! Thank you! And this Blog will not only be about Web 2.0, which many people still have not embraced yet, but also about how Fast Company is a major player in shaping Web 2.0 for business people of Gen X and Y and
hopefully a bit of the Boomers, too.

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