The boundaries between work and personal life have been blurring for years, but the next generation of office technology will mush them into a social gloop

Software designers have leapt on to the social networking bandwagon to make communicating with colleagues more fun. After all, what’s the difference between sitting in front of a screen updating your Facebook biog and sitting in front of a screen typing marketing reports?

IBM, for example, is developing Beehive, which has a brightly coloured interface that encourages workers to share their corporate knowledge – and, in a heavy nod to MySpace, it allows users to post personal updates, pictures, videos and lists of “things I can’t live without”.

Similarly, Intel is testing a “visual business card”, where holders list not only standard stuff about location and title, but also pictures and biographies.

Office software is getting more like Second Life, too: Intel is creating a virtual world of 3-D meeting rooms and auditoriums. Other companies are using virtual worlds for online trade shows, where people can manoeuvre their avatars around the stands.

You can even network on a virtual golf course created by Unisfair. In similar vein, IBM is seeing if groups of people can bond by playing virtual-world games. It calls the effort “Inward Bound”, as a parallel to the more physical exercises run by Outward Bound.

Companies developing all this software say that it might tackle a problem facing global corporations with widely dispersed locations: it’s getting harder for colleagues to develop camaraderie from being in the same place. This can harm productivity, the developers say.

But employers won’t be dismayed, either, if workers come to see their work as playing a computer game – one that makes it feel increasingly hard to hit the shut-down button and go to their real-life homes.

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