An update from Matt's day job

My last company was really top flight. I enjoyed my time at Priority Health; it's a good company. Toward, the end though, I had this odd experience. I struck up a conversation with a guy in the lunch line, and he said "My name is Mark, and I am in IT."

That was totally obvious to me. In fact, the guy sat diagonally from me, one row across and one cubical over. He had been with the company a year.

How is it possible that Mark not only did not know me, but he didn't even realize what department I was in?

Somehow, I had access to people, names, faces, and expertise that he did not. I had a /tacit/, /implicit/ network that was not publicly available. Even if he read the wiki we used for team collaboration extensively, he probably wouldn't know what I looked like. And even if he did, it's doubtful that he could connect to me when he thought of say, automating testing of large database recordsets.

It turns out that the tools we lacked at Priority are the same tools you might get from Myspace, or FaceBook, or possibly LinkedIn. But there's no way way to get those tools inside a company ... yet.

So I went to work for Socialtext.

Last week at the enterprise 2.0 show, Information Week Magazine interviewed Ross Mayfield, our president and chair of our board. (He gave a keynote speech at the show; Socialtext suffers no slobs.)

In the interview, which is up on Youtube, Ross shows off our latest product offerings here.

It's a great time to be a tester.

More to come.