I've read a couple of posts tonight about how quickly news of the Yahoo layoffs today spread over the Internet and Blogosphere due to Twitter and Facebook, mainly.
In Layoff 3.0: How the social graph changes everything the "suddenly" former Yahoo employee Susan Mernit mentioned how quickly she got responses from an announcement she made on her own blog:
"...This morning, I got the news I had been laid off from Yahoo! at about 11 am. Around noon I posted a note to my blog, a note to my Facebook status, and a tweet to my twitter stream.
By 5 pm, there were 44+ comments on my blog post, 21 comments on the FB note, 15 FB emails, 20 Yahoo emails and 20 Gmail emails. Plus perhaps 6 twitter-derived notes.That's over 100 responses generated within 6 hours of the actual occurrence."".....a significant percentage were from blog readers or people I have not meet face to face."
"...Boy, it's been quite a week so far.
I had not anticipated how quickly news of the layoffs (specific people leaving or being asked to leave) would spread on-line. But with blogs, Twitter, TechMeme, Facebook, LinkedIn, IM, Valleywag (sigh), and TechCrunch it's remarkably easy to find out who is affected.
I have to say, it's rather spooky. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "public company."
Had I thought about it in advance, I would have seen this coming. But watching the situation evolve in real-time has been a little disconcerting. And having it all happen against the backdrop of a $150 million acquisition and a corporate takeover bid makes it all the more surreal."
Now that people in communities, with related interests, can communicate with each other in real time - they can feel the pain and react, in real time - which could, in some ways, change the equation.
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