To commemorate its Confluence 4.0 release, Atlassian posted a fun infographic today that explores communication through the ages.

I love the intro, explaining the difficulties of sending messages even with the aid of animals and “structured hand signals.”  That’s a nice bow to the modern-day term: “structured content,” a facet of the updates Atlassian made to Confluence 4.0.

The infographic meanders from spoken word to Neanderthal paintings. It traces the history of smoke signals; hand written manuscripts; carrier pigeons; the Guttenberg printing press; maritime flags and morse code. After the typewriter and the telephone, it skips to the mass media age with the invention of the TV and the dawn of the computer age with the IBM Punchcard System.

The software era comes with the word processor before the Internet age and the dawning of the basic text editor; email and markup languages.

In today’s world, the focus is on search engines; wikis; instant messaging; social networking microblogging and Atlassian’s specialty “online content collaboration.”

Services Ange

Trace the history of technology and with it you will see services – ever present as commercial applications blossom. Today comes the complexities of defining the value of collaborative services and the accompanying features. Is content collaboration really the embodiment and next defining point in communications history? Well, of course it depends on who you ask. But we sure know where Atlassian stands.