Being an Information Manager...

Social Networks

There is a lot of exitement in the industry about Social networks (already for some time). We all know by now the MySpaces & Facebooks of this world and I wonder if this is really worth the billion dollar fuzz (apart from for the advertisers).

In general we see that these networks are 'walled gardens' - a bit like AOL in its old days and although there are some announcements of opening up, I do not see the phenomena as much of a paradigm shift as the last two major changes: the surge of Google and Wikipedia. In my case Linkedin is the only place where I have registered myself, which is great for finding (former) professional contacts, but I hardly can see how they make serious money on this, or how this will drive a general revolution. A new development which is gaining more press is Ning from the former Netscape guru Andriessen (now valued at $ 600 mln). This is a place where you can create your own MySpace, but to be honest it is hardly more than a more configurable version of Yahoo Groups ...

But can we learn from this? Does it mean anything for Enterprise 2.0? You would think from my starting remarks that I would not think highly in terms of impact, but to be honest there is probably more to the Social Networking thing for Enterprises than for the general WWW ...

First of all I think that the concept of a 'walled garden' works well inside a company, since that's a natural fit. Second, there is a lot to gain from better team working. People have a tendency to take care of their own stuff ... when given the freedom. Third - I do not think we need to make a technology shift! We can use we have - it is mainly a culture change.

Probably the best place to start is exploiting Microsoft's Sharepoint, which can be set up to serve team sites, personal sites, blogs etc. Just like an in-company MySpace ... The main change is a shift in mindset from 'control' to Web 2.0 thinking. There is probably no need to regulate this, since the power of search will allow information to be found. If something is highly connected, and used widely it will score higher in the ranking - no need for taxonomies here!

What are the benefits? Probably we will see more content moving online. We may see better team work, since it will be easier to set up collaboration environments for various teams (our web masters today make life too difficult to do this) and finally doing it well will give you an opportunity to get rid of shared drives!

Bottom line - social networking will support moving away from hoarding and show the road to sharing.

Labels: Web2.0

posted by Evert Ruijs @ 12:30 PM