Recently in Social networks Category

Here is an old (November 2, 2007) interview I did on SkyBusiness about social networks, examining both the industry landscape and how social networks can be valuable inside organizations. What I like best about this is that for much of the interview they had up a banner reading “Facebook And Other Social Networking Sites Can Be Beneficial For Corporations”, a message that business audiences, especially at the time, hadn’t heard much before.

Some of the things I discuss in the interview:
* The role of advertising networks in social networks
* The upcoming launch of Google’s Open Social and what it means for the sector
* The value to organizations of encouraging strong social networks
* Examples of companies using Facebook and other social networks internally
* How Enterprise 2.0 takes social media tools to apply to organizational productivity

In the last two days MySpace has announced Data Availability and Facebook launched Facebook Connect, while Google is due to announce “Friend Connect” on Monday, according to TechCrunch. MySpace and Facebook are providing ways to open out users’ access to their data on those social networks. TechCrunch says that Google’s initiative may not be quite as open as the other initiatives, in that it will require data to be accessed directly from their servers each time rather than being able to be downloaded and manipulated (under strict terms of service), However Open Social, which Google's initiative is based on, is being used by most of the major social networks other than Facebook, making Friend Connect potentially broader in scope, as long as the social networks supporting Open Social choose to use the new offering.

I wrote last year about how the dominant platform in technology is shifting to social networks, and the inexorable trend to openness in social networks. It turns out the MySpace and Facebook announcements may not be quite all they seem. Chris Saad of the DataPortability Working Group writes:

Both moves have rightly been attributed as ‘Data Portability’ plays - but neither of them are true ‘DataPortability’ implementations… yet.

Michael Arrington on Techcrunch has just written an article titled I Saw the Future of Social Networking the Other Day, referring to an unnamed start-up that has a mobile social network that runs on iPhone. Arrington writes:

A few years from now we’ll use our mobile devices to help us remember details of people we know, but not well. And it will help us meet new people for dating, business and friendship. Imagine walking into a meeting, classroom, party, bar, subway station, airplane, etc. and seeing profile information about other people in the area, depending on privacy settings. Picture, name, dating status, resume information, etc. The information that is available would be relevant to the setting - quick LinkedIn-type information for a business meeting v. Facebook dating status for a bar.

None of this is new. I wrote about proximity dating in my 2002 book Living Networks and on this blog in early 2003, at the time referring to Imahima, an early player in this space in Japan. In 2005 I wrote about the next phase of mobile social network players including Dodgeball (bought by Google, who did nothing with them) and Meetro, and over the last couple of years I was interviewed on mobile social networking by a number of publications, including one piece in 2006 on What accelerates - and slows - the development of social networking mobile platforms.

The Freakonomics blog, which is now part of the New York Times online, asks the following question of six prominent academics and participants in the space:

Has social networking technology (blog-friendly phones, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) made us better or worse off as a society, either from an economic, psychological, or sociological perspective?

The responses to this ‘Freakonomics quorum’ are well worth a read, with many thought-provoking perspectives.

It’s a question that in various forms is very prominent in people’s conversations today, either in excitement at the possibilities, or concern at evils ranging from distraction to dehumanization.

My view has always been that any change holds potential positives and negatives, so we must work hard to accentuate what could be good, and contain the things that could be bad. However as social animals, any new communication form enables new possibilities to express what I have described as our ‘latent humanity’.

Social networking technologies have been abused in major and minor everyday ways, and will continue to be so, particularly as we all work out what they mean and how it’s useful to us to use them. Far outweighing that is the potential for us to connect in new ways, to bring together people and ideas across the globe in ways we are still only dreaming about, to enable wonderful connections that never would have been possible otherwise. On the way, it is up to us to find out how we can make the most good come from these new tools.

eBay will eliminate negative rankings from May, according to the BBC. This makes what was barely useful into something practically useless.

It’s interesting that when you talk about reputation systems, most people refer to eBay’s feedback and ratings system. It was in fact clear years ago that eBay’s ratings had very little value. The essence of the problem was that there was no incentive to rate people poorly. Since buyers and sellers rate each other, any negative rating can – and often is – reciprocated with another negative rating. However a positive rating is also likely to be reciprocated. Because anyone with any experience on eBay well understands this, almost no-one gives negative ratings, so there is very little correlation between eBay ratings and how good a trading partner people actually are.

Now eBay has recognized this publicly, rather than pretending that its ratings are valid, and is explicitly pointing to users’ retaliation to negative reviews. The BBC article says that eBay says that there are other mechanisms to protect users:

I have written and being interviewed many times in the last few months on the use of Facebook in organizations.

There are a range of reasons why Facebook is often being blocked inside organizations. In many cases it’s because it’s viewed as a time-waster. However in other cases the concern is more about information loss – competitors finding out who is working for your organization and potentially sensitive information.

Worklight has just released a Facebook application called Workbook, reports Dan Farber, which authenticates users with an organization’s identity systems, and enables closed communication within the Workbook application between Facebook users. In one step Facebook can become an enterprise application, including proprietary discussions.

The application is expected for general release in February. For now it is being trialled in three large institutions, including a global retail bank with 70,000 staff that had received loud complaints from staff when it banned Facebook, and an investment bank that tried to implement an in-house social network based on Sharepoint that its employees didn’t use. The intention is to use Facebook not just internally, but also with clients and fund managers. As I’ve written before, one of the key issues with banning Facebook is that it makes it harder to attract and retain young, talented workers.

An interesting article on Techcrunch says Digg refugees may be heading to Mixx. Mixx is one of literally hundreds of community-based collaborative filtering tools that is competing with Digg, yet it is getting significant traction.

It is particularly instructive to read what some of the “Digg refugees” are saying:

“I have already had quite a lot of success with getting my submissions voted on, this may be partly due to the fact that many of my digg friends have joined the site.” Dave Eaves

“Mixx has a much more positive audience than Digg. It always amazes me that even the most popular and highest quality articles can get so many negative and unnecessarily degrading comments on Digg. So far the users of Mixx have proven to be quite a bit more pleasant, something that I know will be welcomed by most users.” Vandelay Design

The context here is that while Digg gets millions of readers, the way stories get voted to the top is based on relatively small communities. As discussed in an article I wrote on the structure of social opinion, 30 people out of a million-odd are responsible for the original submission of 30% of the articles that hit the front page of Digg. The reason for their success is that their friends follow what each other Digg and vote on these stories, at which point the general mass of readers pick up on it. Someone who is prominent in the community is highly regarded, and can be an overt as well as a covert influencer. The community starts to become highly social, with personalities, exchanges, likes and dislikes.

Having spoken at several of the Network Roundtable conferences since they were initiated three years ago, it was fantastic to come back to speak again at this year’s event in Charlottesville, Virginia. The predominant impression is that of maturity. At the first conferences, most of the speakers addressed the potential applications and the early insights. At this event, it is clear that there is widespread use of organizational network analysis (ONA) in US and global organizations, and that much of it is both well established and creating substantial value.

Rob Cross, the driving force behind the Network Roundtable and the success of Organizational Network Analysis, has now firmly established the discipline as a mainstream discipline. In three years the Roundtable has grown to have 98 leading organizations as members.

Major ONA initiatives at organizations such as Microsoft, Lehman Brothers, Montgomery Watson Harza and the like over a number of years have created both a longitudinal history of how networks evolve in organizations, and highly valuable business outcomes.

I’m at the Network Roundtable conference at the University of Virginia, where I’m doing a keynote tomorrow on Tapping Networks to Bring the Best of the Firm to Clients. I’ll do a few posts over the next couple of days on what’s happening at the conference. Since the Roundtable is a consortium with some fantastic corporate members, this is the premier venue for not just the latest research into applying network analysis, but also what specific value organizations are getting from network approaches.

This morning is breakout sessions, where I’m participating in the one run by Myra Gorman from Community Analytics on Leveraging External Networks. As a small group, we’re looking both at the scope of external network studies, and a few specific cases from workshop participants.

The nominal focus of the Network Roundtable is Organizational Network Analysis, so it largely examines what happens within organizations, at issues such as organizational structure, collaboration, leadership, talent development, innovation, and so on. In this session on External Networks we discussed how networks underlie almost all aspects of the business, government, and not-for-profit sectors. Some of the key networks we discussed are:

The other day I wrote a post titled Implementing Web 2.0 is critical for attracting talent.

I just saw this newspaper article titled: Give staff Facebook ‘or risk losing them’

CONSTRUCTION giant John Holland says allowing employees to access social networking site Facebook can play a role in attracting and keeping young workers.

The building company has been hit hard by the current skills shortage, with group managing director David Stewart highlighting engineering as a profession experiencing an "extreme" shortage.

Thanks for the pointer from James Dellow. Yes, you’re right James, I love it!

The current issue of BOSS magazine has an article titled “MyWorkSpace” (unfortunately not available online), with an intro: “They’re the new places to see and be seen, and the hottest social networking sites are also places to forge business”.

It quotes me as follows:

Ross Dawson, chairman of the research group Future Exploration Network, says social networks are becoming an important vehicle for engaging with employees and customers. “If appropriately harnessed and designed, they can be extraordinarily valuable tools, both within organisations and for engagement externally,” he says. “Facebook has become as much a professional networking tool as it has a personal networking tool.”

Reuters, for example, has released its own social networking platform for financial professionals, while software companies such as IBM and BEA have developed their own social media software so that these same tools can be used internally by enterprises.

“We’ve reach the point where professionals will find it harder if they are not on these networks,” Dawson says. “These are where people are spending time, and it is an easy place to reach out and build relationships. If we think five to 10 years fowrard we can’t say what it is going to be like, but we do know that social networking tools will be central to our professional lives.”

I was just interviewed on ABC Radio about Microsoft’s mooted acquisition of 3-5% of Facebook for US$500 million or so, as written about by the Wall Street Journal today. I’m severely jetlagged and it’s well past my bedtime, but I thought I’d make a few quick notes on points I raised in the interview that are relevant to this story.

Value is increasingly seen as shifting to social networks. When News Corp bought MySpace 2 ½ years ago for $580 million, I pointed out that what it was buying was the positioning at the interstices of people’s relationships. Media – as in the flow of information – is increasingly between people rather than in a hub and spoke arrangement, which makes social networking platforms central to value creation.

Social networking platforms have figured out what works. Since 2000 when sixdegrees.com made the first bold attempt to create a system to create value from linking people and subsequently failed, social networks have gradually improved to the point where they are drawing in a massive number of participants. MySpace was the first true success story, and in absolute numbers is still far larger than Facebook. However Facebook has translated MySpace’s success to a professional and arguably more diverse demographic, through different positioning and features. Social networks are rapidly becoming central to people’s interaction with the online world.

I’ve known Patti Anklam for many years now, as she has played a central network role in the global knowledge management and social network communities. After creating much content in the form or articles and reports, Patti has finally released a book which provides a comprehensive view of how networks are applied business and organizations, titled Net Work: A Practical Guide to Creating and Sustaining Networks at Work and in the World

My summary thoughts on the book appear on the back cover:

“Understanding and leading networks are critical competences for today’s business leaders. Anklam has broken new ground by bringing together diverse perspectives and case studies into a deeply practical guide to creating value in networks.”

What most attracts me to the book is that it so pragmatic. There are far too many business books that ultimately offer few insights into specific actions to take. Net Work both provides a deep understanding of the nature of networks, and also practical steps on how to tap their value.

Dave Snowden has been one of the most innovative and outspoken players in knowledge management for many years. Since he left IBM he has spent much of his time developing and applying a software platform, SenseMaker, which uses stories from people in various forms as its primary input to understand what the primary drivers and leverage points are in organizations or systems.

The SenseMaker tool is now being applied in a study on the future of volunteering, driven by Meals on Wheels and NSW Department of Disability and Aged Care, with support from Deloitte, Cognitive Edge, and the Society of Organisational Learning Australia.

The study is urgently looking for stories on volunteering, so if you have any thoughts or experiences on volunteering, or want to experience the inputs to the storytelling software, click here to participate. It takes around 20 minutes.

I’ve just found out that there’s online audio available of the interview I did last week on the radio station 3AW about Facebook in the enterprise. It was one of the interviews I did last week that I enjoyed the most, as we covered a lot of territory in our discussion.

In the conversation with Ernie Sigley, we discussed the use of Facebook by employees, networks in organizations, the impact of technology on productivity, participation in media, the use of Internet by older people, where I was born, the role of connecting globally for the economy, and more in a seven minute segment.

Click here to access the radio interview.