Emanuele Quintarelli's Library tagged 2.0 →  View Popular

This is a need social software squarely addresses. According to the industry analyst firm Forrester, social software tools will become so much a part of the fabric of an enterprise’s collaborative environment that it will be like air – enterprises won’t be able to imagine life without it. Further, according to Forrester, the demand for social software tools is growing with usage rates of social software services almost doubling between 2005 and 2006^2. Leading with the first integrated platform of enterprise-ready social software, IBM Lotus Connections is expected to become available in the first half of 2007.

In the meantime, I’d like to make three quick points:



• Facebook is open, it is porous at the edges. Enterprises need to embrace porousness, need to connect with their customers and their partners and their supply chain.
• Facebook is open, yet it is as private as you want to make it. Thankfully, it starts with an open rather than closed approach, but you have adequate control as to who can see what. Enterprises need to understand and adopt this Start-open-then-only-close-what-you-must mindset. It is an essential ingredient of collaboration, a spirit that every enterprise needs to foster.
• Facebook is open, yet with persistent searchable retrievable information and conversation. Enterprises need to understand and embed themselves into this record-everything-archive-everything-search-everything-retrieve-everything mindset.

What you should know:

Invites via email spur growth: Invites are coming through emails, at one point, I was received dozens on one week, this is a sign of mass.

Discussions: Within the groups sections, there are questions posed, answers, and discussions, if you’re a believer in the Cluetrain manifesto, this is a sign of a marketplace.

Business audience, not just 20s: When Facebook opened up to the whole world, it extended it’s reach past college, this may have been due to many of the original Facebook users graduating and moving the workplace. Many of my contacts and friends within Facebook are senior managers, directors, VPs, and CEOs, this is not child’s play. Recent research indicated that the fastest growth segment was 35+. See my Facebook demographic and audience analysis.



Affinity Groups: Individuals with similiar interests, problems, or traits are starting to self-assemble through their friends network, or within the groups. All of these are opt-in, so these are engaged users, that have self-selected: ‘Hey I belong here’. These are communities, and are micro-segments of marketplaces.



Opt-in: Unlike traditional forms of advertising and marketing, Facebook has many opt-in features that let users review, approve, and accept invites for friends, applications, groups, and other features.



Limited Search Crawling: Facebook is a ‘closed’ network, and you can only see most data if you’ve a login, most indivudals pages are somewhat private to non-friends. As a result this limits the ability of traditional search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and others to crawl and index the data. This will prove to be an interesting dynamic in the next few years.

High Growth: Facebook has one of the fastest growth rates, and could potentially overtake MySpace if these rates continue. See stats from John Bell.

Features to know:

The Platform

Identity Platform: Facebook has opt-in user profiles and rich metadata, they’ve massive intelligence on users. Similarly, users can see detailed metadata about friends that are connected to them. Traditonally, blogs, forums and other tools don’t provide this detailed amount of user data.



Community Platform: Users can connect to affinity groups, Facebook can map relationships and affinities. Communities are forming (all opt-in) and are segmenting by interest. Community is another word for Market.



Application Platform: Facebook controls API platform and can gain intelligence from application deployment, data, and usage.

Clunky User Interface: Facebook is notorious for being confusing for the early and even experienced user, things are often not where they should be, and it’s difficult to tell where one’s ‘homepage’ is.

Home Page: The home page is really a ‘news’ page that aggregates content like an RSS feedreader. It also shows other events, triggers, requests, and information, this is much like the ‘portal’ page of the first wave. You can adjust the settings to increase or decrease certain types of content. You can also see what your network is doing, including your friends writing on others’ walls (there was conflict about this previously). The homepage can also show updates from applications (like Twitter or Powce) centralizing communications (submitted by comments by Moksh)

Profile Page: The profile page lists your attributes, status, interests, and other metadata a user chooses to share. This is the page to share with others to add them as contacts.

Applications: The applications sections has exploded from hundreds of applications a few weeks ago to thousands. As I understand it, a PHP developer can quickly create an application for use there. In some cases, brands with loyal following have customers create applications on their behalf.

Events: Affinity groups are starting to organize, promote, and manage events from Facebook, this is disruptive to Upcoming, evite, and other event management websites.

Direct Messages: Users, and those in my community, are starting to direct message each other using Facebook’s ‘email’ type of capability. There are numerous accounts that users in Gen Y use social networking private messages before email. In fact, I’m told that “email is for old people, like you.”



Media is embedded: There’s audio, video, and live streaming video in Facebook, this is a communication and media platform. There’s many ways to embed stories using rich media.



Widgets and Applications: The most exciting feature are the widgets that let companies and groups build embedded applications on the Facebook Platform. While widgets have certainly been around for some time, they’ve never been available for an ‘identity’ platform that had rich user and network behavior. Case Study: Watch how Walmart’s Dorm Room campaign is now deploying an application for Facebook, Charlene Li predicts opportunity, and John Bell is keeping a watchful eye. If you don’t know the history, Walmart launched a MySpace clone called “Hub” which failed and was shut down after a mere 10 weeks.

Advertising: There’s embedded ads within Facebook on the right column (and other areas) which give the savvy advertiser ability to reach specific markets. Because Facebook is an Identity Platform, they’ve got full data and stats on what users are doing, how often, how much, and what they are doing. Learn more from their official advertising page.

Data and Privacy Concerns

Facebook is a black hole, a lot of data goes in, but very little comes out. I’ve posted the following:




Yet another reason why we need a single, trusted, and protected identity system

All your widgets are belong to Facebook