Social Networking Within the Enterprise

Blogs, wikis, social networks is all the latest buzz, but has the enterprise truly caught on? The Burton Group recently conducted a study investigating whether companies are really using web 2.0 technology. Their in-depth research also helps businesses understand the business, organizational, and technical factors to consider when formulating social networking strategies and initiating internal projects.

Read the Burton Group Report

Government Interest in Social Software

I recently came across Michael Idinopulo’s latest post on Transparent Office in which he mentions that there is a lot of buzz and interest in social media in government. One of the first attempts at launching a community within government was Intellipedia, a community based forum that was used for sharing information across different intelligence agencies.

It’s come a long way since Intellipedia, government officials are now using blogs, social networks, and wikis to collaborate within agencies. I’m interested to see if the Obama administration will make social software go mainstream in government.

Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise

The McKinsey Quarterly recently surveyed executives on the business use of web 2.0 technology within the enterprise in their second annual survey Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise. An interesting notion that this survey brings up is the fact that use of web 2.0 technology is changing. The survey details that users are stepping away from web services and mashups from the previous year, and they are instead focusing on social networks, podcasts, blogs, RSS, and wikis altogether. Another important finding the survey brings is that the majority of employees are satisfied with the way companies are adopting web 2.0 technologies, whether it be to develop new products and services, internal recruiting, enhancing company culture, training, or managing knowledge. Browse through this revealing article, and see how your compare how your company stands with the results given in this latest enterprise survey.

Restricting Access to Social Software Sites Could Reduce Employee Productivity

Not only does blocking access to Facebook decrease collaboration within the enterprise, it reduces job satisfaction which leads to poor productivity. Web 2.0 is here to stay, so organizations must then adapt to it, instead of restricting access. This article on CNN explains how by balancing job and life responsibilities at work, employees can focus more on job tasks at hand.

While it might be tempting for employees to “poke” a friend or two during work hours, the business benefits outweigh and negatives allowing access to social sites might bring.

Enterprise 2.0 a growing business

In an study released at Forrester this week, they say the Web 2.0 business is growing so rapidly, it’ll be worth $4.6 billion by 2013. Details of the report can be found here at Read Write Web.

What’s included in this growing industry? Some of the key parts are social networks, mashups and RSS feeds. They also point out the blogs are not a part of enterprise 2.0. Neither is Facebook, Netvibes or Twitter. Why? These are ad supported. So, this growing is going to come from the money companies spend on web 2.0 tools such as Net Vibes, Microsoft and IBM. Also included in this Enterprise 2.0 category is tools that allow companies to collaborate on certain projects.

Social Searching: Google’s New Goal

Aside from Google’s latest advancements to help Yahoo! stay out of the grasp of Microsoft, they are also looking into providing a social search engine. The details of this quest are at ReadWrite Web.

In a recent interview with Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of Search Products & User Experience, she details how Google is looking to make your social networks influence the way your searches on the web are helped out by what your “friends” are doing on the web. As always, they are looking to protect the privacy of their users, because this is always one of the main concerns of the users. But there are four main ways Google is looking to do this: Labeling, users like you, social network integration, and socially influenced page rank.

Labeling would consist of other labeling web pages, like tags, and then they would be stored in their profiles. When the words were searched, tags would be provided by what your contacts have been searching.

With the Users like you function, Google would display what others searched for.

The Social Network Integration function would show you what your friends had been searching for in one day. Third party Social Networks such as Facebook and MySpace would eventually be brought into the picture, but for now this would just be Google’s social network.

Finally the social influenced page rank would be considered. This is set up believing that you would much more prefer to visit pages your friends visit. The more authority (or friends you have visiting the site) a site has, the more likely you are to see it in your search.

Google sees this as the future. Why not incorporate what your personal profile says about you with the results you get in your search engine? I personally don’t agree with this. I don’t want to see pages because of what my friends searched for. I want to see naturally generated searches with results on exactly what I’m looking for. I want the influence of the actual webpage and its content to tell me why it’s at the top of the webpage, not because I had three friends visit the website in one day. I think Google is overstepping privacy boundaries here. I think this is the job of web pages like Del.icio.us, not Google. What do you feel?