There is a lot of buzz around social networks last few years. There is also a lot of buzz about privacy issues with Facebook policies in the last few days. Today I happened to read two news articles in the context of Facebook. One is the Instance Message conversation between Mark Zuckerberg and his friend. At the end of reading it, I felt good that I am not one of those "Dumb ...." as I have not created a Facebook account. I have been receiving invites from friends and family members from various different social networking sites but I have not been part of any of them, except LinkedIn. I some how got into LinkedIn, perhaps in retrospect because it was initially more of a website for professional setting (or at least that's what I thought), but these days there is so much more to it than what it was before. Besides, if Jigsaw can be acquired, then it may be a matter of time for LinkedIn to be acquired and there goes all my details to the acquired company. But I am actually more spooked of the fact that Picasa identifies photo faces and can make your friend link you to your face!
With the success of social networking for consumers, corporations want to leverage those ideas for the enterprise. Or may be just the software companies who can provide yet another platform to make money. I am partly skeptical because the value of all this web 2.0 type collaboration within companies is yet to be proven I think. But then I don't use an iPhone (yet) or do texting. Hey, what do I know?
Anyway, the second news article I read that is related to Facebook is Salesforce's Benioff Talks Facebook. How much of that Chatter buzz is going to survive a few years is yet to be seen.
Personally I don't like to think of these corporate collaboration tools as managing social networking within the companies but more as managing enterprise relationships. That's just me.
Lastly, so what is the point of this article and why am I writing this? Well, today for the first time I actually made a real use of these networking tools. A colleague of mine at work recently chatted with me on our internal IM asking about my current project and then a little bit of personal details. Thinking about some of that conversation, I looked up in our internal employee directory website (yeah, I am using the good old terminology like directory and such) and realized that he is reporting to a different manager. I then wanted to figure out why that was the case? Could it be because his previous manager left the company? But all of a sudden, my mind blanked on the name of the old manager. Our internal website only provides the latest organization chart, not how it was a few weeks back. So, how the heck am I going to get this piece of info other than asking him directly?
In a flash of genius, it struck me how I might be able to figure it out. You see, LinkedIn has this feature called "Viewers of this profile also viewed...". So, I logged into LinkedIn, searched for my colleague who is already "linked in" with me and found out the list of names who have also been viewed by the viewers of my colleague. Viola! The name of his ex-manager was there and I could complete the rest of my research.
One of the concerns I have is that for various reasons including acquisitions and mergers, company policies change and that might be a threat to privacy. Today a company might say it's just aggregating the data and not using it at a user level. Tomorrow, they might scrub the data and do more research and give it out to others. But then, we all know how AOL's release of scrubbed search data (search for "aol search data analysis") and Netflix's release of data for their challenge (search for "netflix data privacy") have been reverse engineered to tie back the data to the individuals.
So, while there are benefits in Collaboration 2.0 within and even among companies, employees have to be careful about the level of information they are giving out and how it might have an unexpected consequence later on. Frankly, sometimes it's simply easy to pick up the phone and discuss the problem with the key person who can solve it than chatting on IM or opening a forum thread or twittering to a whole bunch of people who only create unnecessary noise but not solve the problem. Sure, once you know the solution to a problem, you can always post it on the forum and tag it as "Solution" and a few employees who don't like a lot of the new collaboration tools can simply search the Solutions tag before calling you or a colleague and get their work done (there by letting you do your work).