Collaborative Thinking

FOAF Musings

FOAF (Friends of a Friend) project site, Wikipedia definition pops up now and then but you have to look for it if you are in the enterprise software space. Major enterprise vendors tend to dismiss it, ignore it or switch the conversation to their own approach - but it's still worth knowing about if you want to maintain a level of industry awareness and remain open to different viewpoints that may end up augmenting whatever approach you decide to adopt (related to a vendor's product).

I think it's also important to learn about these initiatives (FOAF, XFN, etc) because smart people in the field of social networking are not all working for traditional collaboration or large platform vendors. I don't mean that as a cheap-shot but many times the people that innovate, or force us to take a fresh, hard look at a topic, are those sources not bounded by a product roadmap or vendor agenda and can see broader possibilities. For instance, two interesting "food for thought" examples:

25C3: Privacy in the social semantic web

We propose a network architecture where users keep the total control of access to their data. Instead of using a client-to-server architecture like traditional social networks do, we use the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol XMPP also known as the jabber instance messaging network. Like in instant messenger programs, people can add friends to their personal network. Once they mutually authorized each other, personal data can be exchanged. A public-private-key infrastructure on top of the xmpp communication ensures that message cannot be intercepted or read by any third party – including the xmpp server itself. The semantic part in our application are the information exchanged between the clients. We decided to use existing ontologies and schemas like FOAF (Friend of a Friend) and the Tag Ontology. In our first prototype users are able to create their personal profile and to bookmark and tag websites. Those data can then be exchanged with friends. Another feature are recursive searches of those bookmarks which allows to retrieve bookmarks of friend-of-friends (as long as they give their permission). We decided to use semantic technologies because we also wanted to show how a semantic web could look like in future. The overall goal is to develop an open, distributed system to exchange information - privately and protected.

25C3: Privacy in the social semantic web

foaf+ssl: adding security to open distributed social networks

One major criticism of open networks is that they seem to have no way of protecting the personal information distributed on the web or limiting access to resources. Few people are willing to make all their personal information public, many would like large pieces to be protected, making it available only to a select group of agents. Giving access to information is very similar to giving access to services. There are many occasions when people would like services to only be accessible to members of a group, such as allowing only friends, family members, colleagues to post a blog, photo or comment on a site. How does one do this in a maximally flexible way, without requiring any central point of access control?

Using an intuition made popular by OpenID we show how one can tie a User Agent to a URI by proving that he has write access to it. foaf+ssl is architecturally a simpler alternative to OpenID (fewer connections), that uses X.509 certificates to tie a User Agent (Browser) to a Person identified via a URI. However, foaf+ssl can provide additional features, in particular, some trust management, relying on signing FOAF files, in conjunction with set of locally trusted keys, as well as a bridge with traditional PKIs. By using the existing SSL certificate exchange mechanism, foaf+ssl integrates more smoothly with existing browsers (pictures with Firefox) including mobile devices, and permits automated sessions in addition to interactive ones.

foaf+ssl: adding security to open distributed social networks

W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking

For those interested (also a link to several research papers):

W3C is organizing a Workshop on the Future of Social Networking, with a high level goal of bringing together the world experts on social networking design, management and operation in a neutral and objective environment where the social networking history to date can be examined and discussed, the risks and opportunities analyzed and the state of affairs accurately portrayed. Based on the facts and a consensus-based industry landscape, plans for the future can be made by the industry participants.

Within the W3C workshop, the issues facing social networking growth can be documented and, in this workshop in particular, will take into account social networking on mobile devices/platforms with and without PC/broadband Internet services.

The workshop should also explore whether it is worthwhile to consider the creation of an Interest or Working Group under the auspices of W3C to continue these discussions.

Papers submitted to W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking

W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking
Position Papers 15-16 January 2009, Barcelona

Papers submitted to W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking

Social Graph Musings

Some of my late-night Twitter thoughts on social tools, social structures and how "worlds collide" when segments of your social graph become more visible and inter-related via emerging services such as Facebook Connect.

interesting how the "law of unintended consequences" applies to social tools when profiles are connected in unforeseen ways about 8 hours ago from twhirl

people might think each tool's persona is distinct, but interesting collisions occur via automation (e.g,, FB Connect) about 8 hours ago from twhirl

So I wonder if the more open your social graph becomes, the more inclined you are to protect it (assign permission models per social circle) about 8 hours ago from twhirl

If I protect updates on Twitter, but you can see updates on FB - how do you reconcile that - who brokers intermediaries in the relationship about 8 hours ago from twhirl

should change in context & situation (place/space/tool) alter how the relation of social structures & personas are manifested (I believe so) about 8 hours ago from twhirl

Enterprise Twitter: Not Dismissive, Just Realistic

Dennis raised a credible perspective in a comment to my entry on "Enterprise Twitter". I thought I would respond in a separate post since I do not have a feed specific to comments and since his comment misinterprets my position:

1. I do track these products/services and I am aware that ESME is now a part of the Apache Incubator scheme.

2. I already subscribe to the ESME blog and have for some time.

3. These points also reflect comments I hear often from enterprise IT groups (architects, infrastructure planners, etc) concerning introduction of new messaging/communication tools. Since I tend to talk to a lot of these folks, I would consider my comments constructive actually for vendors in this space to consider.

4. I am not dismissing the enterprise Twitter space in a blanket fashion. That opening comment misrepresents my position. If you examine the recent post on Enterprise 2.0 Planning Considerations I specifically call out "Enterprise Twitter" as a space to watch in 2009. I am however not wearing rose-colored glasses when pointing out the hurdles these solutions will face as they emerge within enterprise environments. I do expect that vendors putting together unified communications and collaboration platforms will be forced to address the type of social messaging represented by tools such as ESME. I would point you to some thoughts I posted earlier regarding social presence as well. In turn, ESME and like tools will need to integrate (in some instances), and interoperate (in almost all cases), with UC platforms. I suggest you look at the recent IETF proposal sponsored by Cisco and IBM regarding intranet federation for IM and presence systems - that might be food for thought on integration and interoperability/federation even though these tools are not centric to SIP/SIMPLE.

5. It's easy to throw stones at IBM and Microsoft - and yes, there are aspects of those platforms that are proprietary - but they are deployed within large enterprise environments in a dominate fashion (in addition to Cisco). Microsoft does have an asset here with its Parlano acquisition and IBM does have options to open up Sametime to handle some behaviors demonstrated by "Enterprise Twitter" tools - so game on. Twitter-like tools will not have a free-ride without competition from existing messaging/communication vendors. 

6. It is nice to hear that ESME has multiple pilots - however, pilots come and go (especially given current economic conditions). Production deployments are a better yardstick. I'll be tracking this space in 2009 and look forward to analyzing and advising organizations on how this market evolves.

@Mike I respectfully disagree with your blanket dismissal of the enterprise Twitter space in the way you have. (Declared interest in ESME as you may already know.)

You might wish to know that ESME is now a part of the Apache Incubator scheme. That gives access to a lot of thought leadership in providing tools that are not wedded to proprietary platforms and access to enterprise class development skills.

Speaking personally (my colleagues might disagree) but I see little value in aligning to IBM for instance when they have their own solution in the works and tend to exhibit an 'only made here' attitude to solution selling.

We provided solid process integrations to SAP NetWeaver as part of the early alpha and despite your reservations, have pilots ongoing in a number of places, one of which we can mention is Siemens.

I'd be happy to get our business process and technology leads to provide you with a technical briefing if that works.

In the meantime, I'd refer you to the blog: http://blog.esme.us where you can keep tabs on what's happening.

Thanks for your attention.

2009: Planning Considerations For Enterprise 2.0

Rather than list off a "top ten" list of predictions for 2009, I thought I would briefly layout some topics and areas that business and IT decision-makers should pay attention to when formulating Enterprise 2.0 plans:

Enterprise 2.0: Critical Decisions For 2009

• "SharePoint Next": Call, Raise Or Fold
  • Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) is a disappointing platform for social computing in my opinion. The blog is barely acceptable, the wiki is not, the decision to implement RSS rather than Atom was short-sighted and the "Corporate Facebook" capability is not that impressive. Still, many organizations are deploying SharePoint for many valid reasons unrelated to E2.0 and are "ok" with undertaking extensive customization or adding specific partners (e.g., NewsGator) to augment what SharePoint has in terms of E2.0 capabilities.
  • My position for some time has been that the next release will be a tipping point for Microsoft's social computing efforts. Either Microsoft "gets it right" and delivers a forward-looking release with significant improvements that transforms SharePoint into a market-leading social computing platform, or it delivers a release that has only incremental improvements to existing functionality that reflect a backward-looking competitive landscape (circa 2008 as things get locked-down).
  • If customers fail to see a forward-looking release and realize that they will again have to wait "another three years' before Microsoft delivers credible capabilities, then I expect to see a sizeable backlash within the SharePoint install-base. Organizations will leverage SharePoint for traditional productivity and content management needs but will look for an alternative social platform to sit alongside SharePoint while a minority of shops that have not over-committed to SharePoint (e.g., WSS only) will de-prioritize the platform.
• Communities & Social Networks: Think "Adoption", Not "Deployment"
  • The need to focus on non-technology factors rather than the underlying tooling was a consistent theme during client visits and telephone inquiries as well as the field research study I conducted on enterprise social networks. Most IT organizations are not charged with time, money and resources to really focus on adoption issues. IT organizations might not even have the right skills (some clients I talked to have sociologists on staff). Business leaders also need to realize the importance of cultural dynamics and the challenges that go along with changing work models and persuading people to change their behaviors. Consideration of new roles (e.g., community organizers) and new ways of assessing people's participation and contribution (e.g., redefining performance appraisal processes) are not far-fetched ideas. 
• Social Platforms: Managing The Gap
  • Another common point that arose during client visits and telephone briefings was the issue "managing the gaps". Organizations that selected point tools to fill gaps in existing collaboration and content platforms are now faced with products that have grown into mini-suites. A tactical decision to rely on a blog vendor becomes more complicated when that vendor then expands their tool to include a wiki. Ditto for making a tactical decision to select a wiki provider only to find out that the next release does blogs, tagging and social networking. Small vendors need to survive so it's no surprise that they will expand their offerings but that creates additional overlap with enterprise infrastructure and may cause the decision to be re-evaluated.
  • The trend now is to downplay reliance on point solutions (e.g., blog vendor, wiki vendor) and think more along the lines of a "social platform" (e.g., a consistent platform that offers blog, wiki, and a social network site). This makes the decision more complicated in some ways but the investment becomes less volatile and the investment has the potential to have more staying power in the market. IT groups generally want to avoid numerous small vendors whose products begin to look more similar over time.
• "Enterprise RSS": It's A Middleware Decision
  • It was a surprise to me that this space has not taken off. It might be due to a combination of factors. Right now, if you have sources producing feeds and clients that include feed readers then people are generally happy. Workers might have a few feeds they read in a single client (e-mail or browser). There might not be a "killer app" that illustrates the role feed syndication platforms play in the solution. Until there's a critical mass, the need for network bandwidth management, policy management, centralized feed security, etc doesn't make for a clear-cut business case.  
  • So, I'll repeat myself in 2009 - IT organizations need to look at this space as a middleware decision. And, although we use the term "RSS", please focus on Atom. RSS is a dead-end and architecturally deficient. As I mentioned earlier, it's unfortunate Microsoft implemented RSS within SharePoint - many organizations will be stuck with RSS until this mistake is corrected.
• Social Analytics: Redefining Business Intelligence
  • While this area would include social network analysis (SNA), it would also include all types of social analytics (rankings, ratings, tags/bookmarks, etc). Perhaps we should think of this area as Organizational Intelligence or Organizational Analytics instead of Social Analytics - or just extend our notion of Business Intelligence given the term is well-known. In any case, metrics are important. Without social analytics, it's difficult to know how to measure what's going on within social systems and how to value those interactions and activities. I hope 2009 will be the kick-off of this topic becoming more of a priority.

Enterprise 2.0: Long-term Issues

• Culture: It's not about the technology (per se). I've talked to organizations that have both succeeded, are struggling, or have failed with various E2.0 "tools". Organizations that have effectively leveraged E2.0-related tools most often are those that realized that cultural issues and E2.0 initiatives go hand-in-hand. Governance, change management, community-building and other "people strategies" help organizations leverage cultural dynamics in a positive fashion. 
• Generational shifts: GenY and aging workforce trends create opportunities for HR groups to take on a much more strategic role. Employee, retiree and alumni social networks for instance have the potential to help organizations become more resilient and agile by allowing it to capitalize on its internal and extended relationships - often in ways not constrained by formal institutional structures.  
• Information & media literacy: This might be a sleeper issue. There are a lot of "v" words here: the volume of information is growing exponentially, the velocity of business is increasing, the virtualization of the workplace continues as organizations are more global or have work models that are more mobile, and the variability of roles an employee may be expected to take on will become more diverse as decision-making is pushed to the line-worker. Workers need to become much more literate in how to leverage information and media sources and associated tools.  
• Social networks and identity: As part of the field research study I conducted (social networking within the enterprise), I was surprised to find a disconnect between social networking initiatives and identity management efforts. If employee profiles and the social tools they use to express themselves and establish relationships with others become the "fuzzy front-end of identity", then how those profiles become aligned with identity management becomes a critical issue for business and IT strategists. The interoperability aspect with external environments as digital life and digital work converge clearly comes to the forefront as well. 
• Standards: Pretty normal - standards are needed for integration, interoperability, etc.  
• Microformats: Hopefully, we will see much more focus on microformats (e.g., hCard, XFN) during 2009. Microformats, Atom/APP and XMPP I believe have compelling synergies when combined with social networking technologies.
• Records management: Also expected - we live in a world where there are numerous industry, regulatory and compliance-related requirements that need to be met.

Enterprise 2.0: Vendors To Watch (alpha order)

• Cisco: The market will only give Cisco so much time to "talk the talk". There needs to be a definitive collaboration solution that gains some noticeable traction in the market.
• IBM: Lotus Connections is holding its own but gaps remain (e.g., native wiki) and I would like to see deep integration with SharePoint.  
• Jive: Perhaps the most successful "mini suite" in the market right now and a good option for organizations that don't want to commit to SharePoint and have reservations about IBM.
• Oracle: "Once again into the breach" as the saying goes - Oracle will make another run in to collaboration/E2.0 market. While it has a much improved portfolio of collaboration and content tools this time - can it execute and will the market believe them?  
• Telligent: Telligent could be the "Jive of 2009" given its latest release (which rounds out the features), its integration with SharePoint, and alignment with a Microsoft environment overall.

Enterprise 2.0: Open Source Efforts To Watch

• Alfresco: Gaining more media attention with its SharePoint integration. 
• Drupal: Continues to come up in client interactions. 
• Liferay: Came out with "Social Office" as its E2.0 play. 
• Mindtouch: A vendor I hope more organizations consider - sound underling architecture that perhaps is over-branded as a wiki solution but is more of a mash-up server (kinda) based on a hypertext and service-oriented platform. 
• Sun Project SocialSite: Another project that I find interesting. I'm not convinced Sun can make it successful in the market but as an architectural model for organizations that want to socially-enabled existing web properties and applications and are interested in OpenSocial - it's well-worth a look.

Honorable Mention

• Apache Abdera: "The goal of the Apache Abdera project is to build a functionally-complete, high-performance implementation of the IETF Atom Syndication Format (RFC 4287) and Atom Publishing Protocol (RFC 5023) specifications." I hope to see an implementation of this spec in the market.

Enterprise 2.0: Watch This Space

• "Enterprise Twitter": I posted by thoughts here: Enterprise Versions Of Twitter (updated)

Information Overload And The New Luddism

You should definitely make time to read the entire two-part article. Clay covers a variety of topics such as literacy, media, generational shifts and the future of news/journalism. Some excerpts relevant to an enterprise environment below:

Interview with Clay Shirky, Part I:

RJ: What’s your response to people who say that all this information that’s out there, all this knowledge that we’re producing is great, and there’s all this access that we didn’t have before. But we also risk information overload alongside, and we don’t—

CS: Oh, those are the stupidest people in the entire debate because they, I mean, almost all of the people arguing that this is the Dark Ages are narcissists, because they’re essentially trying to preserve a particular piece of it. But the information overload people are the most narcissistic because information overload started in Alexandria, in the library of Alexandria, right? That was the first example where we have concrete archaeological evidence that there was more information in one place than one human being could deal with in one lifetime, which is almost the definition of information overload. And the first deep attempt to categorize knowledge so that you could subset; the first take on the information filtering problem appears in the library of Alexandria.

.....

So, the real question is, how do we design filters that let us find our way through this particular abundance of information? And, you know, my answer to that question has been: the only group that can catalog everything is everybody. One of the reasons you see this enormous move towards social filters, as with Digg, as with del.icio.us, as with Google Reader, in a way, is simply that the scale of the problem has exceeded what professional catalogers can do. But, you know, you never hear twenty-year-olds talking about information overload because they understand the filters they’re given. You only hear, you know, forty- and fifty-year-olds taking about it, sixty-year-olds talking about because we grew up in the world of card catalogs and TV Guide. And now, all the filters we’re used to are broken and we’d like to blame it on the environment instead of admitting that we’re just, you know, we just don’t understand what’s going on.

RJ: So, is this just a generational thing? That younger people have come up using these filters and these technologies and they love it and the older generation is just kind of scared?

CS: Yeah, that’s certainly part of it. I mean, the thing that people say about young people is just that they understand the technology so well. Well, I teach in a graduate program, I see twenty-five-year-olds all the time. They actually don’t understand the technology particularly well. I think I understand quite a lot of it quite a bit better than they do, which is the reason why I’m teaching there and they’re students. The advantage they have over me is that they don’t have to unlearn anything. They don’t have to unlearn the idea that a card catalog is a helpful thing to have. That you need a librarian to find things. That you have to figure out where you’re looking before you what you’re looking for. None of those things are true anymore. And so one of the problems that old people like me suffer from is just we know too many solutions for problems that no longer exist. And it kind of freaks us out to realize that all the things we mastered don’t really add up to much value anymore.

It’s not so much that young people are smart and old people are scared. It’s that young people don’t have to unlearn all the stuff that old people do have to unlearn if we want to understand this world. And unlearning is just about the least fun activity in the world. So, you know, it’s easy to understand why people don’t want to sign up for it. But it’s also kind of pathetic that the people going around talking about information overload don’t stop to factor in the idea that if the twenty-year-olds aren’t complaining about information overload, it probably isn’t the problem we think it is.

Interview with Clay Shirky, Part I : CJR:

Interview with Clay Shirky, Part II:

Russ Juskalian: Well, this kind of brings me to something. We’ve heard all the consequences of what will happen because of information overload or attention spans. But, when you were talking about the last couple of things, I started wondering. Can you think of any of the consequences that would come about as a result of trying to stem the so-called information overload, or trying to slow down all of these things as they come?

Clay Shirky: So, there’s two different possibilities here. Stemming the information overload is this ridiculous Luddite fantasy of somehow, you know, making all those bloggers shut up so that there’s not so much stuff to read. You know, going back to the day when one could have said that you had read or watched the news, as if there was exactly one hour of news per day. I mean it’s just, you know… even, as an experiment, if you said “I’m going to only read the RSS feeds of news sources that existed prior to 1990,” you would still be drowning in it, because you can get to every English language newspaper in the world. So even if you just dealt with the fact that all this production is now global—forget any new entrants, forget amateurs at all—access to professional information is now so far in excess of what it was in 1990 that you still have that problem. So I don’t think that there are any rollbacks.

What I do think is potentially quite interesting is all of the work on filtering that says a big part of the value of information is actually downstream from its production. I would like to be reading or talking about what my friends are reading or talking about, or my colleagues are reading or talking about, or my competitors are reading or talking about. And this rise of social filtering—there’s an interesting phenomenon in the university world, where the number of papers jointly published by two or more researchers working in different institutions is on the rise. And it’s on the rise because it’s very… sitting at your desk, it’s almost easier to figure out, “Who else [in the world] is working on what I’m working on?” than to figure out, “What are my colleagues down the hall working on that isn’t like what I’m working on?” And that idea of information weakening the walls of the institution seems to me to be really beneficial for cross-disciplinary work. I mean, I think the fact that many of the people doing behavioral economics are psychologists is indicative of the kind of cross-disciplinary work we can potentially hope for in the future. So, I think that one of the ways to get around this filter failure problem is—you know, I refuse to use the term ‘information overload’ for obvious reasons—is to start deploying these social filters that assume that at least part of why I want to read or look at something is to be able to have valuable thoughts or conversations in tandem with other people.

And I think that when we start to see those kinds of conversational groups form in the kind of salon culture, particularly in university communities, we will see a potential transformation not of just whole academic institutions but also individual disciplines, where the econo-physics people, the behavioral economics people, and the neo-classical economics people are all now having a conversation that cannot be resolved with reference to only one of those three disciplines. And that potential for saying, “You know what, we’re going to give up on any idea that one can have read the ‘relevant literature’ now,” because a lot of that was just artificial barriers around the filter. And, instead, we’re going to say, “I’m reading the literature that’s keeping the conversation I’m having kind of the most interesting it can be.” That seems to me a potential way out of the current filter failure problem.

Interview with Clay Shirky, Part II : CJR:

Enterprise Versions Of Twitter (updated)

There are several emerging (e.g., ESME, Laconica (open source), OraTweet (Oracle), SocialCast, Present.ly, and Yammer, etc.) but so far, none address to my satisfaction the issues posed below (which I happened to post on the Present.ly support forum).

Directory, Archive/Audit, Security/Compliance / Enterprise / Discussion Area - Present.ly Support

Most IT organizations will treat "Twitter-like" tools as they do Enterprise IM products which will raise questions such as:

1. Directory integration
2. Policy management (including policies assigned to people in certain roles or groups)
3. Archive (for audit, compliane, records management, etc)
4. Security (access controls, etc)
5. Integration with anti-virus and content filtering tools
6. Integration with Microsoft Communicator and IBM Sametime
7. Application development (plug-ins, integration with productivity tools)

I know there's a lot here but these tools are going to be asked such questions by many IT groups, hosted or on-premise.

Directory, Archive/Audit, Security/Compliance / Enterprise / Discussion Area - Present.ly Support

I would add one more: 8. enterprise-class administration tools to support some of the above requirements.

The biggest adoption barrier for these types of tools will be similar to what organizations have to do with any communication method re: security, records management (e.g., e-discovery), compliance and other burdens placed on enterprise IM.

(Added after posting): One thing I forgot to mention - there will be a race of sorts between IM vendors/products and these social messaging tools. For instance, can Microsoft exploit its acquisition of Parlano and deliver it as a Twitter-like service within OCS and can IBM expand Sametime to emulate the application behaviors of Twitter-like tools. The rationalization will be along the lines of "workers already spend time in their IM client so why give them another communication tool and cause them to switch back-and-forth" or "let leverage the the infrastruction deployed which already handles the archival needs", etc etc...

BTW - no response yet from the vendor.

Project SocialSite

If you are (1) interested in "socially-enabling" existing web site properties or (2) tracking OpenSocial or (3) looking for a reasonable architecture to emulate as a template for internal efforts or (4) interested in what capabilities exist in the open source world for social networking - then you should be monitoring Project SocialSite.

Project SocialSite milestone 3 - The Project SocialSite Blog

The Project SocialSite team is pleased to announce a new milestone build, Project SocialSite Milestone 3 (download it here). With this build we are essentially feature complete for a first release and so for the next couple of months we will focus on fixing bugs, measuring and improving performance and making SocialSite ready for production.

We've made a lot of progress, but remember: this build is intended for TESTING ONLY! Do not use it in production as it has not been thoroughly tested and is known to be insecure. Here are the more serious of our known issues.

Project SocialSite milestone 3 - The Project SocialSite Blog

A Culture Of Ownership

Interesting read... point to ponder: "We have learned repeatedly that there is a pattern in the actions and activities involved in developing strong and adaptive ownership cultures. When an organization consistently builds and reinforces such a culture, it creates a competitive edge that is hard to replicate."

10 Reasons to Design a Better Corporate Culture — HBS Working Knowledge

Editor's Note: Why is it that many of the same companies appear repeatedly on lists of the best places to work, the best providers of customer service, and the most profitable in their industries? In their new book, The Ownership Quotient, HBS professors Jim Heskett and Earl Sasser and coauthor Joe Wheeler assert the answer lies in recognizing that strong, adaptive cultures can foster innovation, productivity, and a sense of ownership among employees and customers. They also outlast any individual charismatic leader.

But how can you as a manager create and nurture that special culture? In the following excerpt, the authors outline the top 10 lessons of the best practitioners, from ING Direct to Build-A-Bear Workshop to Harrah's Entertainment.

10 Reasons to Design a Better Corporate Culture — HBS Working Knowledge

Facebook IM Integration

First thought: If Meebo can integrate with XMPP systems - why can't Microsoft? Note: This is not the first time I've picked on Microsoft (and others) for ignoring XMPP-based IM.

Second thought: Why hasn't IBM integrated with Facebook's XMPP-based IM system?

Third (and last) thought: Given Cisco's acquisition of Jabber and efforts with WebEx Connect - you would imagine integration with Facebook as well.

I assume that Facebook might need to do something on its end to enable federation but if enterprise IM systems federate with consumer IM platforms (e.g., Yahoo!, AOL) then why not consumer social networking platforms that have embedded IM capabilities?

meeblog » Blog Archive » MySpaceIM, Facebook Chat, and Meebo!

It’s been a while since we added support for a new IM network. In fact, aside from our first Community IM network Flixster a month or two ago, the last networks we added were Jabber and Google Talk on September 19th, 2005.

Over the course of the day, we’re rolling out support for not one, but TWO new networks: MySpace and Facebook.  These are two of the biggest social networks in the world, and we’re sure many of you use them on a daily basis.  So click that “sign on to more accounts” link and let us know what you think! We’re always hard at work trying to create the best user experience possible, so please let us know about any problems you have or suggestions for improvements.

meeblog » Blog Archive » MySpaceIM, Facebook Chat, and Meebo!