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A lot of buzz about this today: it was just announced that Facebook will be allowing sites to start using its comments system instead of their own. What does this mean?
Well…
1) If you’re logged into Facebook, you can comment on any site that’s implemented Facebook comments without having to sign in again. Ok, that’s kind of cool.
2) Your comments on said site can be quickly posted to your Facebook wall, if you so choose. This is already available now, of course. But…
3) Because all this is tied together, your real identity will show on the website next to your comment. This includes your name, profile photo, and a link to your Facebook page. Hm. And…
4) Anyone who replies to your comment, whether on the public site or your Facebook page, will have their reply cross-posted automatically to the other medium. So if a friend replies on your Facebook wall, their comment will automatically show on the site you originally posted the comment to, and vice versa.
I don’t like this idea very much, and I’m not alone. Sure, this will cut down on spam and potentially insensitive/inappropriate comments from internet trolls, but that kind of stuff comes with the territory. If you want to be open, you need to be ready to moderate as needed. While this whole cross-posting/multi-channel/single-sign-in identity thing may sound cool, it’s really just good for Facebook and the sites they’re working with. More potential “likes”, shares, and distribution for content these sites are trying to push, and in turn Facebook gets to obtain even more information about you and target you based on sites you’re visiting.
Some sites including TechCrunch implemented Facebook comments as a test last week, and noted a reduction in spam/nasty comments, but also a reduction in the number of comments overall (see related reading below).
A lot of people are already skeptical about Facebook’s privacy and what they’re sharing with third parties. So I find it a little disturbing that I could comment on a friend’s wall post and have my words, profile information, photo, and the direct link to my page all displayed publicly without my knowledge. Presently when you’re commenting on Facebook, you’re ok with it because you know it’s a comment on Facebook. If this opens up, it has the potential to completely change the way people interact on social and public sites.
Steve Cheney (again, see related reading below), says it very plainly, and quite well: “Face it, authenticity goes way down when people know their 700 friends, grandma, and five ex-girlfriends are tuning in each time they post something on the Web.”
I can’t agree more. If you don’t know who’s going to see what you’re saying, or likewise, if you know that your true identity is going to be displayed in a public place next to what you’re saying and it’s going to be seen by a bunch of people you don’t know all over the world, you’re less likely to be open and say what you really want to.
Some people could say: “Well Yasean, if all this Facebook stuff bugs you so much, why keep using it? Just get rid of it.” I could do that, but I think the point many are trying to make is that we signed up for Facebook when it was a social network. You know, connect with friends, family, old acquaintances, etc. I love that part about Facebook and after so many years of being on it, extracting myself from that online network would be erasing a huge part of my everyday life (whoa). But it’s kind of scary because I see the company moving towards trying to monopolize the social web, which would create a paradox – as Steve says, “Facebook’s insistence that you have one identity across the Web is both short-sighted and asinine, and people I talk to are starting to realize this. Fact is, one social network will not rule the Web... People are simply way too social to allow that.”
Thoughts?
PS – some people aren’t aware of this, but Facebook doesn’t have you browsing securely by default. If you’re on Facebook and the URL shows “http” instead of “https”, you should switch your account preferences to browse securely by following the directions here. This was just rolled out in January 2011.
Related reading:
Steven Cheney/BusinessInsider -- How Facebook is Killing Your Authenticity
Geoff Spick/CMSWire – Facebook Offers Its Comment System to Any Website
Social business needs to be priced according to the growth of the network. The old enterprise software licensing model will not work. Nor will the simple SaaS model work. Both are based on presumed usage. Better to charge customers on a pay-per-use model — one what they use. That more accurately reflects the realities of growing a social network.
One of the major components of social business that most needs to be updated is pricing. While companies are learning to expect certain things from enterprise social networks, such as cloud-based personalization and functionality, all too often the method with which they pay for these services is antiquated. Traditionally, for an organization to use enterprise software, it has paid a fee that is determined by presumed usage. However, whether that organization’s usage was higher or lower, or if a higher or lower number of individuals than was predetermined use the software, the price remained the same. This appears to be unfair, both to the organization and the software provider. Also, it’s totally unrealistic to assume how much an organization plans on using enterprise software before that software is even implemented.
There’s a much better way: pay-per-use. Cloud-based service providers should work with a realistic pricing model, one that better fits the reality of “cloud economics.” Rather than assuming that a set number of individuals within the company will utilize the network, it makes much more sense to work from a pricing plan that is based on the actual number of users who sign-in to the network and use it regularly. Even if the network is built for a specific number of users, it should be flexible enough to easily accommodate new users. The cost of doing so is then worked seamlessly into the pricing plan.
It might be a difficult truth to endure, but if enterprise software is valuable, if it does what the software provider says it can do, then people will want to use it. The pay-per-use model is essentially a claim that the software provider stands by their product and believes that given the opportunity, people will not only use it, but encourage others both inside and outside of the organization, to use it as well. As the network grows, so does its value, which should be reflected in the cost of using the software.
In case you missed out on the excellent webinar presented by Clearvale and Human 1.0's Francois Gossieaux, you can check it out here: http:/
Among other things, Gossieaux discusses how businesses are taking advantage of social media, and offers insights into how companies must deal with things like trust, collaboration, information siloes and more in the 2.0 era.
While philosophical discussions and debates over the definition of social business continue, many organizations are looking for answers to specific questions; what are the procedures of social business and how can social media be utilized advantageously?
IT, HR and Marketing executives who wish to learn the answer to these and other related questions will greatly benefit from the live webinar titled: “Behind the Curtain of Social Business” that will take place Tuesday, December 7th from 2:00 – 3:00 PM EST.
Join BroadVision Clearvale and guest speaker Human 1.0 co-founder Francois Gossieaux as he discusses how hyper-social businesses function and what makes them successful.
For more information, or to register for the event, go here.
Note: this post originally was published on ReadWriteWeb:
Anyone who has spent any time in the enterprise 2.0 business - for me, it's been five years - will admit this, if pressured: by far the greatest challenge for the market is not corporate fear, cluelessness, or laziness - the usual scapegoats. The challenge is something far more elusive: getting people in the company to adopt the program meaningfully, persistently, and scalably. The truth is that many enterprise 2.0 programs fail to gain traction because they actually require work. In the enterprise, culture matters, and culture is not something you can easily add, game, or integrate, like the latest 2.0 widget.
But that's where the consensus ends. A large number of businesses have not been able to move forward with their enterprise 2.0 programs for lack of confidence on the right way to approach culture. One side of the consulting world has spoken up rather aggressively, with the message that culture can be addressed with something called "change management."
But the phrase alone is enough to scare off most of the market. It sounds too expensive - and it often is - and in many cases it just adds an unnecessary layer of complexity to a smaller set of things that can be done.
Here are a few things that I observed work well, sometimes with the support of people in the consulting community who see the need for a leaner, meaner approach.
It might seem like a rather obvious place to start. But many businesses jump on enterprise 2.0 projects without first asking what their constituents are actually doing. What tools do employees, partners, and customers use? What are they using them for? Think broadly about these two questions before conducting your "audit" - a fancy word for listening - because we tend to think narrowly about social media.
First, we tend to exclude services and tools that de facto are social, but because they originated in an earlier era, they do not enter our minds in this context. Second, we tend to exclude activities that are not directly related to communications and collaboration, but yet might have value to the enterprise social network.
Several years ago, when I was in the consulting business, a large telecommunications company asked my agency for general recommendations on their social strategy. In our audit, we discovered that while an overwhelming number of people inside their ecosystem were loath to contribute or comment on blogs and social networks, a great number spent time networking with peers on LinkedIn groups. Neither the tool - LinkedIn - nor the activity - professional development - made the initial list of things to examine in our audit. But after this small discovery, the project moved on a faster track for the company.
If the insights from the audit are good, an effective next step is to share them with managers in the company. Done right, this exchange of information does several things at once. First, it makes visible to the top of the organization what's happening at the grassroots. Second, it educates managers on the range of immediate tools and ideas it has at its disposal (recall the little epiphany we had at the telecommunications company). Third, it helps stimulate conversation about how the company might support a promising trend.
Some time after staffers at Best Buy began demonstrating the power of employee-driven communications - best evidenced in the now famous Blue Shirt Nation - my former agency prepared a number of documents, videos and other artifacts that essentially held a mirror to the organization (see Charlene Li's "Open Leadership" for more color and detail). This exercise helped pave the way for other projects at Best Buy that had the support of management. As many early thought leaders in the Enterprise 2.0 world have noted, the most successful projects start at the bottom but meet at the middle, with support from the top of the organization.
Sometimes, the mirror takes the conversation to another place: how the programs that a company strategically decides to support might have a catalyzing effect on the entire company and its ecosystem. In the world of political marketing, we've learned how a few very diverse groups - e.g., women, Latinos, progressives, conservatives - can rally to a cause, despite their differences.
Recent, I looked at how the 2010 elections inspired a number of operatives - on the Left and the Right - to court the big unwieldy Latino metatribe. Similar opportunities exist for large companies with diverse constituents who might come together if only they understood their part in the company's social agenda. Best Buy's Twelpforce - a big part of the company's public brand - comes to mind, and there are perhaps a few others that demonstrate this principle.
But a company may not even need to go there to enjoy the benefits of 2.0, nor will it need to spend much time to get something meaningful started. Best Buy and other companies that are featured at industry conferences as case studies all got started by listening, thinking and supporting.
That's the fastest path to adoption today, and I don't see anything better on the horizon.
I've been at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Santa Clara this week, and this morning I had the privilege of listening to Paul Greenberg, "godfather of CRM", talk about convergence of Enterprise 2.0 and social CRM. As a long-term advocate of social CRM, I didn't need convincing, and felt Paul summed it up best by saying "it's time to engage the customers not just the staff".
Ever since I first became involved in enterprise social networking, I have always been more interested in applications outside the company - this is what led to my paper Socializing Beyond The Enterprise. But of course, this external social networking needs to take place in the context of what is going on inside the company - they are two sides of the same coin.
It made me wonder how we ever reached a point where any sort of convergence was necessary. I am notoriously pedantic about language, and I noticed on more than one occasion, the social CRM guys referring to the Enterprise 2.0 guys as "you guys". How did it ever become "us and them?"
On one level, it doesn't matter, everyone is talking to each other now, all friends together, and there was a dedicated social CRM track within the conference. But look a little deeper, and there has been a noticeable impact on the software products being offered in these two areas. There is very little overlap between vendors of social software for the workplace and social CRM. And I find this very surprising.
BroadVision have always believed that the overlap between internal and external social collaboration is not only inevitable, but also highly desirable. So we designed Clearvale to have the concept of a social ecosystem - a set of overlapping social networks, each with a specific target audience but with the ability to share content and users between them.
And it doesn't stop there. For me, and I am sure many others, the highlight of the conference was listening to Geoffrey Moore speak at the Clearvale Second Floor event yesterday evening. He talked about the way global supply chains have become disaggregrated; while that's great when everything is working, it means that resolving problems when they occur is far more difficult. At that point, enterprise social networking becomes invaluable here as well. So a Clearvale ecosystem may include not just an employee and customer network, but also partner networks, supplier networks and maybe even dedicated networks for each of the most important customers, partners and suppliers.
Putting together this sort of an social ecosystem with a set of products that were not architected for this purpose is going to be really hard work. So before choosing a platform for your first enterprise social network, give a little bit of thought to how it will relate to your second. And your third. And your fourth.
(originally published in www.nojivetalkin.com)
If you’re a technology provider in the enterprise 2.0 market, it’s not enough to talk the talk
I’ve been in the software business for more than two decades. I have started companies. Sold companies. Took one public, and advised many more. If there’s one thing I’ve learned is that if you want to survive in this business, you must evolve. And that’s a principle that applies not only to my company — BroadVision, now entering its 18th year – but to anyone who wants to compete in our market. Because the business of enterprise computing has truly changed. It’s no time for half measures.
Early today, we announced a new iteration of BroadVision Clearvale, our cloud-based enterprise collaboration platform that we first introduced in May. In the short time that has passed since that launch, we have learned a lot. We learned what our customers – now in the thousands – see is unique in our platform. We have learned about some of the amazing things companies can do because of those unique differences (our latest offering, Clearvale PaasPort, is just one example). But most of all we learned that if we are going to continue to compete in this market, we are going to need to remain true to the fundamental tenets of social business, and not fall to the temptation of reverting to the ideas, business models, and words that controlled in the age of enterprise software.
I know about these temptations. I come from that age, and know just how easy it would be to package social business into an old enterprise software model. I call the temptation to fool ourselves — and to fool our customers — “jive talkin’.” Not just because we believe that one of our chief competitors has been talking that way; others have been talking that way, as well. Mostly, we call it jive talkin’ to see if we can start a conversation of a different character. A conversation about what social business really ought to be, starting with the most basic requirements.
(1) Social business needs to live in the cloud … natively. “Social business software” is an oxymoron. If it’s truly social – enabling you to connect with anyone, anywhere, on any device – it needs to live in the cloud.
(2) Social business needs to be DIY. The business world has already learned this from the world of blogging, microblogging, and consumer social networks. Starting an enterprise social network should be as simple as starting a simple blog.
(3) Social business needs to be priced according to the growth of the network. The old enterprise software licensing model will not work. Nor will the simple SaaS model work. Both are based on presumed usage. Better to charge customers on a pay-per-use model — one what they use. That more accurately reflects the realities of growing a social network.
(4) The social business platform can be the system of engagement for any system of record. It would be wrong to think of your social business platform in isolation of other enterprise systems. Ask whether your social business platform can easily integrate with these systems and add a social layer.
(5) Social business should not create silos. Instead they should help you manage your entire business ecosystem. In the offline world, most businesses operate in complex ecosystems of discrete networks of employees, partners, and customers. Ask whether your social business platform enables you to stitch those networks together and manage them for even greater effectiveness and efficiency.
(6) Social business networks should be able to connect with other networks. Not only are businesses at risk of creating silos within their own ecosystems. They are at risk of developing networks that are not discoverable by other companies. The solution is to invest in a world that is open, discoverable, and navigable.
(7) Social business networks should provide developers with an open, holistic platform to integrate any number of useful tools. The way we see it, the social network is the new UI, and the ever-expanding world of communication and collaboration tools have a home on the network.
We can’t pretend to have perfected an approach to each of these tenets. Nor can say that this is a final list. But let us know what you think, and we promise we will continue the conversation, and no jive talkin’.
We’re all very excited to have Geoffrey Moore as our guest speaker at the upcoming CSF event. Author of “Crossing the Chasm” and other innovative business books, Moore has been an important figure in helping companies bridge the gap between business and technology innovation.
Taking place at Tech Mart and coinciding with the closing of the second day of the E2.0 Conference in Santa Clara (Nov 9th at 5:30, click here for details: http:/
Gearing up for the event, I had the opportunity speak with Moore about education, self-organizing principals of the internet and how your age might determine which resources you utilize on the internet.
Are you reading anything right now?
I read a ton of stuff outside the business world. Almost all of it is set in other periods. I did my dissertation on Medieval Renaissance literature; I love reading stories set in other periods.
I also tend to read books about Darwinism and self-organizing principles, so it’s all very abstract. Right now I’m reading Stuart Kauffman’s book “At Home in the Universe”. It’s one of a series of books I’m reading on “how do systems of order evolve?” It does ultimately relate to business. When I look at markets, I try to look at them as evolving ecosystems.
Considering that almost anyone has access to a platform that allows them to be a critic and publicly display their criticisms, how would some of your favorite writers have fared today?
I am a great believer in the marketplace of ideas. I actually think that what is going on today is extremely healthy, although there is a lot of second-guessing and cheap shots. Because in the digital and blog media, there’s a kind of “punchiness” you need to cut through that rewards the clever remark over the thoughtful remark.
Take the book that Nicholas Carr is working on and the idea that the internet is dumbing people down, what he’s worried about is that the clever will take over the perceptive or the thoughtful. I’m not as worried about that. I think the exchange of ideas is excellent. Most of the deep exchanges I have do not happen over the digital medium. But most of the trend detections do.
What I love about the world we’re living in right now is you’ll get massive exposure to lots and lots of signals, which is great, because it’s hard to be parochial. The challenge is you need to get off the grid in order to think and reflect on what those signals are actually detecting or reflecting. The thing my colleagues and I try to give back to our clients is the ability to create time for them to reflect. We also try to do reflecting on our own so we can try to be helpful in developing these deeper patterns that can guide management decision making in the middle of very uncertain situations. You need to have a playbook to play from in these situations. You can’t develop those patterns in the middle of a noisy environment. You have to extract yourself from the noise to do that.
Darwin was a great example; he spent the last 45 years of his life on his farm. He was definitely removed from the noise. I think Darwin would not have done particularly well in this environment, he was very, very careful about how he published - just the opposite of Facebook.
What responsibility does a person have when publishing content on the internet? What responsibility does a person have when choosing which content to read on the internet?
There are a couple of things that will sort that out. There’s no question that in the short term, people are being only as thoughtful as they need to be about source.
The New York Times and a casual blogger can look the same in terms of how they’re represented on an iPad or a PC. One is a highly reputable, highly researched reflection and the other one could be just the random jottings of a person under the influence of a passion. Several things will sort that all out. On the user side, it will be the idea of karma; whatever you do, the results of those actions will come back to you. You can take that in a mystical sense, or you can just say, “what goes around, comes around.” What people will have to realize is, whether they’re accountable or not, the world will hold them accountable. There are reckonings if you are careless with your words. That’s one of the governors on the user-generated side of things. People who don’t care about that governor are going to get a lot of bad karma. Whether that sorts them out or not, who knows?
On the other hand, edited content has more precision, more elegance and it cuts through the noise in ways that are more attractive. So it will reassert itself. The challenge has been: how do you monetize it? Wikipedia is a wonderful example of how you can potentially self-organize content. It has its advantages and its drawbacks, but it’s certainly an example of how you can evolve good, trustworthy content. You can think about eBay ratings and Yelp ratings and things like that, but it's another way to cut through the self-serving behavior of people on the internet.
Do you use Wikipedia?
What I do is I use Google, and as often as not, Wikipedia is in the top 3 answers. So I end up going to Wikipedia, although I don’t start there.
What internet resources do you find personally valuable?
It’s interesting: most of my really valuable information comes directly from people. Partially because I’m at a stage in my career right now where most of the conversations I have with clients are at the higher level, so I get well-informed opinions from interesting people.
Do you have many conversations outside of the 2.0 realm?
Because of my age or demographic, social relationships are definitely 1.0.
A recent study of UK students suggests that young people feel detached and depressed when they unplug. Do you find time to unplug?
With joy. But understand that depending on what age you are, technologies are either inside of you or outside of you. For the first ten years of your life, it’s not technology; it’s just the world. So whatever you encounter, you don’t actually go through a technology adoption. However, at some point, you do organize your life around a set of technology and every subsequent technology is a disruption of that order.
So I organized my life in the 60’s around a typewriter and a pen, and much less TV. The personal computer and laptop were life changing for me and I absorbed them gratefully. The Blackberry was game changing for me, I absorbed it, but with some issues. It’s an interrupt driven medium and I am not an interrupt driven person. So subsequent technology I’ve had to hold at arms length; they’re not compatible with my mental rhythms. It’s what the world is about and where the world is going, and I definitely want to participate. But I can’t immerse myself in it.
How do people on the cusp of technological disruptions play into things?
Earlier, I said I Googled then used Wikipedia. If we were on the other side of the cusp, I would have said I checked Facebook, then Google, then Wikipedia.
When I grew up, you always sat by yourself and talking to another student about a problem was called cheating. When my kids grew up, they sat at tables with 3 or 4 other students and talking about a problem was called collaborating. The whole social networking approach to problem solving, even answering “what restaurant should we go to?” is done very differently on the other side of that cusp. I’ve watched this, and it’s clearly a transformative phenomenon. And I want to understand it as well as I can, but I’m clearly not a digital native; I’m a digital immigrant.
Does collaboration interfere with the positive impact that competition can have?
If the collaborative process does not produce a competitive result, then the organization that is failing that process is going to be marginalized. The organization that is creating better results will be prioritized. Now the argument about today’s business method is that in an outsourcing world, more and more companies are involved in getting an offer from inception to the market, then service and support. There are lots of companies involved in that, hence the need for more collaboration inherent in the systems. You can’t just walk your own path.
The reason I’m studying ecosystems is there is an inherent ecology in the current business model. So I think there’s reason to believe that people who are collaborating will be held accountable. If they’re not accountable, you don’t have to punish them because the world will punish them.
How does collaboration affect the way individuals are rewarded?
I grew up in a world where governments were working under a command and control model, a hierarchical structure with a top, middle and bottom. A lot of the rewards were based on either getting paid at the level you’re at or being promoted to the next one. A lot of behavior was perceived as game-behavior to get to the next level. In the collaborative model, it’s much more about being of service to something outside of yourself; service to a cause, an idea, a constituency, etc. So compensation models need to encourage people to be of service to something outside of the organization. Command and control tends to be of service to something inside the organization.
When the world changes, being internally focused is very dangerous. The collaborative model is very good at staying in touch with what’s outside the organization and going forward.
In my dad’s time, you took care of the corporation and the corporation took care of you. Nobody in my children’s world believes that. In my children’s world, you take care of yourself and you honor the corporation that employs you, but you don’t expect them to take care of you.
So there is a shift in the model of rewards, but I don’t think people should be disillusioned by it, they should be aware of it.
Do you see a trend of new tech leading to a return to traditional methodologies?
The locavore movement is a situation where technology and tradition are intersected. So locavore outcomes are being engineered through contemporary mediums: the taco truck is celebrating local ingredients and Tweeting about it.
Can you tell us about the book you’re working on?
It’s called “Escape Velocity”. We’re still playing with the title, but it’s about freeing up companies form the gravitational pull of last year’s plan. We do a lot of work with very successful franchises, and the challenge is: “how do they transcend success and incorporate the future?” Last year’s plan has enormous impact on next year’s plan in these companies, more so than anyone would like. So the issue is, how do you get out from underneath that?
After last month's Facebook dislike button scam, I enjoyed reading this article from The Next Web explaining why Facebook will never have real dislike button. They say "people simply can’t be trusted to use a dislike button sensibly". It's a slightly depressing observation to make, but for a consumer social network, it's probably true.
However, I would suggest that a dislike button is an essential part of a business social network. In any intelligent debate, there needs to be a way to express polite disagreement. How else can you assess how well your work was received if no one is allowed to criticise it constructively? Without this you end up with endless comment streams of "that's awesome!" and "you rock!" to a point where you only realise you've done something wrong when not enough people are telling you how awesome you are.
This is a subject we've discussed within BroadVision many times, and there's a school of thought which says that whenever you click "dislike" on something, you have to explain why in a comment. I understand this argument, but personally, I don't agree with it - if you don't have to justify why you like something, why do you have to justify why you don't like it? There are many occasions when I've read something that I don't agree with or don't like, but haven't felt strongly enough to get into a debate about it. This "casual dislike" is possible because Clearvale's like/dislike buttons are anonymous - I think this is a good thing because it leads to greater honesty and more accurate assessment of the worth of the content in question.
Although coming to terms with a culture that allows this sort of disagreement is not easy for everyone. I once clicked "dislike" on a blog post and within minutes, the author had added a comment asking "who did that?" This is one of the implications of the social web - anyone can publish, but they have to be a little more thick-skinned when they receive criticism. Clicking "dislike" doesn't mean I dislike you, it means I don't agree with one particular item you have written.
Many people talk about how the journey towards being a "social enterprise" is not just a question of installing the right technology, but a cultural shift. I believe that an essential part of this is to embrace the benefits of disagreement.
Maybe you agree, maybe you don't. But unfortunately you can't click "dislike" on this blog post. We chose to remove the dislike button from the Clearvale blog.... we just can't trust you to use it sensibly!
Uh, maybe, but only for some of the lessons it might teach
After a long week of PR of the unwanted kind, Facebook met with reporters yesterday to unveil a number of features that seem particularly well-aimed at quelling consumer discomfort with privacy issues. The two most noteworthy -- and newsworthy -- features are:
--you can now download all the data you have ever posted to FB in a neat little zip file. As Rob Pegararo of the Washington Post notes, this is "an enormously important change for Facebook and its users. It ensures that the communication that we have downloaded remains our property and free for our reuse."
--Facebook Groups, an old feature, will now behave the way most simple collaboration platforms behave -- they can now be private, and more feature-rich with some of the tools that have been adopted by ad hoc groups and small business.
Again, the timing and the substance of the announcements feel like a response to the negative chatter that the film has been generating. In fact, yesterday's press briefing was CEO Mark Zuckerberg's first outing since the film's debut. But for anyone in the business collaboration market, there's another, less-sensational story brewing here, and it is certainly worth following. A colleague asked me last night, will Facebook Groups disrupt the Enterprise 2.0 market? We'll have to wait and see, of course, but from where I sit, this has potential to disrupt the general business collaboration market because, quite frankly, this is Facebook, and they've got so many people on their platform. But the disruption is likely to play out differently across the various sectors of the market.
On the low-end, Facebook Groups is likely to put pressure on vendors that provide simple collaboration tools -- for example, 37Signals, Ning, and Google. We'll have to see how much pressure -- some of these tools are quite popular and quite good. But on the higher end of the market -- the part of the market that sells to the enterprise -- the disruption is likely to be more subtle. The enterprise will require a whole lot more functionality, and more in the way of privacy and security. But Facebook Groups could help evangelize the new architectural requirements for business collaboration. It wouldn't be the first time that Facebook taught the business community something about collaboration -- think of all the Enterprise 2.0 vendors who cannot resist telling customers that they are a "Facebook for the enterprise"? But the new lesson from Facebook -- obvious to some, but not yet clear to many -- is that collaboration with people outside your company needs to be in the cloud -- how else would you be able to freely connect and collaborate with them? And it has to be do-it-yourself, scalable, and in an environment that allows you to move easily from public to private spaces, and yes, manage all those spaces. Long-term, that's probably bad news for "software"-based systems (e.g., JIVE and Microsoft Sharepoint). But it's gotta be good for the cloud.
We'll be watching this closely, for sure. In the meantime, it will be interesting which story will play out longer after this week -- the story that Facebook is beginning to take privacy and consumer data more seriously, or the story that social-business software is being challenged by the social business cloud. I'm betting on the latter. And I'm betting on the cloud.
