plaxo vs facebook vs linkedin - social network showdown

Andrew McAfee recently added to the Serena Facebook-As-Intranet case study. Which prompted an SNS review thang in my head.

I still have issues with Facebook. I think it's a bit of a mess and doesn't give enough control to the individual in terms of identity management. 80 million active users (according to Facebook) would disagree. However it is still a trail-blazer in terms of application development (even if most of them are really annoying).

LinkedIn has 24 million members (according to LinkedIn). If anything, LinkedIn is not messy enough. The Q&A functionality is nice. LinkedIn is the kind of social networking tool you could introduce to your mother (after your rebellious phase of wearing a leather jacket and hanging out with MySpace). As I once got a job via LinkedIn, I can't really complain but there is so much missing from here - e.g. some network visualisation stuff would be cool. LinkedIn seem to know this and have added status updates and some feed integration. But no one would make LinkedIn their intranet.

Plaxo is surprising me. After it gained an uneviable reputation as a spam machine a few years back, I went back in there a few weeks ago to be confronted with LinkedIn's cooler cousin. The design is smooth and spare. And the Pulse page pulls together your connections' blogs, Twitter, Flickr, del.icio.us, etc. Again - a bit lacking on the visualisation front.

I think it takes a particular kind of organisation to have Facebook as their intranet. However there are an increasing number of organisations creating SNS applications within the firewall. Over the next 12 months, we're definitely going to see links between these internal applications and the external ones listed above. And that's without mentioning the acquistion of VisiblePath by Hoovers....

Presencing Portals

Historically, portals have been all about aggregating content & applications into one easy-to-digest package, more or less personalised to the preferences of the user. Typically this has been about access to data or content rather than access to others.

What has impressed me about Facebook and MySpace (to an extent) is a different version of portal that they offer. MySpace's blogs and Facebook's status sections create a kind of presence portal. I can see where people are, what they are up to, etc. Jasmin highlights some potential privacy pitfalls with this. And they are potentially serious.

I could talk about Privacy 2.0 here but that would be a trifle onanistic. I think we need to get a better handle on our own privacy here. What we tell people. We need to get back in touch with the lost art of keeping a secret. The pleasures & securities of mystique. The more opportunity there is to open ourselves up, the more pleasure there is to be gained from refusing to do so.

From a business perspective, we may be interested in letting others see where we are and what we are doing. Or we may not. Depending on culture & objectives. Depending on who is sticking dollar bills in our garter belts.

Web 2.0 is nothing more or less than a strip-tease (a lucrative industry that I have always been too unnerved by to engage with).

But which side of the lights are you on?

More on social software visualisation

Laurel goes nuts for socialistics. Facebook sees more & more innovation around "consumer SNA" - already noted here. These aren't analytics per se - no betweenness or centrality measures here. But they are giving people the new best friend of analytics - visualisations.

Ross talks about some specialist social networking sites here and their enterprise brethren here.

The collision of social networking tools with visualisation tools will accelerate the uptake of both. Those who have been banging on about SNA for the last 20 years may find themselves the flavour of the month. Interest in SNA/ONA got a resurgence in the corporate world a couple of years ago but now seems to be moving into the consumer environment*. I think this new round of social network mapping will be extremely messy & lacking in rigour. But it will also be a fascinating group experiment as individuals try to make sense of this stuff. And manipulate for their own ends (human beings are like that). And get caught out by incorrect inferences (as anyone with SNA experience can tell you - the map is not the territory).

*For once moving in the opposite direction to other social software trends.

How Facebook will kidnap your children & demand a $3 trillion ransom*

Ah, mX wanders back into E2.0 territory yet again. And the results aren't pretty.

Surfcontrol make internet filtering software. So when they say that the internet is evil, we should believe them. And their research says that Facebook will cost Australian businesses $5 billion (link to SMH article). Using their rigorous scientific methodology, I can predict that coffee will cost Australian businesses $20 billion. Seriously, if 3.2 million Australian workers (say 4 from each of the 800,000 workplaces in Australia) spend approximately one hour a day drinking coffee with each other (about the same time the Facebook obsessives are on there, degrading themselves) then that means that coffee is four times as damaging to the Australian economy as Facebook.

Ban coffee now!!! As Dr Richard Cullen says, "It's only a matter of time before a security loophole is discovered and exploited." That soy decaff latte could be the last thing you ever drink!!!

Now the report has several anonymous interviewees who have apparently slacked off using Facebook and similar tools. I have no doubt that this goes on. But this kinda misses the point. If your employees will goof off at the drop of a hat, what does this say about the morons that hired them and are supposed to be managing them? N.B. I don't have a problem with workplaces monitoring the internet usage of their employees generally. Just so long as the policy on what is permissible is widely accepted and doesn't stop people from doing their jobs - which may legitimately involve networking with people outside the organisation.

Hat tips: Ross & Stephen C

*Based on extrapolations from the author's imagination.

UPDATE: Damn, Stephen L got in with the coffee gag first. That man is too hot to handle...

And Laurel's anti-MSM rant is pretty good. MSM's main selling point is supposed to be its objectivity and fact-based approach to news gathering - and yet it seems it will print any old rubbish on a slow day.

Well at least Surfcontrol got some cheap publicity, that's the important thing, eh?

Facebook network mapping

Ton Zijlstra points me towards the SNS application I have been waiting for 3 years for. Someone has twigged that not only can you build social network maps from social networking software - but that this can be useful for individuals too.

Jack Vinson has also picked up on this and comes up with some good upgrade suggestions:

• navigate my network's connections (see their wheels), mostly for fun
• merge the wheels of a limited number of people, again for entertainment

This isn't a full-blown social network mapping application - in effect it only models an ego-centric network (modelled around me in the example below). Where is might become interesting is to map the members of a particular group or network and those immediately related to them - i.e. those who might be potential members of that group...