(1 votes, average: 7 out of 10)
Loading ...They loved the old Facebook because it was the people’s intranet
Believe it or not, 500,000 people CAN be wrong. The new Facebook isn’t that bad.
That more than half a million people signed up for a group called “I prefer the old Facebook” is proof only of the resistance to change and the tendency for most people to think they could design a Web site better than an actual Web designer. Rather than get into the finer details of what Facebook is doing, however, I realized that the outcry greeting its new look is actually a good opportunity to reflect on what the old version did right, and why social networking hasn’t resonated within enterprise IT the way its promoters insist it should.
The first thing I missed about the new Facebook (and which wasn’t hard to find once I looked a bit more carefully) were the status updates. These had traditionally been running down the right-hand navigation bar, but now either populate the main news feed in the centre, or don’t appear unless you look under the specific “Status Updates” tab running across the top.
These updates are the lifeblood of the site for me, and I’m sure for many others. Even when they descend into something akin to bad haiku or competitions for the most ironic one-liner, they are reminders of people I might not otherwise think about on a regular basis. Occasionally they deliver real news (a baby being born, an upcoming surgery, a new job) but more often describe a state of mind. Sometimes it’s actually used as advertised, to report an activity recently begun or completed. This is the value of social networking that’s as plain as the nose on a CIO’s face, but which few of them seem capable of recognizing.
Forget Twitter and its brethren, forget LinkedIn (true, it’s more of a business tool, but as social networking goes it’s more like a collection of business cards and resumes with little of Facebook’s conviviality). Think of how, right status updates prominently displayed, those working across companies – vendors, their customers, suppliers and partners – could keep on top of what they’re doing and become friends. Not simply “connections,” which suggests an ends to a means, but friends in the sense of people who get to know one another by interacting, whether it’s an actual business transaction or not.
Status updates are as close as we get to real-time information on the development of our Facebook friends’ lives. IT management, at its best anyway, is about collecting, organizing and helping businesses act upon real-time information. Perhaps we should stop thinking of creating social networks on a company-by-company basis the way individual companies own Web sites but think more broadly. Instead of simply pouting about the new Facebook, make some constructive suggestions about how to improve it. Then use that as a template to design something even better for business users. Not another portal for an employer. An intranet for an entire industry.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...The silent death of killer apps
Several months ago Canadian social networking observer Jevon McDonald wrote a post I can’t quite get out of my head.
Titled *cide, he discussed a trend on his SocialWrite blog about the tendency to abandon popular applications that end up taking too much time to manage. These included declaring “e-mail bankruptcy,” and abandoning all attempts to respond to messages, or deleting your Facebook account (which, as Mark Evans pointed out, is not that easy to do).
Jevon came up with a name for this tendency: friendive-compulsive disorder, which is caused by adding too many people as your friend early on in a social network. I love this concept, because it may offer some clues as to why so few companies have really integrated social networking and Web 2.0 into their business processes, and why even more traditional applications don’t deliver.
Social networks are opt-in by their nature. That means they are also opt-out as well, and companies may be reluctant to harness their business processes to software platforms that may stretch their users’ time commitments to the breaking point. Information glut was bad enough. No one wants to deal with the response glut of so many social networking services.
On the other hand, many social networking services are free (or so near-free) that they require almost none of the capital investment that businesses once funnelled into so-called knowledge management systems, which also depended on a certain threshold of employee participation to be truly useful. Many of these systems were also poorly designed compared to many social networks, and the friendive-compulsive disorder is the kind of problem many CIOs (or CKOs, if they still exist) wish they’d had. Just as Twitter may not have imagined there would one day be users committing Twittercide, however, companies routinely fail to anticipate the level of attention a successful application will demand of their users.
In most cases, acceptance of a particular application isn’t an option. No one is allowed to declare sales force automation bankruptcy, or CRMicide. Closing the online accounts you use to submit reports or conduct transactions on behalf of your company usually means you are leaving that company. The more closely aligned with business objectives a piece of software is, the less it looks like a social networking service.
And yet we all know of applications that are used improperly, or used at a minimum to spare the time it takes to properly fill out forms, check off boxes or save a file into the appropriate area. The only thing worse for businesses than an application users can opt out of is an under-used application, one which the company blindly continues to upgrade and support despite the shortfall in its potential value. The death of a Facebook account isn’t much of a loss. The half-life of many other business applications is a much greater tragedy.
