Production Blog Reviews

Google seems to have quite deceptively hidden some information that Buzz is an automatic opt-in regarding “following”. Sure, you can turn it off, but it’s not intuitive and you are not pro-actively notified. Disclosure – to say the least – is done in an avoidance fashion. 

As I’ve said before – social networking providers, especially in the consumer space (Facebook, LinkedIn, and now Google), are in a dilemma. They need people to be open in order to create the type of network effects that support their agendas and business models. Only grudgingly will they be transparent when it comes to options available to manage privacy settings. They simply are not the trustworthy advocate for member privacy that they present themselves as when it comes to up-front disclosure, proactive notification and granular levels of consent (refer to Privacy & Social Network Sites: A Case Of Conflicting Agendas). 

No one should be surprised… disappointed, yes.

WARNING: Google Buzz Has A Huge Privacy Flaw

There is a huge privacy flaw in Google’s new Twitter/Facebook competitor, Google Buzz.

When you first go into Google Buzz, it automatically sets you up with followers and people to follow.

A Google spokesperson tells us these people are chosen based on whom the users emails and chats with most using Gmail.

That’s fine.

The problem is that — by default — the people you follow and the people that follow you are made public to anyone who looks at your profile.

In other words, before you change any settings in Google Buzz, someone could go into your profile and see who are the people you email and chat with most.

…..

A Google spokesperson tells us the followers lists are public by default so that people can quickly find new people to follow. Obviously, that’s a good thing for Google, which is hoping to get as many people using Google Buzz as soon as possible. It’s also meant to be helpful for users. And for those who are unconcerned with telling the world who they email most, it is. But for everyone else, it’s terrible.

It gets to a deeper problem with Google Buzz: It’s built on email, which is a very different Internet application than a social network.

The good news for Google is that this is a very easy problem to fix. Google must either shut off auto-following, or it must make follower lists private by default as soon as possible.

WARNING: Google Buzz Has A Huge Privacy Flaw

Source: http://twitter.com/CRozwell Expertise location enabled by social software – interesting article in Sloan Mgmt Review http://bit.ly/HSExW 6:54 AM Jan 25th from TweetDeck

I found this article from my new colleague, Carol Rozwell. It is an interesting article and worth reading. Perhaps though, it is too enthusiastic about social tools (blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging) in-and-of-themselves solving a complex challenge in many large organizations (finding experts/expertise). My comments might make more sense after you read the article (link below) – and it is worth reading by the way. I do believe that social environments can have a powerful impact on an organization’s “lateral connectivity” so to speak (vs. top-down). As background, I’ve looked at expertise location/automation systems since they emerged in the late nineties with Tacit (recently acquired by Oracle) perhaps being the most well-known.

1. Scarcity: In many situations – “the expert” is already very busy and/or there are not enough experts to go around. Having experts more easily discoverable and accessible may make matters worse for that individual.

2. Accessibility: In other situations, the expert is not visible due to policies that prevent communication between different business units, or for reasons related to security. That is why some expertise location products supported single-blind and double-blind filters to handle sensitive use case scenarios.

2. Ownership: Management might not want to make the expert visible, or share the expert with others in the organization. There could be a variety of reasons for such a situation. Politics of course could be one reason.

4. Incentives: The way managers (and expert for that matter) are incented to complete a project or task-at-hand may make that activity a higher priority than helping colleagues. Not all requests for expertise are simply Q&A resolved in a few minutes over the phone. Some interactions might span days and take up a noticeable amount of time or even a deliverable of some sort -without some type of compensation / reward / incentive / recognition (formal or social), the manger and/or expert may not engage with the requestor.

5. Time: It takes more time to participate in social tools. While it’s nice to think that people will blog frequently, take on the role of a wiki gardener, etc – these activities are often voluntary. Since participation in communities and social network sites are often at the discretion of employees – they may not have the time to contribute on any type of regular basis.

6. Personal Value: De-valuing personal brand might be another reason for these tools to be less-than-perfect. There is a very good argument that participation and contribution improves your personal brand but that argument is somewhat dependent on the culture of the organization. In some organizations that are highly competitive, or live in a world of sensitive intellectual property – there may be barriers to the type of open and transparent sharing that makes expertise easily discoverable. In “unhealthy cultures”, or when job longevity is a concern, people may believe that they are over-sharing what might be one asset that keeps them around. In environments that are “need to know” – information silos may prevent the type of lateral connections social environments might promote.

These are some of the reasons who organizational factors need to be considered in addition to tooling. I do agree the with main gist of the article and the proposed benefits in a general sense can be compelling. However, I typically find “expertise” over-sold when framed in techno-centric manners or when it is based on altruistic participation and contributions that may not exist in many workplace environments. I would also point out that participation and contribution in social environments is opening up an exciting area around social analytics. Topics such as social identities, social roles, reputation, and community equity will be fascinating to watch unfold.

Who Knows What? – Business Insight – Wall Street Journal / MIT Sloan – MIT Sloan Management Review

Every company has in-house experts. So why don’t they use them more?

In-house experts, with their specialized knowledge and skills, could be invaluable to both colleagues and managers. But often workers who could use their help in other departments and locations don’t even know they exist.

Talk about a waste! Because of an inability to tap expertise, problems go unsolved, new ideas never get imagined, employees feel underutilized and underappreciated. These are things that no business can afford anytime—let alone in this tough economic climate. Which is why so-called expertise-locator systems have become a hot topic in corporate IT.

Who Knows What? – Business Insight – Wall Street Journal / MIT Sloan – MIT Sloan Management Review

Earlier this year, Facebook’s Zuckerberg said that the age of privacy is over. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, LinkedIn’s Hoffman echoed that sentiment (view the video below) – musing that privacy was an issue of “old people” and that younger people are not so concerned over privacy. Many will disagree that privacy is a concern only to certain demographics and many will also disagree that people have to cede privacy simply to leverage social networking. It borders on the absurd and demonstrates either a lack of knowledge about a complicated challenge – or reveals the dilemma operators of social network sites face in terms of a credible business model. In this case, I believe it’s both. LinkedIn and Facebook simply do not seem to understand the social dynamics around privacy and compound the problem by implementing technology in a way that exacerbates the privacy challenge (perhaps more so in the case of Facebook).

In order to establish sustainable business models, operators of social network sites will continue to change terms of service and other policies to forcefully encourage people to become uncomfortably public. Twitter perhaps has avoided some of these issues because there are few controls over how people share information Twitter begins the relationship with its members in a more transparent manner – that ”everything is on the public timeline”. However, Facebook long ago set expectations by offering members a more complete set of controls for people to share information on a perceived limited basis. So when executives from consumer social network sites talk about privacy, I react to whatever they say with a health dose of skepticism. It is self-serving in fact for social network site execs to go on stage and diminish the value of privacy when they benefit by its very erosion (to the dismay of members).

The risks and rewards of sharing information online | John Gapper’s Business Blog | FT.com

It can be hard to find an actual disagreement at Davos, given the social effects of sticking a lot of people in workshops and asking them to flesh out the future of the world convivially.

So it was encouraging (for a journalist) to come across a clear and important divide in the first session I attended this morning, on internet social networks.

The topic was privacy, a contentious one for social networks such as Facebook (represented in the session by Randi Zuckerberg, sister of its founder). Facebook’s recent changes to its privacy settings to open up more content to the public caused a backlash.

Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, the professional social network, told the session that “all of the concerns about privacy tend to be old people issues.” Young people generally put mobile phone numbers on social networks because “the value of being connected and transparent is so high.”

The risks and rewards of sharing information online | John Gapper’s Business Blog | FT.com 

  Key Video From The World Economic Forum’s Social Networking Powerhouse Panel

NewsGator today announced that it will acquire Tomoye, a vendor that has long focused on enabling collaborative communities within the enterprise. I’ve only come across Tomoye in governmental settings but the vendor has been in the community space for some time. Tomoye has also been one of the vendors placing bets on SharePoint (as has NewsGator) so the deal is synergistic in that regard. In June 2008, I published a blog post Microsoft’s Maturing Social Computing “EGO”, that outlined different ways that vendors could integrate with MOSS 2007 to provide social computing capabilities. NewsGator and Tomoye were both on that list.

This is a prudent move by NewsGator. Social Sites frequently comes up in discussions with clients committed to Microsoft. Often, Social Sites has been viewed as an effective (tactical) “bridging” solution available to organizations in anticipation of the next release of SharePoint. Social Sites extends SharePoint by enabling “Facebook”-like features with an emphasis on communities (an area that Microsoft has only begun to understand and focus on with SP2010). The solution also leverages NewsGator Enterprise Server (a feed syndication platform).

The concern I have with NewsGator was how the company was going to innovate ahead of the shadow SharePoint casts on its partners in the social computing area. While this deal does not solve all concerns, acquiring Tomoye provides NewsGator with three things: (1) people experienced in the community space, (2) a more complete technology platform that compliments Social Sites as well as SharePoint, and (3) a stand-alone option for organizations not interested in SharePoint.

The deal potentially places NewsGator in roughly the same category as Telligent except right now, I mostly see NewsGator/Tomoye as an intranet play – and perhaps as an extranet play down the road as SharePoint improves in that regard re: SP2010. I do not see a consumer (customer-facing, social media, etc) play here right now. I would hope to see a statement of direction on hosted versions of SharePoint as well (i.e., BPOS). Telligent still has stronger analytics, a consumer facing solution, and more experience in the community space than NewsGator. But inMicrosoft-shops – I expect these two vendors to cross paths more often.

Overall – a pragmatic move by NewsGator and Tomoye but we should wait and see how an integrated solution pans out and some actually client implementations before hailing things as being successful.

Interesting application of SNA re: collaboration, transparency, etc. 

SAP Innovation: Social Networking at the Service of the French Public Sector | SAP Web 2.0

Alexis Naibo of the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center gave a demonstration of the SNA technology, explaining how it can import data from a wide variety of sources including internal business applications, corporate databases, and external interfaces. Once the data has been gathered, people can search for experts and discover relationships using an intuitive interface.

Today’s organizations are increasingly complex, with frequent reorganizations and many cross-functional teams and initiatives. The result is that the standard corporate hierarchy, which is often the only relationship information available, rarely reflects how people really work together. Many people today are active members of professional social networks such as LinkedIn or Viadeo, and want it to be as easy to find an internal contact as it is externally.

SNA has the potential to gives a more complete, 360 degree view of collaboration in the organization, leveraging the knowledge already embedded in corporate applications such as human capital management, customer relationship management, and project management systems.

The prototype makes it easy to understand existing relationships between people in much the same way that traditional business intelligence systems help organizations understand data stored in their corporate systems.

Unlike consumer-oriented social network tools that only support one type of relationship between individuals (“I know X”) and a limited, predefined collection of data attributes, SNA supports multiple different types of relationships between both individuals and groups, and organizations can easily adapt and extend the information and links contained in each individual’s profile.

Anything technology that touches on relationships between people requires sensitive handling, and SNA is designed to meet all the technical, legal, and organizational requirements for data security and governance, by incorporating fine-grained control over information access. In addition, the platform is designed to fit seamlessly into existing environments, supporting standards such LDAP and Google’s OpenSocial, and with integration to mobile devices and corporate email accounts.

Alexis explained that the prototype has been implemented as a beta project within SAP and has proved very popular with employees. As a standard part of the internal company portal, all SAP’s approximately 50,000 staff have access to the solution, and it is used thousands of times each week.

An open SNA demonstration is available online for anybody would like to understand the technology, at http://sna-demo.ondemand.com

SAP is still investigating how best to package and commercialize the SNA prototype, but there has been considerable interest from potential customers, notably as a seamless part of specific SAP business vertical and functional applications.

SAP Innovation: Social Networking at the Service of the French Public Sector | SAP Web 2.0

Demonstration Site:

Social Network Analyzer demo

Welcome to the Social Network Analyzer demo site

Social Network Analyzer aggregates existing enterprise data to display and discover organizational relationships. It automatically generates useful social networks that can be used:

• to find and connect people,
• to take actions based on individual/organization/company information,
• to send an email, meeting request or call a person,
• to build the right team,
• to better manage and control processes,
• to understand the relationships between suppliers and buyers,
• to analyze people’s information and organization using BI tools,
• to integrate social network information inside any application…

Social Network Analyzer enables stronger collaboration capabilities, more trust and better decision contexts!

Social Network Analyzer demo