Social networking

Overheard - Web self-service

“More and more organizations are finding that, while a dedicated customer service staff is still an integral part of any company, customers can do a fine job answering questions and service issues for themselves and for one another.” Barney Beal, SaaS CRM vendors get serious about Web self-service features

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is Web self-service.

LinkedIn - social networking for business

I have a strong belief that starting businesses during an economic downturn is the exact right time to do it because it gives you runway. It’s harder to raise capital, but if you can do it, it gives you an advantage. Reid Hoffman, as quoted in LinkedIn’s startup story: Connecting the business world

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is LinkedIn.   If there’s an economic downturn, it makes a lot of sense to put your energy into a business model that helps people connect professionally.  You make money…they find a job or a person to fill a job…everyone wins.

LinkedIn’s membership goals are pretty high — they’re after 1 in 4 people of the world’s population.  Currently, LinkedIn is gaining members at the rate of 1 per second.  That’s a million new members approximately every seventeen days.

The business, which is profitable, has three revenue streams: subscriptions on the site (providing better search functionality and a better way to contact members at large in the database), advertising (their demographic is similar to that of the Wall Street Journal) and a SaaS for recruiters and departments of human resources called LinkedIn Talent Advantage.

Face-Off - Do you really have the right to expect privacy on the Internet?

Privacy, the Internet and the workplace — should boundaries exist?

Dave McMahon and Margaret Rouse take sides on whether or not employees have the right to expect privacy on social networking sites.

Dave McMahon “Be very careful of what you put on the Web. Anyone can see it.” I hear these words over and over again. I go out with friends on Saturday evening and on Sunday morning I urgently call them and ask them not to tag certain pictures because I’m afraid that my boss will see them. I’m lucky to have a good job and I would be foolish to risk it. It isn’t fair that I can’t let my friends post pictures of the fun time we had, or tell stories on my blog about our antics. It’s unethical of my boss to browse my personal life and use it to judge me as a professional. Twitter, professional blogs and even Facebook accounts are being recognized as useful resources among corporate teams — that is until I want to use my account for social purposes. It becomes a professional trap when employers utilize the same forums to monitor social lives and take disciplinary or discriminatory action. We don’t always choose which photos of us are tagged on Facebook and I find the intricacies of some Web 2.0 applications make it easy for private conversations to become public knowledge quickly and, often times, accidentally. It is wrong to punish promising professionals for a conversation they thought was private. Employers justify monitoring with claims that watching employee blogs or Facebook accounts is an excellent way to catch them in a lie. Last week’s “sick day” was actually spent on the beach with friends? However, I think these practices create more problems than they solve — like mistrust and more dishonesty. I believe these monitoring practices make a respectful and clearly understood separation between personal and professional lives nearly impossible. Putting an end to these monitoring practices is the first step toward creating a more comfortable and more productive workplace. Dave McMahon is an aspiring writer and literary professional. He is currently an Editorial Assistant at Tech Target while finishing a degree at Northeastern University.

Margaret Rouse “You have zero privacy anyway. Just get over it.” - Sun Chairman Scott McNealy 1999 In 1993, the New Yorker published a cartoon by Peter Steiner. Two dogs were sitting in front of a computer workstation. One dog was sitting in a chair typing and the other dog was sitting on the floor. The dog that was typing turned and explained “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The cartoon quickly became a classic, in part because the dog spoke the truth. In 1993, the Internet was anonymous. Nobody used their real name. Like with the CB radio fad of a generation before, early Internet adopters had handles — only this time around they were called screen names. We weren’t Bob Smith or Nancy Jones. We were Bulldog123 and ByteMe99. What changed? The Internet evolved from a text-based medium to become a multi-media environment — and we started to shop on the Internet. And the dollars brought marketers. And marketers, who needed to see what we were doing on the Internet so they could market to us more effectively, brought cookies. And although some of made a fuss, most of us accepted their little bits of code, gladly trading privacy for a smoother user experience. And then the Dot Com bubble burst. Which made us all get real. Literally. Although the sock puppet from Pets Dot Com was looking for a new job, it was clear that the Internet itself wasn’t hurt. It just wasn’t a place for ByteMe99 anymore. The party was over. Thankfully, a certain search engine’s growing popularity helped us adjust to using our real names. We even got a new verb out of it – googled. We googled our friends and business contacts and found there were benefits from using your real name. People could find you. You could find them. And then social networking sites came along and boosted the whole thing up a notch. Today, everyone not only knows you’re a dog on the Internet – they know what breed of dog you are, how old you are, where you live and whether your master is a fan of “Ceasar’s Way” or “It’s Me or the Dog.” Ok. I’m exaggerating. Maybe. My point is that as the Internet matured and proved to be more than just an interesting diversion, it also became a public place. And because it’s public, there’s no such thing as privacy. If you were at a football game and you spotted your boss across the field and didn’t want him to see you, you wouldn’t say “Hey, you can’t look at me because I’m not at work,” would you? No. That would be ridiculous. Instead, you’d do what any normal person would do in that situation. You’d hide. I’m not kidding. How do you hide on the Internet? First, take the time to manage your privacy settings. Use private posts on Twitter. Limit what co-workers and friends of friends can see about you on Facebook. Uncheck the box that says anyone can tag you in photos or write on your wall. And don’t post anything that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the New York Times. Or do what we all did back in 1999. Use a screen name for your personal networking. Because there’s no such thing as privacy on the Internet. Margaret Rouse is a technical writer with more than twenty years experience.

Overheard - Twitter privacy issues not new

“Twitter has been around for years, but only recently has it become the tool-de-jour for people in the public eye. Along the way we’ll see the inevitable story of losing a job because of Twitter, a marriage broken up over Twitter, probably a tear-jerking tale of a family being reunited by Twitter, and then something new will be on the scene.” Nick Gillard-Byers, as quoted in Indiscreet Tweets

All the hoopla about Twitter brings back memories of what it was like when the Internet was new.  Right now there are concerns about privacy — next step will be cries about how advertising has ruined a good thing. Because you can bet your bottom dollar that ads will be coming to Twitter.

Overheard - Twitter’s Black Monday

I have a feeling we’ll start seeing phishers adding Twitter to their stable of targets in 2009. That’s unfortunate, because it almost certainly means we’ll be hearing the term “twishing” being bandied about this year. Brian Krebs, Phishers Now Twittering Their Scams

Microbologging service Twitter has had a bad start to the new year. First, members started receiving phishing messages and then some prominent user accounts were hacked.

Is it a right of passage — a sign that Twitter is now deemed valuable enough that bad guys want to expolit it?

Maybe.

More likely it’s just a sign that Twitter needs to pay more attention to security.  Businesses have been embracing Twitter lately. I wonder if this week’s breaches will cool the love affair? I’m guessing yes. Look for “enterprise ready” versions of the service coming to a firewall near you.

Overheard: Social networking? SHOW ME THE MONEY!

Facebook’s real problem isn’t privacy, it’s monetization. Dave McClure, as quoted in Social-networking sites work to turn users into profits

 In many respects, it is the same query that dogged portal companies in the mid-1990s and search engines in the early ’90s. Some were sold. Some went public. Some went belly up.

The ongoing challenge is to concoct a potion — be it through banner ads, premium subscriptions or licensing agreements — that no one has perfected. Facebook, crown jewel of the field, is valued at $15 billion but barely turns a profit.

Overheard: 75% of businesses still block instant messaging

According to a report released at Infosec 2008, nearly three quarters of businesses are blocking the use of free instant messaging (IM) applications. Asavin Wattanajantra, Infosec 08: Businesses clueless on instant messaging

The report says that retail and distribution companies were most likely to block instant messaging, while financial companies were most likely to allow instant messaging ( but they monitor its use).

Ironically, I read the article above the very same day there were blogswarms about Apple adding an instant messaging application to the iPhone — and Microsoft announcing that their Windows Live Messenger campaign has raised $1.3 million so far.

Tom Newton from Smoothwall (they commissioned the report) says that as time goes on, business will have to change. He points out that while today’s network administrators didn’t grow up with instant messaging, today’s kids are skipping right over email and using a combo of instant messaging and MySpace or Facebook to communicate with friends. I can’t argue with that. It’s that way in our house.

So here’s my question: With a whole generation (think consumers) growing up using instant messaging, how come it’s the only major communication service that isn’t interoperable? And might that have something to do with business not “getting it?”

Overheard: ValleyWag explains why Robert Scoble got banned from Facebook

ValleyWag: Why Robert Scoble got banned from Facebook

Illustrious egoblogger Robert Scoble, the Paris Hilton of Silicon Valley, has committed the geek equivalent of a DUI. He has, by his own admission, violated Facebook’s terms of service, and had his account suspended — 5,000 friends and all. Scoble’s sin? He used a script to export his Facebook address-book information to Plaxo, which runs a competing social network.

Since Robert Scoble was banned from Facebook, there’s been a lot written about the need for data portability in social networking. If social network data was portable, that would mean that if you had a MySpace account for several years but then decided Facebook was “the cool place to be” you could migrate all your stuff over to Facebook without much, if any, effort. Other than people who’ve climbed aboard the social networking bandwagon big time, does anyone really care?

Steve O’Hear’s been thinking about this for quite awhile. He asked four leading developers in the social networking space about how important data portability was to the future of social networking. The best answer IMHO?

Marc Canter (CEO of Broadband Mechanics): “Users do care [about portability] if for no other reason than they’re lazy and they don’t want to have to create all those relationships and upload their photos all over again.”

Overheard: Social network IPOs

“The IPO market is pretty shaky right now, but that’s not stopping Classmates.com from trying to capitalize on the social networking mania. Is the stock a buy? We’re not billionaire investors here, but we’d rather buy a $12 hot dog.” Betsy Schiffman, Classmates.com IPO: What Are These People Thinking?

Overheard: Tim Berners-Lee on social graphing

So the Net and the Web may both be shaped as something mathematicians call a Graph, but they are at different levels. The Net links computers, the Web links documents. Now, people are making another mental move. There is realization now, “It’s not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important”. Obvious, really… I called this graph the Semantic Web, but maybe it should have been Giant Global Graph! Any worse than WWW? Tim Berners-Lee, Giant Global Graph