Social Profiling has been one of the areas where I believe enterprises can learn from the consumer web. And with its announcement of the F8 Platform, facebook may now become the default choice for enterprises. There are already tens of thousands of company networks active on Facebook. And HBS Professor Andrew McAfee reports that Facebook offers “one-stop shopping for uploading media, blogging, calendaring, communicating, catching up and checking in, sharing information, etc.” McAfee goes on to say that these are all things that employees in a company want to do:

All of which got me thinking—isn’t this very close to what employes within a company also want to do? And if so, doesn’t Facebook provide a demonstrably powerful, popular, and easy-enough-to-use infrastructure for doing it? The site has been open to all (not just those with a .edu email address) since September of 2006. Some features still reveal its legacy as a networking site for college students, but it’s also now being adopted by plenty of folk who graduated long ago.

So what are the Enterprise 2.0 lessons from Facebook? I think one is the power of one-stop shopping, or an integrated collaboration environment. My current Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 interactions are scattered across a number of tools. While it’s not an overwhelming hassle to check them all throughout the day, it is a bit of work. I got the impression from Rachel and Sameer that a lot of undergrads are doing the bulk of their online interacting within Facebook. Shouldn’t we expect employees within a company to do the same, given the opportunity?

A more fundamental lesson concerns the incentives to participate in online communities. Some of the questions I get asked most often about E2.0 concern motivating and encouraging participation. Lots of companies have introduced technologies intended to facilitate collaboration, and most of them have been disappointed by the resulting levels of adoption and use. So collaborationware that spreads like wildfire is extraordinarily interesting, even before we delve into what it’s used for.

With the launch last week of the platform, Facebook just got way more compelling as a platform for enterprise 2.0. Now it will be possible to do things like link basecamp to facebook and pull news from a company's intranet onto facebook pages. Here's some information from around the web on the platform launch.

Today Facebook launched “The Platform”, a system enabling 3rd party companies to integrate their services inside of Facebook user pages. The platform will go-live later tonight. About 70 companies have apps set up already (more on those below). As explained in an excellent FAQ by one of Facebook’s 3rd party partners, SplashCast Media, this platform goes beyond the ability to post media from outside into Facebook and it goes beyond the previous Facebook API (a read-only Application Programming Interface (API) released on August 15th, 2006, and at the time also called The Platform). With the new platform, outside companies are now being allowed to deploy advanced functionality inside the Facebook site.

Facebook’s current user base stats - Techcrunch reported that Facebook is growing 3% per week (100,000 new users per day) and the fastest growing demographic is the 25 and up age group. Active users have doubled since Facebook expanded registration in Sept 2006. The international user base is still at an early stage, but obviously has room for large growth. Currently Canada has the most users outside of the United States, with more than 2.5 million active users; followed by the U.K. with more than 1.4 million active users.

As well as quantity, Facebook has on its side that it is a very sticky site - 50% of registered users come back to the site every day. Facebook is generating more than 40 billion page views per month, from 24 million “active” users - 50 pages per user every day, which is very very high. In comparative terms, Facebook is now the 6th most trafficked site in the U.S. and gets more page views than eBay.

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