Bill Ives reports that Serena Software corporation has adopted Facebook as its Intranet platform:

René explained that the firm is just over 800 employees but is still globally based (operations in 18 countries) with 35% of their employees working virtually. They are going through a major transition as they move from more traditional enterprise applications to web 2.0 mashups. The leadership wanted all employees to be better connected so they could be on the same level of understanding, excitement, and commitment to this transition. They also thought that using a web 2.0 tool, like Facebook, represented the best way to take the whole company into this new space.

Serena wanted to promote a greater connection between people. Facebook, which is both free and a great example of web 2.0, seemed to be the right answer. They established a private Facebook group for Serena employees and they built a few simple custom Facebook apps to better enable intranet functions. Now they provide links through Facebook to documents stored securely behind the firewall. Access is just as secure as any other method. Serena employees go to specific people to get relevant information. For example, René and his staff provide press clippings and the HR people provide links to benefits information. In each case you learn about the people providing the information through their Facebook profiles, and not simply the content, itself.

Serena also has public Facebook groups to connect with customers and the broader marketplace. René said that some of his customer conversations have now moved away from email. Clients such as Stewart Cohen at Arbitron and Rajiv Amar at Intuit connect with René and his colleagues through Facebook. René is also one of my Facebook friends and I have noticed that he is usually at the top of the recently updated profile list so I can easily see what he is currently doing.

Serena has found that Facebook has also helped them with recruiting. People send their resumes through Facebook and prospective employees relate their use of the same networking tool that they use in their personal lives. Employee morale has also increased, as well as employee retention, as the whole firm is better connected. A few years ago, many people thought that blogs and business did not go together. We have seen that perception change dramatically. I wonder if the same will be soon said for Facebook and other social networking tools. Thanks to Serena for proving us with an example.

Note the highlighted passage where documents are now accessed securely from Facebook and people are the conduit for information. I think this is a bold move and will be interested to see if it is picked up by other organizations.

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The National Book Awards were announced yesterday. Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke was given the award for fiction. I have read this book and it is a masterpiece. Highly deserved and highly recommended.

“Tree of Smoke: A Novel” (Denis Johnson)

The nonfiction award went to Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner. It is on the bed stand.

“Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA” (Tim Weiner)
Oprah announced her book club selection yesterday. I just finished this book and despite its 973 pages, it is a terrific read.

“The Pillars of the Earth” (Ken Follett)
And finally, I have to recommend a novel I am in the middle of reading as the best book of the year so far. The voice is thoroughly original and the story of a family from the dominican republic is wonderful.

“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (Junot Diaz)

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This insight is courtesy of Dave Winer via Scripting News:

The current product development process, that focuses on a few supposed geniuses and ignores the intelligence that’s in the user’s minds, same as with unconferences, is about to run its course much as the old style conference can’t possibly compete with one that involves the brains of the people formerly known as the audience. Think about it. There’s a big trend here, imho it’s the difference between the 20th and 21st centuries. In the past the flow of ideas for products was heavily centralized, and based on advertising to build demand. In the future, the flow of ideas for products will happen everywhere, all the time, and products with small markets will be worth making because we’ll be able to find the users, or more accurately, they’ll be able to find us. “Targeting” customers is the wrong metaphor for the future. Instead make it easy for the people who lust for what you have to find you. How? 1. Find out what they want, and 2. Make it for them and 3. Go back to where you found out about it, and tell them it’s available.

Advertising is on its way to being obsolete. Facebook is just another step along the path. Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information.

This is why I really like Facebook Beacon, the new service from Facebook that lets buyers notify their networks of their purchases. We are building this into Swift so that as you purchase your conference registration, you can opt in to notifying your Facebook network about it. I believe Dave Winer is right about advertising becoming information. Many of my buying decisions, particularly about “information” are based on the view of people I know. If Mari is going to a conference, I’m going to be much more likely to go. And if I’m going, Sylvia is also likely to go.

Compare this with the alternative: spam from the conference organizer and/or direct snail mail. The former is ineffective; the latter is truly wasteful. I toss all of the snail mail conference solicitations. I just don’t buy that way any more. But I am happy to be informed about people in my network doing things of interest. I do not view it as advertising. I do view it as information.

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The blogosphere is abuzz with the initiative announced last week by Google — Open Social — a system that allows application developers to create applications that work across all of the social networks.

This means that our new service for managing conferences –– Swift (in development) –– can be integrated into any social network using the Google API. This is good for us but also good for users in that your conference information can be shared across social networks.

And as Devin writes on his Quantum Creative blog, Google has developed a new Social Network in partnership with Carnegie Mellon, called SocialStream. SocialStream allows users to “seamlessly share, view, and respond to many types of social content across multiple networks.”

SocialStream is a research project and it is worth reading about the research and user studies done by the team to put it together. Here is a good articulation of what people need in terms of a social networking service:

* To access information with little effort
* The ability to communicate with all contacts, regardless of the sites or services they use
* To keep informed about someone through updates about their recent activity
* To have someone perform a task on someone else’s behalf
* To feel in control of what they are doing and their information
* To not have to go through redundant steps for routine tasks
* To have easy and understandable sharing

To get a good feeling for how SocialStream works, you need to download the demo movie.

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Andrew McAfee at HBS has a very good article in his blog on how social networking can strengthen weak ties among knowledge workers in networks. He writes:

Consider the prototypical knowledge worker inside a large, geographically distributed organization (all of what follows also applies for smaller and more centralized organizations, but probably to a lesser extent). She has a relatively small group of close collaborators; these are people with whom she has strong professional ties. Beyond this group, there’s also a set that includes people she with worked on a project with in the past, coworkers who she interacts with periodically, colleagues she knows via an introduction, and the many other varieties of ‘professional acquaintance.’ In Granovetter’s language, she has weak ties to these people.

Beyond this group there’s a still-larger set of fellow employees who could be valuable to our prototypical knowledge worker if only she knew about them. These are people who could keep her from re-inventing the wheel, answer one of her pressing questions, point her to exactly the right resource, tell her about a really good vendor, consultant, or other external partner, let her know that they were working on a similar problem and had made some encouraging progress, or do any of the other scores of good things that come from a well-functioning tie. By the same token, if our focal worker is a person of good will, there are many other people in the company she could help if her existence, work experiences, and abilities were more widely known.

Weak ties are important because they enable people to reach beyond their intimate circles of friends and co-workers to find people and information. Weak ties are differentiated from strong ties which are among people with long-term, sustained interaction.

In his blog article, McAfee goes on to explain how weak ties are strengthened through social networking:

As I wrote earlier, enterprise social networking software lets our prototypical knowledge worker stay in touch with a large network of colleagues, allowing her to keep up to date with that they’re doing, working on, and producing. It also lets her tell this network what she’s up to.

This might sound like an only marginally useful exercise, but it can in fact be quite powerful because it’s a quick and easy way to form connections and make associations that might not ever occur otherwise. I saw this firsthand a couple days ago when one of my Facebook friends told his network via his status message that he was going to accompany a foreign head of state to a high-level meeting on technology issues. Because I was only weakly tied to this person I had no idea that he was that well connected or interested in public policy. But as a result of his Facebook update, which took him about ten seconds to type and me one second to read, I now know who to reach out to should I ever want to dive into European IT issues, or desire an invitation to the Elysee Palace wink. SNS lets its users build bridges to new human networks, and to let non-redundant information emerge.

Facebook currently lets members ask their network a question, then collects their answers on one globally-visible page. I imagine that successful enterprise Facebook equivalents will have much more advanced tools to allow members to actively exploit their networks by asking them for assistance, pumping them for information, etc. I also imagine that they’ll let users post answers to their most frequently-asked questions, then simply point seekers to this resource. The facts that Facebook has opened its platform to outside applications, and that a consortium of social media providers anchored by Google and MySpace has just announced a common specification for developers, will no doubt hasten the arrival of robust enterprise SNS.

I think this is an extremely important insight into the value of social networking for knowledge workers and why everybody should be looking at joining a social network (Facebook now and more specialized networks that emerge out of the Google Open Social Initiative later). My own experience with Facebook and Linked In is that they are opportunistic tools. While I do have good friends on Facebook, I really use it to manage my weak ties — loosely track the interests and activities of a network of people with whom I have some kind of relationship — I met them at a meeting or conference — but with whom I am not going to be in regular phone or email contact. When I need something beyond my network of strong ties (like an introduction to the people who run SXSW), I turn to my social networks. And I have been very successful at exploiting the weak ties in my network.

In his blog article, Andrew talks about how other enterprise 2.0 technologies can be used to support other types of relationships, but I think the weak tie argument is extremely cogent and compelling.

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