21st Century Organization

"Should Your Business Be Friends with Facebook?"

To find out please visit TheAppGap blog where slides and the audio of our rich June 25 webinar discussion are posted.

Sincere thanks to:

• TheAppGap and Intuit Quickbase for hosting the discussion of findings from our Facebook Groups in Business Investigation for which the initial invitation to participate was posted on this blog October 2007
• Our audience and their thought provoking questions
• Members of our investigation team who contributed including calling in from South Africa and Europe at late hours.

Now please join us at TheAppGap to continue the discussion and address answers to the excellent questions audience members contributed.

In opening the webinar discussion about:

"Should your business be friends with Facebook?"

my blogging colleague Victoria Axelrod overviewed recent research and cases of companies from FedEx to Serena Software and Salesforce integrating Facebook into their strategies and daily operations.

In addition to addressing the webinar audience questions posted at TheAppGap I'm interested to discuss:

"What's ahead"?

For example, our webinar slides include Alexa graphs showing Facebook growth versus Twitter.

"What does this suggest about the future of consumer social networks and platforms to come?"

Finally, our Facebook Groups In Business Investigation (FGIBI) starting premise was that while Facebook may or may not evolve as a significant business platform, history tells us consumer technologies drive enterpise adoption so we should understand it. Hence:

"What are the important lessons from consumer use of Facebook for enterprise technology development?

What does the future hold?"

and

"How do organizations adapt to the reality of tools transience?"

There's so much to discuss at TheAppGap.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

<24 hours at Community 2.0: Revisiting Online Communities in Business 2004

Thursday May 15 in Las Vegas colleagues Victoria Axelrod, Bill Becker and I conducted our Social Capital: Glue for Sustainability Workshop as a post Community 2.0 Conference event.  Our sincere thanks to our participants who had the stamina to stay on after 3 days of meetings and contribute to conversations richer than we could have imagined.

As our workshop followed a "Community 2.0" Conference for reading matter on the flight out I dusted off a copy of Joe Cothrel and my 2004 Online Communities in Business Study.  Reading the conference program, and in the people I met during my less than 24 hours in Vegas, I saw our Report come to life.

Patti Anklam

It began at the Vegas airport connecting with keynote speaker Patti Anklam.  Participating in Patti's 2003 Emergent Learning Network opened my eyes to both the potential and value that comes from viewing organizations as networks, and intentionally putting human networks to work.  Patti was one of the 135 online industry professionals who contributed to our 2004 study.

Jim Cashel

Checking in at the Community 2.0 Conference as Wednesday's sessions were ending appropriately Jim Cashel, both a top 10 influencer and respondent to our 2004 study was the first person I met. (See Top Influencers Table page 21.)

Jim's Online Community Report and Sonoma Conference have become industry staples. His interview with the BBC's Robin Hamman in which Robin explains how the BBC must adapt in a world of low cost consumer participative media tools, remains for me the best ever explanation to media companies of how they must act. The interview is no longer online but from memory I recall Robin describing how the BBC must move from being "the conversation" to "lighting thousands of conversations".

Joe Cothrel

Joe's Community 2.0 presentation addressed "Successful Communities Start Here" and who better to do that.  Co-convening our 2004 study with Joe Cothrel followed years of bumping into each other at industry events beginning with the 1999 Vircomm in San Francisco. 

Collaborating on our study and presenting our findings at the Virtual Communities Conference, The Hague remains a professional highlight. (As this 2004 Virtual Communities Conference was Harry Collier and Infonortics last, our slides are no longer available online so I've reposted to Slideshare here.) Thank you, Joe.

Nancy White

Unfortunately I missed Nancy's Community 2.0 presentation that buzz tells me was a conference highlight.  Not surprizing of course.  Nancy (along with Howard Rheingold) emerged as the most cited influencers in our 2004 study. Thanks to Nancy's tools niftiness and willingness to share, her C2.0 Conference visualizations are available on Flickr. 

Amy Jo Kim

Also a favorite influencer in our 2004 study, the slides from Amy Jo Kim's Community 2.0 presentation "Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Social Software" indicate why.

Lee LeFever

I also missed Lee's presentation but he too contributed to our 2004 study, and emerged as a most-cited influencer that continues through his CommonCraft.

Open Source- Factory Joe- Chris Messina

In 2004 two OCIB survey respondents cited "open source" as an influence. 4 years later at the Community 2.0 speaker dinner I found myself sitting at a table with open source aficionado Chris Messina.

CNET indicates Flock, of which Chris was a founder, started early 2005, after our 2004 study. Consider the range of tools, not to forget "Open Social", that have emerged in these short 4 years.  Clearly sifting the technology candidates today to update the timeline (page 5) from our 2004 study would be an interesting challenge.

The Wisdom of 135 2004 Study Respondents

Revisiting our 2004 study 4 years on was especially thought provoking as the wisdom of our extraordinary respondents appears profound. The 5 themes that emerged from analysing the open text responses (Chapter 2:Strategies) were:

1. Think Local and Real
2. Get Networking
3. Empower the People
4. Raise the Bar on Data
5. Advocate and Educate

"Get Networking" and "Raise the Bar on Data" have directed my focus over the last 4 years. Both are central to the Social Capital:Glue for Sustainability Workshop that took me to Las Vegas. (Slides are posted here.)

For me the bottom line, attention getting findings in our 2004 study (that I suspect are closely tied) were:

"Most organizations can’t measure return on investment (72%)

Many people still don’t understand what online community is (72%)"

I couldn't help wondering if Community 2.0 Conference attendees were surveyed about their ability to measure the value created through their initiatives, whether the situation had changed.

Rereading our 2004 report, page 11, I was intrigued to find we had concluded:

"Conceiving of online groups as networks that is, larger, more distributed, with a looser set of shared goals or understandings―may better prepare us for developing and managing online groups in the years to come."

From my experience studying organizations as networks over the past 5 years, and as we watch enterprise platforms incorporate social networking capabilities, that call is even more relevant today than it was 4 years ago. I wonder what you see?

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Thinking about Open Network Business Models: Your Insights Invited

Victoria Axelrod (my 21stCenturyOrganization blogging colleague) and I are on deadline for Effective Executive, an India based business magazine published by ICFAI University Press. Working title of our piece is:

Open Net-Working Organizations - Co-generating Knowledge and Innovation

Our article explores themes we've blogged about here over the past 2 years, research for two recent Inside Knowledge Magazine articles ("Broadcasting Innovation: Organising to Connect Intelligence" and "Prediction Markets: Co-creating the Organisation", my Enterprise 2.0 Summit Hanover presentation, and our forthcoming Social Capital: Glue for Sustainability Workshop, May 5 in Las Vegas, following the Community 2.0 Conference. (As Victoria previously wrote please use code SPKRM2005 for a friends 20% discount if you can join us.)

We like to practice what we advocate so as our article is about open, networked, working we're sharing our article outline here and inviting fresh perspectives and contributions of interesting sources.  Our article focus reflects we are contributing to a special Effecutive Executive Knowledge Management edition.

Overview

"In a March 2007 "Long Live KM" online discussion through the AOK Group, Robert Buckman (described by Infoworld as "KM's father figure") wrote:

"Jerry, thank you for the kind words, but I never did try and manage knowledge. What I really tried to manage and nurture was a culture that would encourage and expand the flow of knowledge. It was because economic value could only be obtained in our environment when knowledge moved across the organization in response to a need."
~ Bob Buckman, March 6, 2007 AOK Yahoo Group Post

Two decades since Buckman's pioneering work to encourage and expand knowledge flow and innovation, taking a network view of organizations and using the tools of Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) facilitates creating open, collaborative organizational cultures. More importantly, an intentional open net-working approach aids understanding how "social capital value" is created in organizations through dynamic interactions and relationships between all of an organization's participants and stakeholders. Examples from our research and experience of organizations using new open network models to promote knowledge sharing, innovation and value creation are included.

While we will revisit open working models investigated in our Inside Knowledge articles:

• Qualcomm's Venture Fest using prediction markets
• The Bordeaux Energy Colloquium, a Think Tank Network,
• Executive to Executive Marketing Networks as implemented at Avaya
• Procter and Gamble's "Connect and Develop" and innovation marketplaces like Innocentive

we're also exploring approaches including:

• Boston Consulting Group's use of mapping tools to understand networks around patents and identify high potential talent. (Did they really just use Touchgraph as Manuel Lima suggests commenting on the Business Week article?)
• IBM's use of open network initiatives including sharing research with partners and clients. (Thanks to John Maloney for this paper find.)
• The innnovative and business critical collaborative knowledge sharing initiatives presented at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit, Hanover.

In writing about open network approaches we're alert to investigating when such models appear not to work effectively. Hence we're striving to understand what caused Boeing's decentralized 787 supply chain to become a critical factor in the company's high profile and costly aircraft delivery delays.

Yesterday discovering Robin Teigland's presentation on Slideshare, (displayed as a "Related Slideshow" to my Hanover presentation), I was reminded of the potential value that can be created through openness in knowledge sharing. This is especially so when you intentionally start by "looking around" as John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid encouraged in "The Social Life of Information", 2000.

Hence this blog post sharing our article themes and ideas. Any and all reactions to our focus and examples, insights into Boeing's supply chain issues, and or fresh insights and interesting open net-working business models are welcomed and appreciated.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Enterprise 2.0 Summit Hannover Report & References

Thanks to Bjoern Negellman, Kongress Media, (organizer) and Simon Wardley (event facilitator), I was a privileged presenter, in the inaugural European Enterprise 2.0 Summit convened as part of CEBIT, March 4 in Hannover.   (Given COMDEX no longer operates in the United States, experiencing the CEBIT scale and vendor commitment was eye opening.)

Blog reports from Emanuele Quintarelli, François Nonnenmacher, Martin Koser and Robbert Homburg tell the event story that began with Simon Wardley reminding us how technology forces drive change, followed by Dion Hinchcliffe's keynote and Euan Semple's BBC lessons. Scenes from the event are captured on Flickr.

For me the event nuggets came in descriptions of serious business wiki applications by:

• Kenneth Lavrsen, Motorola A/S, wiki-ing quality standards documentation
• Wieland Stützel, Fraport AG (Frankfurt Airport), cross organizational knowledge sharing
• Diego Gianetti, BTicino S.p.a. (an Italian producer of communication, distribution and energy control systems) describing "Sul Campo" a sales force community of practice
• Cedric Blum, Société Française de Radiotéléphone Service Client (a French mobile carrier) explaining how using a wiki helps customer service solve customer problems and get more from IT

For those who stayed late into the day here are the books mentioned in my session introduction:

• Yochai Benkler, Wealth of Networks
• Rob Cross & Andrew Parker, Hidden Power of Social Networks
• Ron Burt, Structural Holes
• Lowell Bryan & Claudia Joyce, Mobilizing Minds
• Dan Tapscott, Wikinomics

Also referenced were:

• Patti Anklam, Net Work author
• Valdis Krebs, pioneering ONA practitioner
• InnoCentive and Harvard researcher Karim Lakhani et al's investigation of factors in problem resolution
• Procter & Gamble's Connect & Develop program

My presentation builds on a co-authored article "Learning through Participation and Connecting Intelligence". and two Inside Knowledge Magazine articles, Broadcasting innovation: organising to connect intelligence and Prediction Markets: Co-creating an organization's future (to be published).

    

     The Valdis Krebs admonition cited:

"You do understand Metcalfe's law does not work for social networks, right?“

came in response to reading our "Connecting Intelligence" article and Valdis's concern we had not made this point clear enough.  Metcalfe has openly asked us all to better understand the power of his law applied to social networks here . Colleagues and I have just completed an investigation of Facebook Groups in Business that points to the complexity of social network growth as Metcalfe discusses.

Thank you to everyone involved with Kongress Media's Enterprise 2.0 Summit for the rich conversations that I look forward to continuing, especially with Simon Wardley regarding his newly minted term:

"STRUCTURACTION"

Slides from my presentation are posted to Slideshare here.

   ~ Jenny Ambrozek

2008 And Both. Davos. Collaboration Innovation. Competing on Analytics

The face-to-face media buzz event that was Davos 2008 is ended, but the exchanges live on in the resources available at http://www.davosconversation.org/. These provide an opportunity to pay closer attention to this year's theme, "Collaboration Innovation".

The Financial Times February 5 Review section headlined:

"INCOVENIENT TRUTHS: HOW MARKET TURMOIL AND A ROGUE TRADER ROCKED DAVOS."

captured a theme heard in much media coverage of this year's event: that real world concerns overtook the intended focus on "Collaboration Innovation".

Given the seriousness of financial market news events co-inciding with Davos, the distraction is understandable. However, I'd propose that allowing today's events to draw organizations' attention away from "collaboration innovation" happens everyday in enterprises large and small.  And among the many reasons is a significant inability to measure how value is created through "collaboration innovation".

Clearly the five CEO's participating in the Davos Collaboration Innovation session experience the benefits, and also understand the challenges. However, in the hour video of their session I heard no specific mention of how success is measured.  There was talk of successful partnerships and new product creation but beyond that?

My interest in measuring how value is created through collaboration dates from the Online Communities in Business 2004 study Joe Cothrel and I co-authored.  Our respondents told us:

"Participation in online communities, networks, and teams is growing (82%)"

but

"Most organizations can’t measure return on investment (72%)"

I thought about this finding recently reading Bill Johnston's community ROI post. It describes a range of indicators from an April 2007 ForumOne report most notably that:

"Only 22% of respondents had clear ROI Models"

The Online Communities in Business 2004 findings about lack of ROI measures was a driver for me in co-convening the Facebook Groups in Business peer-to-peer research experiment. Colleagues and 10 volunteer Facebook Group owners are tracking activity to explore if, and how, business value is created. Our initiative is work in progress but it's quickly become clear if you are seeking networking measurement nirvana, Facebook doesn't deliver.

Noticeably absent listening to Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport duelling January 11 (at the FAST Forward Blog) about the impact of Enterprise 2.0 tools in organizations were numbers to support either case. Given Tom Davenport's latest book is "Competing on Analytics" might we not expect more?

Please understand. I am not at all suggesting business value is not created through interaction, as McKinsey argues, and collaboration. Quite the opposite. Rather, if you accept common wisdom that businesses operate on what they can measure, doesn't it seem reasonable that lack of measurement tools handicaps "collaboration innovation"?

No doubt the emergence of more quantifiable collaboration platforms ranging from idea marketplaces like InnoCentive and prediction markets (as reported in the recent Google research paper), is making the power of "collaboration innovation" more visible. From attending the recent NY Mashup Summit there appears promise in emerging mashup platforms to dynamically improve data collection, and analysis. Still, given the power to collaborate and innovate that global connectedness allows, isn't it time to pay closer attention to developing and using measures for the value created?

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Social Media Club Gathering 20071211: A Gorilla on YouTube

Howard Greenstein labelled the event "What worked and what didn't in Social Media in 2007?" and convened an impressive collection of entrepreneurs and people who work at helping traditional organizations adapt to the impact of social media upon them. 

The most interesting discussion thread for me came via Jack Myers, (CEO Myers Publishing, author of the Media Business Report and "Virtual Worlds: Rewiring Your Emotional Future" published in May).

With TV industry experience starting at CBS, Jack proposed a potential outcome of the current writers strike is fundamentally changing the traditional television broadcasting industry. Given the impact of digital technology on transforming the recording industry, an entirely reasonable prediction.

Also discussed was the bottomline for organizations. As participative technologies empower individuals to become publishers and broadcasters via the Web, how do traditional media companies engage and develop new revenue models to play and sustain in this environment? No doubt the arrival of Chris Anderson's new book "Free" late 2008 will promote that dialogue.

It was interesting looking around the room and seeing who was present and not. My limited survey found technology entrepreneurs, consultants striving to help companies find their way in a low-cost consumer-created content world, and publishing industry companies although not the industry leaders.  I hadn't realized that Business Wire, the event host, is a Berkshire Hathaway company.  I'm betting there was no company in the room with more than 1,000 employees. While new low cost participative media technologies are nipping at the heels of larger organizations, their ability to adapt and leverage the possibilities is so much harder.

Not to say of course that some companies, with support from outside agencies are not figuring it out. Today's Financial Times (print p17) carries a story headlined "Gorilla drums up sales for Cadbury" with a photo of their YouTube favorite video captioned: "Sweet music". The story indicates the company reported the Gorilla advertising company "had helped it recover market share in its UK confectionery business." Tellyads voted the ad number 1 in 2007 based on their 185,000 requests since September 2007.

The Youtube video is here with 1,449,759 views, 3216 ratings, 2,442 comments, 4 honors 5 links and favorited 7,824 times. Sites are linkng to the Youtube ad and there are a string of remixes.

Of course the FT Cadbury Schweppe's story goes onto mention other forces at work challenging the company to change including an oil funds backed activist investor and rising commodity prices.

No doubt leveraging and adapting to new low cost participative media technologies is just one dimension to making an organization 21st Century sustainable.  Much more challenging is changing organizational structures and business models that demands serious heavy lifting and will.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Yale Symposium on Reputation Economies 20071208

      Yale Law School Reputation Economies Symposium organizers are congratulated on a stellar event that assembled leading thought leaders on an array of legal aspects from privacy to trademark and copyright laws, and more. The speaker and panels links give a taste of the day.  The position papers (available through the panels link) make interesting reading.

       While each session provided interesting nuggets the following stood out for me:

1. Professor Beth Noveck, Director, Institute for Information Law and Policy NYLS addressing the issue of who owns an online reputation? 

        Context was the case of eBay removing a member's profile and reputation rankings built over 8 years. The member was selling an Avatar that Sony claimed violated their copyright/trademark violation.

         Professor Noveck's position paper argues reputations are not individually owned:

"This requires, first, that we recognize that in on-line settings reputation is not the creation– and hence not the exclusive property – of the individual who is being rated nor of the publisher who supplies the tools for reputation-creation. Rather, it is the community in a social network that creates reputation.* My eBay score is the collective product of the members who contributed to that reputation.

The group should have a voice in how that reputation is treated and the legal treatment of reputation should recognize the community, not the individual and not the technological intermediary, as the rightful “owner” of reputation."

2  Alessandro Acquisti, Assistant Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon, School of Public Policy and Management

       This presentation addressed "Searching for Privacy and Looking for Fame: Thoughts on (Bad) Reputations, Online Social Networks, and Behavioral Economics". It added interesting dimensions to the Facebook Groups in Business Study peers and I are conducting.

3. John Clippinger, Senior Fellow Berkman Center for Internet & Society at The Harvard Law School       

    Clippinger directs the Higgins Project, "a program on open security and digital identity that gives people control over their personal information". He is the author of A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity, Perseus, Public Affairs, 2007.

His position paper argues:

"What is important about the example of reputation systems in biology for human based reputations – off line and online – is that they are constantly evolving and that the locus of control is with the individual, at the edge of the network.  Although there are aggregation or “mashups” of individual entities resulting in social networks that take on their own identities and reputations, the viability of these aggregated networks is dependent upon the persistence and stability of the individual entities." ~  John Clippinger

A couple of take-aways

i.  The array of issues and early days in evolution of reputation economies.

     It is clearly early days in understanding how reputation economies work and the legal aspects.  On this though I have to respectfully question Facebook advisor and retired Federal Trade Commission member Mozelle Thompson's observation about Facebook confronting legal issues at the edge.

      I suspect my PRODIGY alumni colleagues who were lawyers deeply involved in translating existing laws into day-to-day practice two decades ago, and influencing early legislation regarding online services, may argue significant foundations have been laid.

ii.  I will never count technology company behemoths IBM and Microsoft out.

Both were present revealing their constant attention to the 'edge" and research commitments

      IBM was represented on the last panel of the day by Bob Sutor, Vice President Open Source and Standards, Chairman of the IBM internal Corporate Standards Advisory Committee and the Open Source Steering Committee.
His speaker description indicates he is:

".. the executive responsible for driving and executing the cross-company business and technical strategy for open standards and open source as they relate to software, hardware, services, vertical industries, and emerging markets. In particular, helps move IBM from its traditional technical and intellectual property approach to one where business exploitation of standards and open source for greater customer value is paramount*, especially in vertical industries and emerging markets."

    Microsoft was the event sponsor and represented by Microsoft computer science PhD. and Senior Researcher Darko Kirovski  whose speaker bio reveals his interests and accomplishments as:

" Web services including reputation networks, reliable computing, system security, multimedia processing, and embedded system design*. He has received the 1999 Microsoft Graduate Research Fellowship, the 2000 ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference Graduate Scholarship, the 2001 ACM Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award in Electronic Design Automation, and best paper awards at the ACM Multimedia 2002 and the IEEE MMSP 2006. He has authored more than 100 journal and conference papers and filed more than 40 patents."

While Saturday's rich conversations focused on the legal dimensions of reputation economies, for me it is the interaction between technology driving change, human behavior, and the legal system striving to adapt that is really interesting.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

  * My highlighting   

Prediction Markets: Connecting Intelligence in Organizations

The prospects for wider adoption of prediction markets in organizations have intrigued me since attending the New York Prediction Markets Cluster event early 2006. Searching for prediction market applications to reference in our recent article a 2005 Bo Cowgill piece on Google's use was the most readily accessible. 

The Consensus Point hosted Prediction Market Conference September 24 in New York revealed I was clearly not looking in the right places.  Hats off to David Perry and Ken Kittlitz for a rich gathering and update on the prediction markets landscape. You answered my questions and more about what companies are using, for what business objectives, and why prediction markets are not more visible.  Following are some highlights.

1.  Hearing Robin Hanson Speak

It's interesting knowing about a tool and then discovering oneself in a room talking with the person credited with being the "the first to set up and run a corporate prediction exchange —at Xanadu, Inc., in April 1989". Robin Hanson is an "associate professor of economics at George Mason University, and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University." His presentation is laced with graphs and focuses on how value is created. Devoting time to exploring his presentations is recommended.

2. Getting Insight into How Leading Companies are Applying Prediction Markets

Hearing the experiences of companies the caliber of GE Research, Misys Banking Systems, NBC Universal, Best Buy and Qualcomm using prediction markets to improve decision-making and project management is attention getting. That answered my question about what companies are adopting.  Learning Consensus Point serves companies that do not reveal prediction market applications for data sensitivity and competitive intelligence reasons helps understand why this tool doesn't have a higher profile.

3.  Hearing from "The Wisdom of Crowds" Author James Surowiecki About Challenges 

Essentially implementing prediction markets challenges traditional hierarchical organizational structures, notions of power, and mindsets, "the deep seated impulse to find the one person with the right answer."  I heard Surowiecki say:

"Prediction markets are not just about improving decision-making. Also about transforming organizations as a whole."

4. Listening to Jed Christiansen and being Reminded of the Growing Demands for Analytical Skills in Organization

Jed presented his London School of Economics thesis study results investigating prediction markets to group forecast rowing race winners. (His Mercury's Blog includes video presentations explaining prediction markets and how they can help companies.)

Listening to Jed talk about calibration, accuracy measures, scoring rules, trader distributions, data scatter, linear best fit, and probabilities you cannot escape recognizing the increasingly quantitative talent demands of 21st century business.

5.  Noting the People Connecting Impact of Prediction Market Initiatives

A thread among the presenters was how prediction markets expand people connections in organizations.  Through market participation employees from disparate parts of organizations discover unknown people with similar interests and unexpected talents.  Market activity becomes a thread in employee conversations. Previously unrecognized expertise emerges through successful trading and listing on leader boards.

Smart companies are exploring use and adopting prediction markets to connect intelligences and improve decision-making and forecasting. But doing so demands leadership that is not threatened by discovering what the collective wisdom can tell them, especially when the information shared is not what they want to hear.

Considering Robin Hanson's first corporate prediction exchange dates to 1989, and Ken Kittlitz has been developing exchanges for fourteen years, gives some insight into the realities of putting prediction markets to work in organizations.  Has their time come?

~ Jenny Ambrozek

 

Thinking YOU can Ignore Facebook? Lessons from Revolution Health & A Space

     Not sure how it is for you but for me it seems everywhere I go, there is Facebook. TIME Magazine has pronounced "Why Facebook Is the Future".  The Financial Times under a headline "Route to social success" interviews Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg about his plans for Facebook and reports backers "think it is worth $8bn-$10bn".

     The New Zealand Herald is focused on the productivity issues with employees devoting work hours to Facebook costing companies billions. The New York Times reports a successful viral consumer campaign started in Facebook that has Cadbury Schweppes bringing back the Wispa chocolate bar on a test basis. Martha Stewart has a Facebook profile.

     Already in July Scoble and Calcanis were discussing "Facebook fatigue".  Edge technology users in my circle are already abandoning Facebook because it's too many clicks.  It will be REAL interesting seeing whether the member and site activity growth since Facebook opened their platform to developers May 24 can continue.

      Online all aspects of Facebook are dissected ranging from the privacy issues associated with Facebook exposing member profiles to search engines to whether the arrival of the older crowd will deter founding college student members from using Facebook. A flurry of Facebook Groups trying to figure out Facebook for doing business have emerged.

      What's occupying me however are recent conversations with people who think they can ignore Facebook. Thanks to Mark Meaney, a new found Facebook friend, this past weekend I discovered Revolution Health's use of Facebook Groups to reach their audiences.  Smart I thought.  Knowing Revolution Health's CEO is AOL founder Steve Case, I'm paying attention.

       Then through Valids Krebs Network Weaving blog a fascinating post on A Space, a  social networking platform for the intelligence industry the Financial Times reports is being  developed by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence.

       For me whether or not Facebook emerges as THE social networking platform for business is still to be decided. I don't know but I'm betting, (based on industry history), that leading enterprise platform providers like Microsoft and IBM, as well as startups we are yet to learn about, have developers working away to claim that space.  Hopefully they are also working on providing automated activity data collection for group administrators.  In my view if Facebook wants to be a serious contender for business networking, metrics are essential.   

        Meantime rather than ignore Facebook I'd encourage all organizations to experiment and see how a Facebook type platform might create value for your business.  And the main reason is what Valdis Krebs highlights in his assessment of whether A Space will succeed:

"IMHO, just putting social web technology into a strong culture, averse to sharing and connecting, will not change how things get done. MySpace and Facebook worked because they were dropped into cultures eager to connect. The IC needs to get the sociology right before they support a new culture with new technology."      

Making successful use of a Facebook like platform is not about the technology. It involves new mindsets and openness that in my experience seriously stretch traditional organizations.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

From Videotex to Facebook: 22 Years Online. So What's Changed?

Thanks to Nancy White and Jo Murray, editor of The Knowledge Tree, the Australian e-journal of learning innovation, with colleagues Victoria Axelrod and Kiki Mulliner I've had the opportunity to co-author a piece on "Learning through participation and connecting intelligence: experimenting with a wiki to co-create". 

The article documents some of our lessons learned through the process but remarkable for me was the excuse to look back at my 22 years online, beginning at the Australian Caption Centre in 1985. Thanks to farseeing Caption Center founders Adam Salzer and Alexandra Hynes I helped create "Edutel", an educational content service for the launch of Viatel, a U.K. Prestel standard videotex service. As this was pre-Web there are few remnants to tell the story. Peter Hosie's reflections on the potential of videotex for education capture the times.

Coming to the U.S. I was fortunate to find my way to the Trintex offices in White Plains, NY where a group of smart, dedicated people were working hard at pioneering the NAPLPS based online consumer service launched as "PRODIGY" in 1988. 6 years later, December 1994, with AOL nipping at our heels, PRODIGY became the first online service to integrate a Web browser. 

In 2007, creating a Facebook 21st Century Organization Group with minimal effort and functionality I never imagined 20 plus years ago, I asked myself the question J. C. Spender uses to provoke discussion at New York Knowledge Cafe gatherings:

"So what's changed?".

Here are some reflections.

1. Today's Invisible Servers, Cables, Programmers and Code

I've heard Cliff Figallo tell wonderful stories about The WELL's early days and heroic efforts to keep the service up as new members joined, including tending the server dressed in formal attire. As PRODIGY grew each morning attention turned to the previous day's peformance levels.  There was a scheduled downtime during pre-dawn hours for maintenance. 

Today we just expect to be always connected wherever we are, and on the move without cable tethers. Failure to do so, like Skype's recent outage, becomes a news event. How many people ever consider the server network Google has around the world ensuring 24x7 access? Wikipedia cites 450,000 servers in data centers worldwide.

Similarly, where are the programmers?  No doubt behind the sites I log into every day ranging from Earthlink, through Facebook, Google,Typepad, Technorati, etc are hundreds of programmers working to add functionality and service stability. But I don't know them, the programming languages they use, or where in the world they are.  At PRODIGY programmers were highly visible, essential and valued colleagues with names, people whom I'm delighted to see when PRODIGY alum gather to mark another year.

And where is the CODE?  I created our Facebook 21st Century Organization Group without seeing a line of code. I considered this while applying John Pederson's rule for making del.icio.us tags display in a Wikispace, to our ConnectedIntelligence wiki. 

2. From Information Sparsity to Overload and Abundant Connections

Did anyone else notice the number of people admitting they were taking time away from being connected to reflect this summer? I sympathize with Stuart Henshall's frustration expressed in a Facebook wall post that as he contributes "to more and more "Streams" with twitter, facebook, social bookmarking, blog posts, wiki pages etc and I'd like to capture that all in one place." In 2007 with the exponential power of network laws at work, our skills are constantly being stretched to learn new tools and manage through this abundance.

3. TIME and ENERGY Become Increasingly Precious Resouces. Knowing when to say NO to Connectedness

Anders Hemre first focused me on the importance of allowing TIME for THINKING during a 2002 article interview.  With "REFLECTION" the topic of article co-author Kiki Mulliner's dissertation, we spent time during our article writing considering the importance.  In a highly connected world, as TIME becomes an increasingly precious resource, knowing when to say "NO" to connectedness to devote hours and ENERGY to creating value from available information and connections seems to me an essential skill.

4. The Technology is Catching Up to Support People Networking, Where the Real Value of Connectedness Lies

As PRODIGY yielded to AOL's mid 90's ascendancy on my office wall was a quote in a Jupiter Report citing Bob Smith from AOL saying:

"AOL understood people come for the content and stay when they get connected."

AOL's focus on chat and IM revealed that understanding.  Reports from the recent Always On Stanford Summit point to what's ahead online.  At minimum, as Facebook is revealing, the technology is catching up to support people connecting where early online services, from The WELL forward, suggested the real value of connectedness lies.

This post has grown long. I also pondered what HASN'T changed.  Grist for another time. 

Thank you for reading if you've persevered this far.  Your reflections and experiences about the evolution of online, and implications of connectedness, invited and welcomed as comments.

~ Jenny Ambrozek