Social Networking and Collaboration Tools for Enterprise 2.0

Social Networking and Collaboration Tools for Enterprise 2.0 John Breslin [email_address] http://www.johnbreslin.com/ Enriching the Internet Experience 18 th October 2007

A little bit about myself! 1998: Forum* on the Irish Games Network 2000: boards.ie Ltd. Formed 2004: Researcher at DERI, NUI Galway 2008: 10 th Anniversary* Hello, World! 1990: VMS MAP.COM

What I’m going to talk about today…

Collaborating with Social Media and Web 2.0

Social Networking Services (SNSs) So Far

Enterprise Social Networking Services

The Future of Social Networking Services

1. Collaborating with Social Media and Web 2.0

A move from the Web to a “social web”

The New Yorker, 1993

“ On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

The New Yorker, 2005

“ I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking.”

What is social media?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media

“ Social media uses the ‘wisdom of crowds’ to connect information in a collaborative manner.”

“ Social media can take many different forms, including message boards, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video.”

Popular examples of social media sites:

Wikipedia, MySpace / Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, SecondLife, Upcoming, Digg / Reddit / StumbleUpon, Flickr / Zooomr, del.icio.us, World of Warcraft, Amazon

Related terms:

Web 2.0, social web, social software, social networks, social news, social bookmarking, user-generated content

What is Web 2.0?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

“ Web 2.0 refers to a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services - such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies - which aim to facilitate collaboration and sharing between users.”

The term Web 2.0 was made popular by Tim O’Reilly:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

Features / principles of Web 2.0 (O’Reilly)

The Web as platform

Harnessing collective intelligence

Data is the next “Intel Inside”

End of the software release cycle

Lightweight programming models

Software above the level of a single device

Rich user experiences

The long tail

Web 2.0 and social media in my simple terms

Users

Content

Tags

Comments

Users post content

Users share content

Users annotate content with tags

Users browse content via tags

Users discuss content via comments

Users connect via posted content

Users connect directly to users

Content can be…

Books Amazon

Discussion postings Blogs

Bookmarks del.icio.us

Photos Flickr

Music Last.fm

Movies Netflix

Events Upcoming.org

Places Dopplr

Products Microsoft Aura

Articles Wikipedia

Blogging: a phenomenon for a new generation?

Cincinnati Enquirer, October 2004

Overview of blogs

Weblog , web log or simply a blog is a web journal

“ A web application which contains periodic time-stamped posts on a common (usually open-access) webpage”

Individual diaries -> arms of political campaigns, media programs and corporations (e.g. the Google Blog)

Citizen journalism…

Posts are often shown in reverse chronological order

Comments can be made by the public on some blogs

Latest headlines, with hyperlinks and summaries, are syndicated using RSS or Atom formats (e.g. for reading favourite blogs with a feed reader)

The state of the blogosphere from Technorati

70 million blogs

The blogosphere is doubling in size every 320 days (slowing down a little)

120,000 new blogs are created each day (i.e. 1.4 new blogs every second)

1.5 million blog posts are made in a day (i.e. 17 posts per second)

Around 5-10% of new blogs are spam blogs or “splogs”

35% of blog posts use tags

Definition of wikis

A wiki is a type of website that allow users to easily add and edit content and is especially suited for collaborative writing

The name is based on the Hawaiian term wiki-wiki, meaning “quick”, “fast”, or “ to hasten ”

It amasses to a group of web pages that allows users to quickly add content and also allows others to edit the content:

It relies on cooperation, checks and balances of its members, and a belief in sharing of ideas

Some uses of wikis

Wikis are being used for:

online encyclopaedias

free dictionaries

book repositories

software development

project proposals

writing research papers

event organisation

The Wikipedia: from Gaeilge to Esperanto

Typical wiki page

Flickr, share your photos

SlideShare for presentations

The social bookmarking service del.icio.us

All Consuming, what have you read today?

Upcoming event listings and meetups

Dopplr for managing travel, tracking friends abroad

You can even share your favourite walks…

… and find others with like musical interests

TouristR for travel destination stories and info

The machine is us/ing us

http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v =6gmP4nk0EOE

2. Social Networking Services (SNSs) So Far

We all live in a social network…

… of friends, family, workmates, fellow students, acquaintances, etc.

Friend of a friend, or “dúirt bean liom go ndúirt bean leí”

Theory that anybody is connected to everybody else (on average) by no more than six degrees of separation

Everyone’s connected…

Milgram’s six degrees of separation theory

Sociologist Milgram conducted this experiment:

Random people from Nebraska were to send a letter (via intermediaries) to a stock broker in Boston

Could only send to someone with whom they were on a first-name basis

Among the letters that found the target, the average number of links was six

Stanley Milgram (1933-1984)

And now a major motion picture, kind of…

Six Degrees of Separation (1993)

“ I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names... It’s not just big names — it’s anyone. A native in a rain forest, a Tiero del Fuegan, an Eskimo. I am bound — you are bound — to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people.”

Play from 1990 by John Guare

The Erdős number

Number of links required to connect scholars to Erdős via co-authorship of papers

Erdős wrote 1500+ papers with 507 co-authors

Jerry Grossman’s site allows mathematicians to compute their Erdős numbers:

http://www.oakland.edu/enp/

Connecting path lengths, among mathematicians only:

The average is 4.65

The maximum is 13

Paul Erdős (1913-1996)

Trying to make friends Valdis Marc Met Marc and I already had friends in common! I later found out my cousin Ailish also knows Andrew. The “small world” phenomenon… Latvia Uldis DERI John Dublin Clare Bros John C Andrew

“ It’s a small world after all!”, by Kentaro Toyama Kentaro Bash Karishma Sharad Maithreyi Anandan Venkie Soumya Prof. McDermott * Source: http://research.microsoft.com/toyama/talks/ Ranjeet Prof. Sastry PM Manmohan Singh Prof. Balki Pres. Kalam Prof. Jhunjhunwala Dr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia Ravi Dr. Isher Judge Ahluwalia Pawan Aishwarya Ravi’s Father Amitabh Bachchan Prof. Kannan Prof. Prahalad Nandana Sen Prof. Amartya Sen Prof. Veni

The Kevin Bacon game

Boxed version of the game

Invented by three Albright College students in 1994:

Craig Fass, Brian Turtle, Mike Ginelly

Goal is to connect any actor to Kevin Bacon, by linking actors who have acted in the same movie

The “Oracle of Bacon” website uses IMDB to find the shortest link between any two actors:

http://oracleofbacon.org/

The Kevin Bacon game (2)

Total number of actors in database (as of 15 th October):

893283

Average path length to Kevin:

2.957

Actor closest to “center”:

Rod Steiger (2.68)

Rank of Kevin, in terms of closeness to center:

1049th

Most actors are within three links of each other!

What are social networking services (SNSs)?

From the beginning, the Internet was a medium for connecting not only machines but people

Idea behind SNSs is to make the aforementioned real-world relationships explicitly defined online

2002:

Friendster

2003:

MySpace, LinkedIn, hi5

2004:

orkut, Facebook

2005:

Bebo

Social networking in plain English

http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v =6a_KF7TYKVc

The popularity of SNSs

The 10 most popular domains ~= 40% percent of all page views on the Web (Compete, November 2006)

Nearly half of those views were from the social networking services MySpace and Facebook – wow!

And that’s just in the top 10…

Alexa rankings:

#6: MySpace

#7: orkut

#8: Facebook

#10: hi5

#16: Friendster

#95: Bebo

#142: LinkedIn

SNSs attracting lots of monetary / media attention

Friendster – $13M VC

Tribe – $6.3M VC

LinkedIn – $4.7M VC

Bebo – $15M VC

MySpace – Sold for $580M

Friends Reunited – Sold for £120M

Facebook – Purported $1B Y! offer

Motivation for social network services

Allows a user to create and maintain an online network of close friends or business associates for social and professional reasons :

Friendships and relationships

Offline meetings

Curiosity about others

Business opportunities

Job hunting

…

For social good:

Kevin Bacon – sixdegrees.org

Sun – openeco.org

Big social network services (in terms of accounts)

myspace.com 200,000,000

spaces.live.com 120,000,000

orkut.com 68,000,000

hi5.com 50,000,000

friendster.com 50,000,000

xanga.com 40,000,000

classmates.com 40,000,000

facebook.com 39,000,000

bebo.com 34,000,000

tagged.com 30,000,000

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites

Features of social network services

Network of friends (inner circle)

Person surfing

Private messaging

Discussion forums

Events management

Blogging and commenting

Media uploading

Facebook, #8 in the world

The success of (and hype around) Facebook

After talks with MS to take 5% stake, estimated at $10B

4,000 applications have been created for Facebook’s developer interface:

70,000 developers signed up

Active user count has jumped 70% in the four months since this contributable application layer was added

50% of Facebook users are non-students:

People over 24 are its fastest-growing demographic

orkut, Google’s SNS

TechCrunch - Google To “Out Open” FB On November 5

www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/21/google-to-out-open-facebook-on-november-5/

Scobleizer - Google: Making Big Social Media Moves

scobleizer.com/2007/10/09/google-making-big-social-media-moves/

Get LinkedIn to business contacts, 15 million users

OpenEco, a SNS for managing GHG emissions

Other niche SNSs

Age:

Multiply (seniors and settled); Boomj (baby boomers); Rezoom

Country of origin:

Silicon India

Gender:

CaféMom; MothersClick; Sister Woman (female friends)

Occupation:

ModelsHotel; FanLib (fiction writers); AdGabber; TheFeng.org (financial services executives); MilitarySpot (military families); Sermo (doctors and physicians)

Business and careers:

ConnectBuzz; Doostang; Execunet; Netshare; Ryze; Viadeo; Xing

Interests:

TradeKing (investors); StreetCred (hip hop); IndiePublic (art and design); PeerTrainer (health and wellbeing)

* Source: Paul Gibler, Wisconsin Technology Network

Can be many links even in a small-sized SNS

Meaningless when viewed as a whole, so need to apply some social network analysis (SNA) techniques:

“ Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications”, Stanley Wasserman and Katherine Faust

http://www.socialnetworks.org/

http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/tse-portal/analysis/social-network-analysis/

http://vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si/pub/networks/pajek/

For example, can reduce the amount of relevant social network data by clustering

May choose to cluster people by common friends, by shared interests, by geography, by tags, etc.

What is social network analysis?

People are represented as nodes or “actors”

Relationships are represented as lines or edges:

Relationships may be acquaintanceship, friendship, co-authorship, etc.

Allows analysis using tools of mathematical graph theory, and mapping:

Movie actors

Scientists and mathematicians

Sexual interaction

Phone call patterns

Visualising your network of friends

You can graphically visualise your network of friends and friends-of-friends using graphical tools (e.g. Prefuse)

This is the friends network for “john b” (the ellipse in the center)

Surrounding him are his friends and friends-of-friends

Network from social.ie

http://www.swfup.com/uploads/swf-37675.swf

Social network analysis in use

Sociology theory applied to the 21st century, collecting data from social network websites:

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2006/08/19/research_on_soc.html

Combine with Semantic Web technologies to determine social behavioural patterns:

http://www.blogninja.com/galway-iswc2005.ppt

MIT Media Lab are conducting mobile SNA research via their “Reality Mining” project:

http://reality.media.mit.edu/

Knowing too much?

Individuals are revealing more and more information on SNS and other social software sites

Personal privacy issues, where sensitive information is revealed

Advertisers and marketers can gain better understanding from customer behavioural patterns:

Analysing the masses of SNS info, “clouds” showing the overall picture

United States NSA using social network analysis technologies for homeland security

Also using “automated intelligence profiling” based on unreliable information

3. Enterprise Social Networking Services

Enterprise 2.0

Web 2.0 includes applications such as blogs, wikis, RSS feeds and social networking, while Enterprise 2.0 is the packaging of those technologies in both corporate IT and workplace environments

“ Enterprise 2.0 is the use of a freeform social software platform inside an organisation that allows them to do things that are important”, Harvard Business School’s Professor Andrew McAfee

“ There are direct enterprise equivalents [to Facebook]. You can ask people the status of their projects, what they’re working on, are they travelling, things they’ve learned . All of these things would be very valuable inside an enterprise.”

Fears if employees are using external SNSs

Chief information officers from large companies (e.g. financial institutions) block employee access to public social networks:

There is a fear of losing control of information in response to the “open” ethos of the Internet ; security issues

Accounting firms need to ensure their employees don’t provide tax or financial advice online to comply with regulatory guidelines and disclosure legislation

Requires safeguards in terms of tracking documents, discussions:

Awareness Inc.’s system tracks SNS posts and sends potentially inflammatory posts into moderation boxes for manager review

Need to comply with company, legal or state regulations

Some negative aspects for SNSs and businesses

Can sap employee productivity?

Potential violations / breaches of company protocol?

Forrester Research recently found that 14% of companies have disciplined employees and 5% fired them for offences related to social networking

A poll by Sophos found that 66% of workers think their colleagues share too much information on Facebook

50% of companies (including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, UBS, and Lehman Brothers) block access to Facebook according to the same Sophos survey

Be careful what you post about 

“ Jessica Zenner, an employee of Parker Services (a technical recruitment contractor for Nintendo) was fired on the 31st of August [2007] by her employer following concerns expressed by Nintendo about posts on her blog ‘Inexcusable Behavior’. […] T he firing follows on from the recent dismissal of Paris-based Catherine Sanderson, AKA ‘La Petite Anglaise’, from accountancy firm Dixon Wilson for ‘gross misconduct’.” – SocialMedia.net

“ Bookseller Waterstone’s has sacked a long-serving employee for writing a blog. Joe Gordon from Edinburgh, who worked for the company for 11 years, says he was dismissed because he ‘brought the company into disrepute’ [in 2005].” – The Guardian

What company opportunities are there from SNSs?

A useful means for self-promotion, marketing products online, and attracting new hires:

Can promote products or services through targeted advertising and viral marketing

Get feedback (directly, indirectly) about your products or services, especially from influential hubs / connectors

Discover new recruits; network with peers

An opportunity to create an internal network for sharing information and expertise:

Share information within a business’ own walls

Efficient way to mine for in-house expertise (“expert finding”)

Reduce the time spent mailing docs and e-mailing comments

Encourage employees, alumni, interns, new hires, retired staff, other stakeholders to interact with each other

The positives of SNSs for business employees

“Bosses warm up to social networking on company time”

www.technewsworld.com/story/social-networking/59315.html

“ Corporate adoption of social networking tools, has been considerable due to their effectiveness in cutting across barriers in large corporations.”

“ Social networking has become a tool to drive corporate innovation.”

The positives of SNSs for business employees (2)

“ More than 40 percent of business users consume social networking applications like blogs, intranets and RSS [really simple syndication] feeds more than three times a week.”

“ More than 30 percent of respondents read information in wikis, social networks, discussion boards and videoconferences / IMs more than three times a week.”

“ More than 20 percent of respondents contribute to blogs, intranets, social networks, discussion boards, video conferencing and tagging [social media sites] more than three times a week.”

Quotes about blogging and business

“ It'll be no more mandatory that [CEOs] have blogs than that they have a phone and an e-mail account. If they don't, they're going to look foolish.” – Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems

“ Tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. If your competitor has a product that's better than yours, link to it. You might as well. We’ll find it anyway.” – Robert Scoble, Formerly of Microsoft, “Corporate Weblog Manifesto”

“… controversy flared up in December, when a Portland, OR, company called Marqui announced that it would pay select bloggers $800 a month to publish at least four entries per month about its software. […] Nokia, for example, recently gave away Nokia 7710 wide-screen smart phones to more than 1,000 ‘VIPs’ around the world, including many bloggers…”

http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech/wtr_14587,258,p1.html

Corporate social networking providers / platforms

Mentor Scout

Microsoft SharePoint

SelectMinds

Tacit Illumio

Visible Path

Web Crossing

Awareness

Contact Networks

IBM Lotus Connections

introNetworks

Jive Software

Leverage Software

introNetworks

Jive Software

Visible Path

Visible Path powers “Hoover’s Connect” for business research company Hoover's, which lets users know how they're connected to companies and people in the Hoover's database

Search for those who work in venture capital

Target those people working at firms of interest

View profiles to see common friends that can get you a meeting with the VC of choice

Try LinkedIn.com

You have a business idea and are looking for an “in” at a venture capital firm:

Other business uses, e.g. finding venture capital

Can an internal SNS become less “social”?

Why not?

Evolution of boards.ie topics:

1998:

Games = 97%

Rec = 2%

Tech = 1%

2007:

Rec = 20%

Tech = 13%

Games = 11%

Soc = 9%

Biz = 8%

…

And it doesn’t necessarily have to take 10 years!

Creating your own SNS

Which method is best for you?

Create a social network via a web interface, hosted on someone else’s site

Install off-the-shelf social networking software on your own server

Install a content management system and customise the SN modules / themes yourself

Creating your own SNS (2)

Ning.com:

From Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape

Hosted service

phpfox.com:

A downloadable relatively cheap solution called Konsort

Needs PHP, MySQL, etc.

http://groups.drupal.org/social-networking-sites:

Drupal is a popular content management system

Can add SN modules like buddylist , invite , organic groups , etc.

4. The Future of Social Networking Services

Problems with SNSs

Fundamental problems block their potential to access the full range of available content and networked people online

There is a need to build semantic social networking into the fabric of the next-generation Internet itself:

Interconnecting both content and people in a meaningful way

First issue

Need interesting objects to draw you back to keep on using social networking services

* Source: Jyri Engestrom, “Object-Centered Sociality”, Reboot 7

Many social networking services can be boring… * Source: Jyri Engestrom, “Object-Centered Sociality”, Reboot 7

Object-centred sociality can provide meaning

Users connected via a common object, e.g., their job, university, hobbies, a date…

“ Another tradition of theorizing offers an explanation of why Russell linked out, and why so many YASNS ultimately fail.”

“ According to this theory, people don’t just connect to each other. They connect through a shared object.”

* Source: Jyri Engestrom, “Why Some Social Networks Work…”

Object-centred sociality can provide meaning (2)

“ When a service fails to offer the users a way to create new objects of sociality, they turn the connecting itself into an object [LinkedIn].”

“ Good services allow people to create social objects that add value.”

Flickr = photos

del.icio.us = bookmarks

Blogs = discussion posts

* Source: Jyri Engestrom, “Why Some Social Networks Work…”

… can connect us to other people

Video annotations

Chats

Photos

Micro-blogs

OSN profiles

Bookmarks

…

Everything we make and do…

Second issue

We all have too many separate profiles and sets of contacts on disconnected social networking services

Social network portability and reusability

Need distributed social networks and reusable profiles

Users may have many identities and sets of friends on different social networks, where each identity was created from scratch

Allow user to import existing profile and contacts, using a single global identity with different views (e.g., via FOAF, hCard, OpenID, etc.)

See also:

http://groups.google.com/group/social-network-portability/

http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/

http://danbri.org/words/2007/09/13/194

The Semantic Web can help

Sir Tim Berners-Lee et al., Scientific American, 2001:

“ An extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.”

The Semantic Web can provide the required representation mechanisms for connecting disparate social networks:

It links people and objects to store and represent the heterogeneous ties that bind us to each other

Serves as a useful platform for linking and for performing operations on diverse person- and object-related data gathered from heterogeneous social networking sites

The Semantic Web can help (2)

By using agreed-upon Semantic Web formats to describe people, content objects and the connections that bind them all together , SNSs can interoperate by appealing to common semantics

Developers are already using Semantic Web technologies to augment the ways in which they create, reuse, and link profiles and content on social networking and media sites (using FOAF, SIOC, etc.)

Facebook to FOAF :

www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~mrowe/foafgenerator.html

openlinksw.com/weblog/dav/dav-blog-1/index.vspx?id=1237

In the other direction, object-centered social networks can serve as rich data sources for Semantic Web applications

Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF)

FOAF is an ontology for describing people and the relationships that exist between them

Can be integrated with any other SW vocabularies

Some SNSs with FOAF exports:

People can also create their own FOAF document and link to it from their homepage

FOAF documents usually contain personal info, links to friends, and other related resources

Integrating social networks with FOAF Common formats, unique URIs * Source: Sheila Kinsella, Applications of Social Network Analysis 2007

A distributed social network with FOAF

Can use FOAF to describe social networks across a number of services

Picture shows data from both boards.ie and my hand-coded FOAF file

Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities

The aims of the SIOC project (funded by SFI at DERI) are:

To fully describe the structure of content in online community sites

To create new connections between forums and posts from different types of discussion systems (blogs, forums, mailing lists, etc.) and content items / containers on Web 2.0 sites

To browse connected posts and channels in interesting ways (e.g., distributed linked conversations, decentralised discussion channels and communities, etc.)

Some positive quotes:

“ I […] think the concept is HOT” – Robert Douglass, Drupal Developer

“ It just dawned on me that the burgeoning SIOC-o-sphere (online communities exporting and exposing content via SIOC Ontology) is actually: Blogosphere 2.0” – Kingsley Idehen, Founder and CEO of OpenLink Software

"SIOC has the potential to become one of the foundational vocabularies that make Semantic Web applications useful” – Ivan Herman, W3C

How can SIOC data be used?

SIOC metadata exporters have been created for open-source / commercial discussion systems and popular Web 2.0 sites:

b2evolution, Dotclear, Drupal, phpBB, WordPress, mailing lists, IRC, Twitter, Jaiku, aggregators, OpenLink Data Spaces, etc.

Easy-to-use APIs have been produced for writing your own SIOC applications in PHP, Ruby on Rails and Java

As well as nearly 20 academic papers about SIOC and a W3C member submission ( http://www.w3.org/Submission/2007/02/ ), easy-to-read documentation and usage examples are available :