We’ve been discussing the issue highlighted by this posting internally. I think that the question boils down to this:

Do people currently feel so proprietary about their professional connections that they feel their connections must remain confidential to remain professionally competitive?

In the fairly recent past some have certainly felt this way, but the interent is radically changing that. Search, social networks and the massive increase of data available online to anyone makes it much easier to find people and things. This is causing our understanding and appreciation of relationships to change back to the way things were much longer ago…

It’s 1500, somewhere in Europe. Everyone in town knows the blacksmith; so what? The interesting questions were much more complex and contextual - eg who would the blacksmith let slide on payments? Who does the blacksmith socialize with? Is the farrier in town profesionally cooperative with the blacksmith, or is she a competitor?

Preserving knowledge of the existence of nodes in a social network as if they are proprietary IP and must remain obfuscated is an “old school” modern business behavior. It implies that the node on the other end would be happy to deal in the same manner with anyone, and as such it devalues the relationship to such a great extent that you have to wonder if there’s a relationship there at all.

Economies based on this kind of artificial scarcity are excessively vulnerable in a modern age of search and the internet.

Back when I ran a paintball field, and long before the interwebz had search, I found a source for the smoke grenades that most of us sold at our fields in WA state. It was hard to find this guy; he was in the Midwest somewhere and it took about 3 or 4 people hops and lots of phone chatting to get to him.

Once I did find him I was able to buy the grenades in fairly small numbers - say a case at a time - and sell them at a significant mark-up while still under-cutting my local competition. In essence I became a regional distributor. It was a good deal for me and for the other guy.

However he owed me nothing and he just wanted to move product, and so ANYONE who found him could get the same deal I got. Eventually someone did, which cut my regional advantage down to nothing. I still got a good price, but ultimately what happened was the regional price re-set so that we all got close to the same markup of a buck or so a grenade.

These days, that kind of advantage is tremendously fleeting. What matters is relationships themselves, and how they are nurtured over time. If just know who I talk to makes you directly competitive with me, then I am not doing my job.

I understand that sales relationships can be different animals than other kinds of relationships, and that sales people can feel very proprietary about their network. Inside Trampoline we’ve been very fortunate in that Adrian and the rest of the sales team treat our sales relationships as long-term investments which aren’t prone to being under-mined by other people simply knowing about them.

This happens to align nicely with our overall view of relationships - it’s not only who you know but also how you know them that matters.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Sapporo at the Infinity Ventures Summit (the site’s in Japanese) to talk about the role of informal networks in business and show off Trampoline’s SONAR Suite. This is the largest technology innovation conference in Japan, bringing together the leading start-ups, corporations, analysts and investors. The focus was mainly on mobile and consumer internet so Trampoline really stood out as an enterprise infrastructure provider. We were also one of just four non-Asian firms invited to present.

I’ve travelled in Japan in the past but this was my first visit in a business context. The amazing etiquette involved in exchanging business cards was the first thing that struck me. In an unstructured setting like a drinks reception in the West cards are typically swapped at the end of a conversation if there’s a likely relevance for future contact. In Japan cards are exchanged at the start of a conversation with no filter for relevance. This means you get through a lot of cards and your pockets rapidly end up bulging with other people’s.

Cards must be offered horizontally with the text in the correct orientation for the recipient, held at the corners in both hands. When you receive a card you must hold it similarly in both hands and give it your full attention for a second or two before looking up or continuing conversation. You must hold the card in front of you throughout the conversation. It’s insulting to put it in your pocket, scribble a note on it or (worst of all) hand someone a crumpled or disfigured card. If you’re sitting around a table with people the correct thing to do is lay everyone’s cards out in front of you in a neat row matching their positions around the table.

What interested me most, however, was the cultural alignment of Japanese enterprises with social computing solutions. Previously I’d assumed that Japanese business culture would be intrinsically hostile to technologies that make informal groupings and networks visible, or which lead to information being shared in new ways, since there is sensitive etiquette surrounding these processes. However my experiences in Sapporo completely changed my view of this.

The connection I’d failed to make previously is that Japanese corporations have historically placed a much higher value on the informal networks amongst their employees than their Western counterparts. Within the “shushin koyo” model of life-long relationships between employer and employee, many aspects of the individual’s social life were organised and supported by the corporation. This was seen to build organisational strength and forge links outside the formal structure (both of which are also notable drivers for social networking tools in the enterprise). During the long recession in the 1990s a lot of these extra-curricular activities were cut, but a management culture persisted in which informal networks were highly valued. On the face of it enterprise social computing tools are perfectly placed to fill this gap.

In many cases products developed for a Western market will need to be modified significantly before they are suitable for Japanese customers. This won’t simply be a case of changing language in the user interface. Behaviours around privacy management and authorisation will almost certainly need to be modified to fit different cultural nuances. But contrary to my initial assumption, Japanese corporations may prove to be early and well-informed adopters of social computing technologies.

I’m indebted to Shuji Honjo for drawing my attention to the possible like between social computing and corporate involvement in extra-curricular activities.

It’s Wednesday afternoon at Enterprise 2.0. In spite of a few frustrating failures in infrastructure, it’s been a really great two days here at E2 for Trampoline.  

Right now I’m sitting in the EMC booth stealing their hardline because WiFi is down (again) and our hardline is down (again). Evidently Enterprise 2.0 still doesn’t mean reliable internet connections or badge readers which, like, read badges.

Ironically even the toasters on the breakfast bar this morning were teh fail and I had to steal one and jack it into a power strip inside one of the breakout rooms to toast my bagel. (Which, by the way, was artfully sliced to look like the victim of a drunken accident with a chainsaw. Not that I am in the least bit picky about my toasting. Oh no, not me.)

The deepest irony about the toasters was that during the “Evening in the Cloud” event several speakers likened cloud computing to needing to be as predictable, reliable and standards-driven as our electricity supply, clearly tempting fate and cursing the event and my breakfast toasting.

New England is in the middle of one of the weirdest early June weather fronts in history with temperatures in the high 90’s and huge thunder-storms and even tornado warnings, and really, there’s only one company on the planet to blame all of this on…

I blame google, of course.

I hereby declare that cloud computing evangelists are no longer to be taken seriously if they liken their services to electricity. In fact you should probably immediately take proactive de-cursing actions lest you find yourself suddenly in a region-wide freak weather phenom, total blackout or starring in a real-life version of I Am Legend.

Adrian, Steve Ardire and I worked the booth yesterday (with occasional support from Rebecca and Jules, who had lots to do on the party and so were constantly jetting about the hotel alternatively solving herculean problems and looking wistfully out the window at the sailboats).

The booth experience was very, very interesting. As always Adrian was the companies greatest low-key evangelist and gave great demo while Steve managed little micro-demos on his mac off on the side. (The people Steve talked to all left with a very pleased but somewhat dazed look in their eyes.) We were 2 or 3 rows deep for most of the day, even when all we had was Rebecca’s awesome slide deck because our hardline to the internet was dead (as were most booths) Tuesday morning.

The people who have visited us at the booth have been uniformly smart and enthusiastic and ask really great questions. While some folks are clearly still just looking and thinking (which is fine) the interest level at this show in real solutions to current enterprise problems is very high. So ++ on SONAR Server, Dashboard and Flightdeck.

When I joined Trampoline we were still supporting a product called “Collaboration Engine” which dated back to the earliest days of the company. It did what our customers wanted it to and it was also decent revenue, however when I looked at the product, talked with the team about it and then looked around at the marketplace and compared it to where other folks seemed to be headed, I recommended that we should cut it completely.

Why? Because I thought then that everybody would be doing “collaboration software” and it would become increasingly difficult to clearly differentiate our collaboration offering from others in this space. Collaboration in an enterprise means getting many many things right and it means potentially competing with experienced and/or entrenched competitors. There are clearly vendors here who are doing this well (IBM Connections is looking very slick, while Jive is here as well) and others who are highly entrenched (MS is here with SharePoint).

Most of the people I’ve spoken with told me “wow. Everyone else showing here is doing the same thing as eachother except for you. Your stuff is cool!” This was a really important bit of feedback and was very rewarding to hear. It’s nice to be told that you don’t look exactly the same as everybody else and to be appreciate for what you think you are doing well. People seem to really appreciate that we don’t build wiki, group, IM, email, workspace and blogging software but that we do make it much easier to build profiles to find people, skills and interests across large groups of people, and to visualize networks in interesting and engaging ways.

Wikis are clearly hot and there are lots of wiki companies here doing some neat stuff and again, glad they are doing it and doing it well, also very glad to not be “another wiki company”.

I don’t think that anyone one else at this show is eating email and automagically producing and maintaining user profiles of themes and connections, and lots of potential customers are noticing that this is what we do and they like it. It’s really refreshing.

Many of the vendors here at the show have come by and asked us about our upcoming API as they see what we are doing as very complimentary to their offerings. We can make collaboration tools like email and wikis work better. All cool.

The party last night was very good. Massive props to Rebecca; she kept her cool and created a really nice event. It was probably the nicest conference drinking event I’ve ever been to (and really, I’ve been to LOTS. Like, way more than 100), and that’s in spite of having to “work it” in the sense that we paid for it and so it was clearly soft marketing for us. It was really chill and fun and intimate and the music was good and people really seemed to be having a good time. Charles did a neat presentation on St. Agnes that was as interesting and low-key as the rest of the party.

As near as I can tell folks had lots of fun, and when Boston’s finest came they didn’t see the burned furniture or the donkey, so it was all good. (Okay, just kidding about some of that.)

Note to conference party planners – more money and more drinking and famous bands don’t always make for a better party. Try for intimate and fun and get fun smart people to show up. Think of the best non-work parties you’ve ever been to – they probably were way less over the top than the next conference party you are planning.  

So – despite the hiccups it’s been a great event. I’m really glad we are here.

We’ve all been on our feet all day again, but for the booth at least we are in the home stretch – just one more session on the demo floor for of boothy goodness! W007!

Rarely is one presented with a delicious opportunity to delve into the connections between stickers produced last week, a metaphysical poet from the early 17th Century and the concerns of enterprise social computing. Trampoline is the only workplace on earth I can imagine that occurring. An unhealthy obsession with correct spelling aside, this is the first time I have used my English degree in my career. You have been warned.

Let’s begin with stickers. Trampoline has a batch of them, rapidly depleting and strewn between London, Seattle and San Francisco; a gingerbread trail for wandering Tramponauts. They’ll mostly be encountered at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco this week. Find them and us at booth 629 where we’re being kindly hosted by Oracle. Perhaps you already have, and that’s why you’re here. In which case, make yourself at home.

We had to put something on our stickers. Various ideas were batted around, particularly single words relating to our technology and the world of enterprise social computing. Not bad, but nothing that would achieve our main aim of people liking or identifying with the stickers enough to put one on their laptop. In a flash of inspiration, spurred on by copious cups of tea, I remembered the phrase “no man is an island”. We went with it and a mutated version of our logo.

I was prompted to look at the origins of the phrase and found it belonged to John Donne, a favourite of mine in my late teens. (Don’t laugh, I just love poems.) Here’s the text:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Or, as Donne himself had it, and as I prefer:

No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man
is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine;
if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe
is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as
well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine
owne were; any mans death diminishes me,
because I am involved in Mankinde;
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

In essence, every time a man dies, I am affected. Or, to turn it on its head: a group of men is something bigger than the constituent men are as individuals. Together, they are bonded, collective, and the loss of one is a loss of and to all. The text was originally prose, Meditation XVII: Devotions upon Emergent Occasions and IMNSHO this is far from Donne’s best verse. I was tickled by the occurrence of the word Emergent though. At Trampoline we often consider about the ways our technology can support and even identify emerging communities of interest. By this point, I was convinced Donne’s few lines had a good handle on what we’re trying to do at Trampoline, and why we’re doing it.

We believe that people aren’t alone at work. And if they are, they shouldn’t be. Groups and organisations succeed by being greater than the sum of their parts. The constituent parts need to work together to succeed. In Trampoline’s area of practice, large enterprises, that logic means that organisations should be encouraging people to work together, connect, collaborate and tap into each other’s knowledge. This often takes the form of giving people tools, perhaps software. In bringing people together to collaborate, you allow them to create something that wasn’t there before and couldn’t have existed without the fusing of their knowledge and ideas. This is particularly relevant to organisations full of knowledge workers whose main resource is in their employees’ heads, or organisations striving to succeed through innovation. Bunches of individuals working as hard as they can can’t produce new ideas and move them forward like groups of people working together can. We’re all in it together.

So there you have it: John Donne to Trampoline Systems, with stickers as my conceit. I’ll leave you to learn more about what Trampoline does and what Donne did. I recommend the ones about intelligent social networking for enterprises and persuading a lady into bed by ranting about fleas. The choice is yours.

So, the Facebook hype dust has settled and what we’re left with is a solid, social networking platform. I check my feed several times a day. But since Facebook added per-feed-item preferences I’ve started to notice exactly what it is I’m interested in hearing about my friends… and it’s Twitter.

Applications are a great way to broadcast your identity and they fulfil what I think is the most underrated of Maslow’s needs - esteem. The thing is, I already know all my friends on Facebook. I’ve met them all in the real world. Applications are an entertaining distraction but they aren’t sticky. Not for me, at least. What I come back for is the status updates - the contact with my friends - the ambient intimacy. I think applications were key to Facebook’s adoption - a soft, understandable way to get people interested - but it’s presence that’s of lasting interest. If anything, the applications have become a noisy albatross, distracting from the core signal.

Facebook’s genius was wrapping the new behaviour of broadcasting status in a consumable package. Presence, identity and ‘is’. It all fits perfectly. I’m glad that Facebook have finally removed the compulsory ‘is’ from their status input but I think that, initially, that little word provided a vital hint to the function of the box. Without it I’m not sure as many people would have grasped the concept. And that’s the problem Twitter has come up against: understanding.

From the very beginning I’ve had trouble explaining why I use Twitter. I love the sense of community and the constant stream of society that I get from it but I could never get that across to anyone. Why would I want to broadcast what I’m doing? Well, because my friends do. I like hearing from them so I’m reciprocating. These days I describe it as “Facebook status updates but without the applications crap”.

That description does Twitter a terrible disservice but it’s the simplest analogy I can find. What’s interesting though is that the functionality I derive from Twitter, despite its simplicity, actually covers off both Facebook status updates and wall posts (public but directed comments, via the @username convention) with one input field. It’s everything I’m interested in with none of the crap.

And its openness is a massive benefit where Facebook’s walled garden is going to become more and more of a hindrance. I log in to Facebook a few times a day to check my feed; I have Adium open receiving Twitter updates constantly. Twitter wins - it’s got more of my attention.

Twitter FTW!

For those of you who have never played Werewolf (aka Mafia) before, it’s a game based on blame-storming, finger-pointing, deviousness, manipulation, blatant lying, and do-unto-others-before-they-do-unto-you. Last night’s meetup of the werewolves of london (nothing to do with the rather catchy Warren Zevon song of the same name) was a chance for Peter and I to have a few beers at the massively-atmospheric-if-almost-impossible-to-find Shunt bar, hang out with a motley mix of actors, TV producers, game design researchers and random punters, and flex the old werewolf muscles that haven’t been used since I last did a drama workshop, many moons ago.

The thing about a good game of werewolf is, that you can turn up to a group of random people, most of whom who you’ve never met before, and within five minutes you’ll probably have a pretty strong suspicion about someone. Within ten minutes you’ll probably be defending yourself against a groundless (or is it…?) accusation or gleefully jumping on the bandwagon to lynch someone – anyone – else for no apparent reason, and within fifteen minutes you feel like you’re thinking yourself round an ever-thickening onion built on layers of “I know they said they’re a (whatever) but what if it’s a triple / quadruple / … / dodectuple bluff??”

I found it fascinating to see how the crowd mentality developed. In the very first round, there’s not really any reason for any one person to suspect anyone else, so accusations tend be either entirely arbitrary (in our first game we ended up spinning a bottle, just to get the game moving) or based on nothing more than gut feeling. After all, what makes you think someone is acting suspiciously? Is it the tone of their voice? Their body language? Or do you just flat-out not trust them? On what grounds?

Some interesting patterns I noted -

* those who stuck their neck out by accusing someone early on, tended to get the backlash if their accusation failed – if X accused Y, but Y was acquitted, someone nearly always accused X immediately afterwards, and X usually got lynched. Is this a British thing, to immediately suspect the accuser, presumably on the grounds of “methinks the lady doth protest too much” – or is it a common pattern across the pond as well?
* those who eventually turned out to be werewolves often tended to be the ones who had played it quietly, but not TOO quietly. In the latter stages of the game, as the paranoia starts to kick in, suspicion falls on anyone who has deviated from the norm in any way. Too quiet? Lynch them! Too loud? Too assertive? Lynch them!
* when accusations were being voted upon, it was quite rare for more than two people to stick their hands up immediately. Far more common was for the accuser and seconder to raise their hands, followed by a gap of a couple of seconds while everyone feverishly watches everyone else, waiting to see if the “Lynch them!” bandwagon was going to gain momentum or stop rolling altogether, before deciding whether or not to jump aboard.
* Once momentum was building up in a lynch vote, there’d be a late flood of “yes” votes, as people realised that someone was likely to be lynched, but if they voted “yes” to this person, it wouldn’t be them.
* people last night were also very reticent to claim to be the Healer or Seer. I only heard two people explicitly claim to be either, one of which was Peter. Remember, anyone can say pretty much whatever they like during the daytimes, it doesn’t mean it’s true – but what was also noticeable was that once it had been claimed, a couple of rounds later people seemed to have implicitly accepted their claim, by saying things like “but the Seer said that X was a werewolf, so…” Was this another British middle-class thing, to not want to flat-out lie or accept that your peer group is doing so? Or just a result of people’s short-term memory only going so far, and forgetting that anyone can claim anything they like?
* It’s also interesting, if a little scary, to mentally scale this up to, say, a few hundred people, and a real-world situation, and then disturb yourself by imagining the consequences of paranoia, suspicion, random accusation and mob justice.

Imagine renaming the game to “Salem Witch Hunt”. Or “McCarthyism”.

Or “Terrorist”.

So next time you’re in a “XYZ Project Post-Mortem” meeting, to blamestorm why a project failed or went over-budget, etc – think of Werewolf, and watch, and listen…. but don’t be *too* quiet, right?

We enjoyed it so much that we’re planning an office Werewolf-and-beer session, and I can heartily recommend it – I’d just advise that you don’t invite Derren Brown…

Last week Mike made the case that Facebook won’t replace LinkedIn, arguing that people prefer to manage their professional contacts separately from their friends. In my previous post I’d suggested that Facebook migh replace LinkedIn. In the light of Mike’s article I’m going to explain why I think this is likely to happen.

I created an account on LinkedIn three years ago and connected to a handful of friends, customers and collaborators. After that my account languished for a couple of years until the end of 2006 when I refreshed my profile and connected to some more people. Right now I’ve got 33 connections, qualifying me as a miserable norman-no-mates in LinkedIn land.

To put it bluntly I don’t like LinkedIn. I always feel a little bit dirty asking someone for a LinkedIn connection. I think this is probably because the platform offers such a coldly reductionist view of what a business relationship means. In LinkedIn all that counts is a person’s job title, where they’ve worked in the past and how many high-powered connections they’ve notched up. This dehumanises people and relationships, rendering them down to their mechanical and factual base. To use any system is to express complicity in the values it embodies. LinkedIn doesn’t reflect my values or my experience of professional relationships.

In May this year I created an account on Facebook (late adopter that I am) and got swept up in the usual ferment of friends and apps. The people I’ve listed as friends in Facebook cover a wide spectrum from purely personal to purely professional. But I’ve met all of them (with one exception) and I like all of them. Unlike LinkedIn, Facebook gives me a rounded picture of each person that might include their music and reading habits, glimpses of their family life, photos and video clips, updates from their Twitter feeds and so on. It’s important that the Facebook platform encourages people to interact in a playful way. I’m liable to find professional contacts slapping me with a kipper or turning me into a zombie. When was the last time that happened on LinkedIn?

In my experience successful businesses are built on strong relationships which include both professional and personal elements. I believe people have an innate preference to interact with each other across multiple dimensions, regardless of conventional work/life distinctions. LinkedIn makes absolutely no contribution to this whilst Facebook provides lots of helpful mechanisms. That’s why I predict people will increasingly use Facebook for their professional connections as well as their personal ones. Watch out LinkedIn!

After my presentation at last month’s Web Essentials event hosted by Library House I was asked whether I thought Facebook would be widely adopted as a social networking platform inside the enterprise. This is an interesting question as it touches on the different underlying requirements for consumer and enterprise applications. Facebook is currently getting strong adoption from business folk, something that MySpace and Friendster never achieved. Last week Siemens’ inhouse web strategist disclosed that 6,000 of Siemens’ employees were already on Facebook and most of them had joined during the previous month. This led Robert Scoble to suggest that the company might soon be producing dedicated apps for the platform and that in time Facebook could even replace Siemens’ intranet.

Facebook as a replacement for the corporate intranet? It’s an intriguing thought, but I think Mr Scoble is wrong on this. There are three main barriers:

Insufficient Security and Privacy Options
Part of Facebook’s triumph is its simple (but subtle) permissions system. As a user I can choose whether my profile page is visible to everyone or just my friends. Groups can be open to everyone, their content can be restricted to members or they can be completely invisible. I can also associate a group with a network such as a school or business. People can easily grasp these authorisation options and they offer enough range to cover most social preferences. However they don’t offer the level of granularity or sophistication needed for serious enterprise usage. Businesses have a wide variety of security and privacy policies and every internal system needs conform to them 100%. There’s no margin for error or compromise where highly sensitive information is concerned. Security and privacy are peripheral functions for a consumer platform they are absolutely central for an enterprise platform.
Too Reliant on Manual Updating
Facebook, in common with other consumer social networking platforms, relies on manually entered data to build up a picture of who your friends are and what you’re interested in. This works fine for social purposes, where updating profiles and friend lists becomes a leisure activity in its own right. But this isn’t true in the enterprise. Systems that rely on manual updating (such as knowledge management tools based on tagging) tend to deliver limited value in the enterprise for the simple reason that people never get round to updating them. To deliver sustained value, enterprise social networking platforms must have automatic mechanisms to update themselves and maintain an accurate picture of people’s networks and interests.
No Integration with Enterprise Systems
Enabling third-party developers to write plug-ins (or “Apps”) for Facebook has made a huge contribution to its success. My Facebook page includes a random selection of my photos imported from my Flickr account, details of the artists I’ve been listening to on LastFM (with a button to play my personal radio station) and links to the last six entries from my personal blog. It’s easy for Facebook to link with other consumer platforms like this because they all share simple authorisation models and the data being exchanged isn’t sensitive. However the sources an enterprise needs to integrate with, such as their corporate email system and document repository, hold extremely sensitive material and have sophisticated authorisation regimes that must stringently be adhered to. This isn’t what Facebook was designed for.

These issues don’t mean that Facebook has no role in business. Far from it. I think Facebook could well replace dedicated business networking services such as LinkedIn. Indeed I’ve already made a number of valuable business connections through Facebook. But the very factors that underlie Facebook’s success in the consumer world limit its application inside the enterprise. If it had been designed for enterprise needs it wouldn’t be seeing such wide adoption in the consumer world. In the end it’s horses for courses.

Apparently Jeff Pulver has stopped using LinkedIn for business social networking. This comes on the back of various other luminaries doing the same and predicting the replacement of LinkedIn by Facebook as the defacto Enterprise networking platform. I think they’re missing the point. Not all ‘friends’ are created equal; socialising and networking are two distinct activities. The divide between the two groups has decidedly fuzzy edges but it still exists.

I used MySpace for networking within the music and art communities. Many of my ‘friends’ were random strangers whose music I enjoyed or artwork I liked. LinkedIn is very similar. While I know most of my contacts I’m not necessarily friends with all of them. On Facebook, however, I know every person in my friends list. Incidentally, I think the term ‘friend’ is far more suited to Facebook than it is to MySpace and that’s why it’s taking off so virulently - the behaviour it encourages is far closer to that which we display in real life. Sociomimetic, Charles?

Facebook mimics my offline social network. I know everyone in it and keep up with them either directly - a drink after work or an email exchange - or indirectly, through other friends. I still do the former but Facebook has taken over the information distribution role of the latter. LinkedIn, on the other hand, substitutes for the stack of business cards I have mouldering on my shelves and collection of half-recollected email addresses that languish in my address book. These aren’t people I necessarily keep in touch with frequently but I certainly don’t want to forget about them.

LinkedIn is a network but it’s not really social. It’s about collecting not interacting and that’s how I want my networking to be. I don’t put my friends and my business associates in the same bucket. There’s some overlap (everyone at Trampoline is in my friends list, for example) but I certainly don’t want to turn the CEO of the company I was consulting for last year into a zombie. It’s simply not appropriate.

I’m definitely not saying that Facebook has no place in the enterprise - I expect it to function like a virtual coffee machine or water cooler - but I don’t think the form of socialising that it promotes necessarily threatens LinkedIn. In fact, I think the two could play very well together… A LinkedIn Facebook app, anyone?