System iNetwork

July 16, 2007

Online Social Networking for IT: Here to Stay

Last weekend I got together with some buddies. After one of the guys got a check-in call from his teenaged daughter, there was the usual "gee, they grow up fast" conversation that wandered into the MySpace debate because the dad mentioned that both of his daughters have pages there. None of the other guys in the group have daughters, and pretty soon several people were trundling out the conventional wisdom about MySpace being nothing but flypaper for child molesters. "How do you deal with your girls not giving out too much information about themselves?" one of us asked. The dad said, "Oh, I tell them over and over not to reveal enough for anyone to find them." Then he smiled broadly and said, "Of course, I have my own MySpace account just to keep an eye on that."

He's far from the first adult to do something like that, but what's getting to be news is how many people are doing it for professional rather than family reasons. While there certainly are plenty of horror stories about social networking's potential downsides, it's starting to look like this phenomenon is catching fire in the business world. As it should be.

As happens in human culture from time to time, youth is leading its elders, in this instance into yet another aspect of Internet culture that was unforeseen not so long ago. Naturally, IT people, System i users among them, are some of the first to see there are benefits.

IBM is trying to take a leadership role by offering several opportunities for System i professionals to take advantage of social networking. It's been encouraging the System i community to join iSociety ( http://www.isociety.org ), its "online home for everyone who believes in the System i philosophy of business computing," as former COMMON President Beverly Russell put it in her introductory letter last September. At the Town Meeting at COMMON Anaheim in May, Trevor Perry and others commented on iSociety's substantial growth since its launch.

IBM also launched last spring IBM developerWorks community spaces ( http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/spaces ), designed to help developers "build communities around a broad range of technology topics and business trends." In addition, it announced IBM Lotus Connections for Partners ( http://paxos.lotus.com ), a resource that lets IBM business partners "create and share profile information that describes their business, find subject matter experts, share online information through social bookmarking and blogging, engage in collaborative business activities as appropriate and joint communities of interest."

IBM's Lotus Connections ( http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/products/product3.nsf/wdocs/connectionshome ) product facilitates community building, blog writing, and other networking with other employees, business partners, and customers. For example, includes a feature called dogear that lets people "save, organize, and share" Internet bookmarks with their established community, and advocates search-and-pivot browsing, "where you start by navigating by tags or links or people, and, when you find someone who looks interesting, pivot to go to their Profile or their bookmarks."

Of course, Microsoft's not far behind, supposedly working on social networking tools based on MS Office. Just a few other examples of social networks for business are Advogado ( http://www.advogado.net ) a community for open-source software developers, as well as LinkedIn ( http://www.linkedIn.com ) and Zoodango ( http://www.zoodango.com ), where users can swap resumes and do some professional networking.

It would be easy to argue that professional social networking, particularly among IT types, is just an outgrowth of forums, which have probably been around since the Beatles broke up. But trading personal information and making professional and quasipersonal connections via the Internet is a whole order of magnitude above swapping tips and techniques and answering each other's technical questions. I think this is happening because of the psychological aspects.

In a world that has encouraged us for millennia to retreat into social isolation aside from a small trusted circle of family and friends, and to treat anyone we don't know personally as a potential threat, online social networking is relatively safe, despite what the Chris Hansens of the world would lead us to believe is the norm. You can sit in your own office or home, a safe environment, and only put out in public what you're willing to share, and you can make connections with people who can't pull a gun on you or bash you over the head just because you've accidentally started talking to someone bad. Certainly there's potential danger for the naive, but that shouldn't be the gating factor. And as more people start participating, the fear factor will diminish. Don't forget, people were once afraid of riding in automobiles, and even though that can be downright deadly on occasion, there are few of us now who would willingly give ours up. They're just too darned convenient.

And so it will go with online social networking for professional purposes. The networking, problem-solving, and information-exchange convenience this phenomenon represents are bigger than anyone realizes until they get involved. In a few years, people won't believe how they were once able to get along without a community in which they can find colleagues at other companies who follow the same occupations, face the same problems, and maybe even have worked for the same idiot bosses who've migrated to greener pastures. At the least, I think we'll be able to discover a huge commonality of interest with as many people as we reasonably have time to interact with.

And lucky us, the tech-savvy folks working in IT, we get to be among the first to discover the benefits personally. This genie's fled the bottle and won't ever go back.

Posted by at July 16, 2007 3:33 PM