marypcbuk

As a user, I worry about Facebook's attitude to my information (it's AOL, all over again - once the ads put the dollar signs in your eyes, the business tends to forget about the users who make the ad numbers work). As an IT professional, I worry about the time Facebook eats up and the wealth of personal information on there to be mined. As someone who networks for a living, I look at the networking tools on Facebook and find them pretty primitive. But Facebook is successful enough to make knowledge professionals think about how sites like Facebook and Linked In and LJ and flickr and the like have generated far more organised content with far less investment and bad-mouthing than any CRM or CMS you've ever seen. Standout quote of 2007 for me is still Anil Dash telling us "If you send people away for a week of training on your CMS, they come back and they still don't use the system but now they hate you". Put it all together and social networking techniques ought to be big business inside business. The tools aren't really ready yet - and neither are many businesses - but I've found a selection you can get started with today, ranging from free-but-in-beta (Xobni, SNARF) to build-it-yourself (C#UNG) to pricey-but-powerful (Trampoline). Get the details in Well Connected over at Server Management.