Software to help you network
- Posted:
- 14:50 12 Mar 2004
- Topics:
- Social Networking
Social network software is a hot topic in the US, and
has featured heavily in the past two O'Reilly Emerging Technology
conferences.
Last year Friendster was the most talked-about service, and it now
has more than four million members. That is impressive for a system
that is still in beta.
This year, of course, the geek focus had shifted to Orkut, thanks
partly to its association with Google. There are now more than a
hundred social network sites, including:
- Tribe.net
- LinkedIn.com
- Friendsoffriends.com
- Friendzy.com
- Friendsurfer.com
- Netfriendships.com
- Everyonesconnected.com.
These social sites are now moving into the business world. The
basic idea goes back to "six degrees of separation", which suggests
that if you go via friends of friends-of-a-friend, everyone is
connected to everyone else by six steps, on average.
If you know 100 people, and each of them knows 100 more, then you
have 10,000 friends-of-friends. Take that a step further to three
degrees and you are connected to one million people. At six
degrees, the number increases to nine billion.
Sites such as Orkut make the connections easier by giving you a
photo and a profile of each person in your network. You can either
make contact with friends-of-a-friend directly via the system, or
send messages to all your friends-of-a-friend and see if you get
any interest. In a few seconds, you can message anything from
50,000 to two million people.
All this has lots of potential, especially if you live in the US
and you are interested in dating. Most social network users are
young, single and American.
Its relevance to business is another matter.
This kind of system would obviously be extremely useful if you
could either create your own walled-off social network on a public
system, or run social network software on your intranet. And the
software to do this is beginning to emerge.
Enterprise-class social network software needs three things that
present web-based systems lack. First, you must be able to verify
and authenticate users so that you do not take on board any
fakers.
Second, it must have multiple levels of control. For example, you
will certainly want to have different access levels for internal
staff and external associates.
Third, it must integrate with existing business software. Working
with Microsoft Outlook is the minimum requirement, and an ability
to work with CRM systems would be highly recommended.
There are at least three companies to watch: Spoke, Visible Path
and Zero Degrees.
Social network software is not one of those things that you should
be using or even testing today. But I expect it will become
important in about five years, and you should certainly add it to
your watching brief.
Jack Schofield is computer editor of the
Guardian
