Collab-Or-Ate

Read here that Standard Chartered Bank is using Workbook, by the start-up WorkLight.

WorkBook: A Secure Corporate Overlay for Facebook

WorkBook allows employees to securely interact with their peers using the hugely-popular Facebook service. WorkBook combines all the capabilities of Facebook with all the controls of a corporate environment, including integration with existing enterprise security services and information sources. With WorkBook, employees can find and stay in touch with corporate colleagues, publish company-related news, create bookmarks to enterprise application data and securely share the bookmarks with authorized colleagues, update on status change and get general company news. Employees can freely use Facebook, with the WorkBook overlay, with no danger of information leaking outside the organization or access being granted to unauthorized personnel.

It is after 7pm on a Friday night, so I don’t have any comments to make at this time.

If you are working in the area of social networking within the workplace or organization, please submit a position paper to our CSCW 2008 workshop on Social Networking in Organizations! We expect it to be a great collection of people interested in this topic. Position papers are due Sept 26th and the workshop is Nov 9th in San Diego, CA. (We are excited to be part of a great line-up of workshops this year.)

Workshop on Social Networking in Organizations

Workshop Website: http://research.ihost.com/cscw08-socialnetworkinginorgs/

Overview:

Social networking websites, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, are heavily used by students to maintain friendships and by professionals to maintain contacts with others such as potential customers and recruits. Technologies such as email, IM, and weblogs were initially adopted by students and consumers for personal use and then moved into enterprises, having a significant impact on business environments. Social networking technologies seem to be following suit, perhaps more rapidly, but we are just beginning to explore how these applications are being used inside enterprises and large organizations. To what extent are they used to maintain or establish external ties to family, friends, and professional colleagues? To what extent are they being used to meet internal team or organizational goals? How are organizations responding?

This workshop will assemble 15-20 people with a research or applied industry interest in social networking in organizational or enterprise settings.

Those wishing to participate in the workshop should submit a 1 to 2 page extended abstract describing their research, experiences, or analyses of social networking software.

Important Dates:

Friday, September 26: position papers due
Friday, October 10: notification of acceptance
Sunday, November 9: workshop in San Diego, CA

Organizers:

Joan DiMicco, IBM Research
Werner Geyer, IBM Research
David Millen, IBM Research
Jonathan Grudin, Microsoft Research

I was reading How to Create a Successful Web Site For Nothing (or Almost Nothing) in today’s WSJ, and my jaw dropped at this paragraph:

There’s one more free and easy way to improve the design of your site — using HTML programming code. Fortunately, you don’t need to have programming skills to use HTML. All you need to know is that a block of HTML — essentially, a bunch of gobbledygook words and symbols — can add extra features to your site.

I guess they didn’t have room for the 3 sentences it would take to explain what HTML is, but dismissing it as “gobbledygook” seems a little extreme. The section in the article about how to get your website found by search engines was actually kind of useful. No gobbledygook required.

Last week there was an interesting article on CNET about Why Facebook left ‘Scrabulous’ alone that comments on Hasbro filing a copyright and trademark infringement claim against the creators of Facebook’s Scrabulous.

The CNET article points out that “Facebook’s insistence on being a ‘neutral platform provider’ in the situation” is a little odd, “because, to state the matter bluntly, it isn’t.”

“[Facebook] has a history of tightly policing activity on its developer platform, banning “Secret Crush” over a spyware claim, locking down applications believed to be spamming users, and occasionally raising developer ire with some of its more stringent regulations. The site even temporarily blocked Top Friends, a creation of widget powerhouse Slide, when a security hole was discovered…

“Facebook wanted to keep Scrabulous around. In claiming a ‘neutral’ stance, the company was actually taking the activist route.”

So it makes me wonder, is it possible for a community site or social network site to remain neutral about its content? When you build a site, and especially when you are also studying the behavior of the users of the site, you do not want to be the police, monitoring and deleting content deemed inappropriate. But, as this situation on Facebook reveals, by doing nothing, you can’t claim neutrality because you are implicitly endorsing the content. It could be argued that it is only because Facebook removed some content that they can’t claim neutrality. But what if they did nothing about illegal content such as child pornography? Do they need to comply with laws? Copyright laws? If yes, then that means they have to be the police, a role no web2.0 community developer wants. It is a tough situation.