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 19th 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

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.

Just randomly checked today and in less than 1 year Beehive has signed up more IBM users than Facebook, the largest social networking on the Internet! (39,300 vs. 39,236) We only have 64 more people, but I’m pretty confident we’ll keep the lead, given our adoption rate. (For some indication of adoption rates, in the last 2 hours, 30 people joined Beehive and 7 people joined Facebook’s IBM network.)

Have you heard of BizNik? It is YASNS, for business folks. Their homepage promotional banner declares that using their site you can “build relationships, promote your business and share your experience!” and these 3 basic actions resonate remarkable well with what we’re seeing on Beehive, inside of IBM.

We conducted a study of why people at IBM are using Beehive and our analysis reveals that workers differ from typical users of Internet social network sites, who have been shown to use SNSs primarily for keeping up with off-line friends (see boyd & Ellison, 2008). Within the walled garden of the enterprise, where there is a higher level of trust and an emphasis on work, IBM employees choose to reach out and meet new people rather than only connecting to those they know. They also share details of their life outside of work (”share your experience”) which has not been found with any frequency in other enterprise social software tools . And lastly, if motivated by career advancement goals or a desire to champion a project idea, they use the social network site strategically to connect (”build relationships”) and spread their message to a large audience (”promote your business”).

Luis Suarez, an IBM employee and one of our earliest and most enthusiastic Beehive users, has an article in the New York Times this week where he shares his amazing story: I freed myself from email’s grip. Luis has replaced his regular use of business email with phone calls, instant messaging, his wikis, his blog, and Beehive. There an interesting set of comments in response to his article on Lifehacker.

It is exciting that Luis sees our social network site Beehive as part of his set of critical business communication tools. Part of his reason for this is that Beehive is a public forum where he can answer things once, rather than many individual times.

My primary hypothesis as to why Luis and other employees are excited about checking their Beehive profile page and dread their email inboxes is that while the email inbox is one huge, enormous, always-growing to-do list, a social networking site is by definition social and there is a much lower level of obligation to reply or do anything in response to messages on the site. In many cases, there is no expectation to reply to that “friend request” or that friendly comment on your family photo. You are free to enjoy the environment and contribute content and comments when the mood strikes, and that is it. Who wouldn’t want to hang out there, as compared to within their piles of email?

If someone asks you something within Beehive that is 100% about work, it is similar to when a colleague asks you about the project while you are on your way to get coffee. You are available and willing to hear the question. You can defer the question or even ignore it, but in all likelihood your colleague is likely to get a response from you because you are in a context of being social, open and friendly.

So, can, should, or will social networking sites replace email? They can’t, shouldn’t, and won’t because they aren’t task-oriented inboxes. Employees crave an obligation-free communication environment, which is why they flock (buzz) to Beehive. And while they are there, sharing with each other, there many instances where the topics turn to business and real work gets done. But if social networking sites replace email, they wouldn’t be any fun any more!

Today’s WSJ has an article about keeping track of all of your friends’ activities on different social networking sites: Social Services: Lots of sites let you keep track of your friends. The problem now is keeping track of all the ways to keep track.

I was kind of surprised by the article: basically this space of social aggregators hasn’t changed much in the past 12 months. Spokeo is the most viable option and it has been running for at least a year. But have you heard of it before? The problem of keeping track of your friends’, family’s, and colleagues’ activities keeps getting more and more complicated with everyone now joining multiple sites. (”Did you post your status on Facebook or Twitter?” “I looked for that picture you mentioned…. is it on your blog or flickr?”)

Maybe the reason a single browser aggregator isn’t dominating this space is that people are pushing updates to other applications, either mobile or RSS readers. That’s at least my solution. Or just not keep track :).

NYTimes Bits: Big Changes Coming to Profile Pages on Facebook

“The changes come as Facebook aims to simplify its user pages, which have become as cluttered with applications, photos and information as pages on MySpace — long criticized by visual purists as being a bit too visually chaotic.

The changes come amid indications that growth at Facebook might be tailing off. According to a recent report from Nielsen Online, 22.4 million users visited Facebook in April, down from 24.9 million in March. Overall year-over-year growth slowed to 56 percent from last year’s 98 percent growth rate.”

I’m definitely looking forward to this clean up (see the article for details)! As I collect more and more Facebook friends I’m having a hard time getting anything useful out of looking at their profiles. What I’d really like to do is to subscribe to feeds of my friends’ photos and comments, so I can cut through the clutter using my RSS Reader. Anyone have an idea how to do that? I have a feed to my friends’ status messages and am enjoying that.

The Associated Press wrote an article that talks about our social networking project Beehive: Next generation of business software could get more fun:

You can tell just from looking at the Beehive program under development at IBM Corp. that something is different. Beehive’s color scheme is bright yellow, not IBM’s standard blue. The cheerfulness reflects the fact that Beehive is meant to encourage far-flung co-workers to like each other more.

Beehive is an online portal for employees to describe their expertise, so valuable knowledge doesn’t get lost inside the bureaucracy. Those kinds of tools are common, but Beehive adds an unusual dose of Facebook or MySpace. The 27,000 IBMers using Beehive can post pictures, video and one-sentence updates about themselves. They can share lists of “things I can’t live without.”

Such personal touches often are missing when people work at a distance from one another, says Joan Morris DiMicco, an IBM researcher developing Beehive. Co-workers in different locales can’t wander into each other’s offices and see family pictures on the desk. They don’t shop at the same places or have children in the same schools.

These tidbits, DiMicco believes, help people understand each other better. And the usual communication tools like e-mail, instant messaging, phones and even videoconferencing do only so much to fill the gap.

The Associated Press: Next generation of business software could get more fun
USA Today: Virtual apps try to build camaraderie, productivity
CNN: ‘Virtual watercooler’ makes workplace more fun
Washington Post: Next generation of business software could get more fun
Red Orbit: Virtual Communities Boost Employee Productivity

A mention of Beehive on BusinessWeek’s Blogspotting: IBM’s del.icio.us: A big hit and also on the Intranet Blog: Could Facebook be a real intranet? IBM is onto something…

“The research goal of Beehive is to aid IBMers with various people-centric challenges within the workplace. We broadly categorize these challenges into “relationship building” and “people-sensemaking”.

Relationship-building challenges include, for example, new employees struggling with making connections that are important for their current project and professional growth, remote workers having difficulties with team building and staying in touch with their team members, or employees moving on to new assignments who are not easily able to stay touch with former colleges.

People-sensemaking includes, for example, the difficulties of discovering people with the right skills and common interests, or learning more about someone personally as well as professionally to facilitate making contact, or getting to know about ongoing projects and activities beyond your immediate team.”

Spied this while buying replacement clothes in Scotland. (No, I didn’t buy it.) I guess Facebook has taken off in Scotland! Who knew this is the “tshirt everyone is talking about.”

I am about to hit the road to present some research results.

Rosta Farzan, the PhD student intern who worked with our team last summer, has two papers on the incentive mechanism she deployed on Beehive. Rosta implemented a basic point system on the site where users earn points and move up through status levels as they contribute content to our social networking site. The results have been pretty dramatic! First, users added more content. Then users objected to the system. Then users started to game the system. Then users opt-outed of the system. Then users discussed the merits and weaknesses of the system. The list of our lessons learned grows by the week, which has made this research project extremely interesting. I can’t wait for Rosta to return to IBM this summer and implement a new type of incentive system, so we can see what drama unfolds when the rules of the game change.

Rosta (and she’s kindly sharing some of her presentation time with me) will be presenting the initial results of deploying the points system at the annual CHI conference. This year it is in Florence, Italy, yahoo!

R Farzan, JM DiMicco, DR Millen, B Brownholtz, W Geyer, C Dugan. (2008) "Results from Deploying a Participation Incentive Mechanism within the Enterprise." Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008), Florence, Italy, April 2008.

And prior to that, I will be in Aberdeen, Scotland, presenting the follow-up paper describing what happened after the initial experiment. This paper will be published at the Symposium on Persuasive Technology that is being held in conjunction with the AISB 2008 Convention on Communication, Interaction and Social Intelligence.

R Farzan, JM DiMicco, DR Millen, B Brownholtz, W Geyer, C Dugan. (2008) "When the experiment is over: Deploying an incentive system to all the users." Symposium on Persuasive Technology, In conjunction with the AISB 2008 Convention, Aberdeen, Scotland, April 2008.

And it isn’t all about the point systems, either. I’m going to be participating in a CHI workshop on Sensemaking, to talk about “people sensemaking” with David Millen:

JM DiMicco, DR Millen. (2008) "People Sensemaking with Social Networking Sites." Sensemaking Workshop,Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008), Florence, Italy, April 2008.

And Werner Geyer will be presenting another paper on Beehive that discusses everyone’s favorite social content type the “hive five”!

W Geyer, C Dugan, JM DiMicco, DR Millen, B Brownholtz, M Muller. (2008) "Use and Reuse of Shared Lists as a Social Content Type." Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008), Florence, Italy, April 2008.

For my own research purposes, I’m using my fellow researchers’ tool, Many Eyes. Pretty cool!

And I need a place to save this, so why not use the blog?

from Le Monde, via overstated.

Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal had an article about the challenges facing today’s information worker in terms of job satisfaction.

In the information age, so much is worked on in a day at the office but so little gets accomplished. In the past, one could see the fruits of his or her labor immediately: a chair made or a ball bearing produced. But it can be hard to find gratification from work that is largely invisible, or from delivering goods that are often metaphorical. You can’t even make a mark on a paper in increasingly paperless offices. It can be even harder trying to measure it all. (Satisfaction’s a tough job, WSJ, 2/19/08)

This article rings true for me. When work becomes exceptionally busy with meetings, powerpoints, decision-making, and travel, it feels like there isn’t anything to show for it at the end of it all. But back in the good old days (before the Internets?), after hard work there would be stuff built! and things made! To get some of that old fashioned satisfaction I’ve spent my past five weekends installing shelving around the house, in part because we need it, but mostly because I’m finding it so satisfying to set about a project that results in something tangible.

So what is an information worker to do? Could social networking tools come to the rescue?

Sounds like a stretch, but hear me out. I’ve been thinking lately about who uses social networking tools. What types of workers are most drawn to these tools? If it is the case that project managers, the prototypical information workers, use social networking tools more than engineers, the prototypical builder in a software company, then it may be because SN tools offer them something lacking in their existing day-to-day work.

What do social networking tools offer information workers?

• measurement! you can count your friends! you can count your connectedness! most importantly you can compare yourself to others and see how you stack up. If you can track it, it feels like you are accomplishing something.
• using the skills you have, you can build something. An information worker, who is skilled in communication but not programming, can build a digital representation (a profile) of him/herself quite easily using a social networking site. Engineers don’t need the technical infrastructure of a social networking site to build a webpage, but project managers do.
• connecting and maintaining social networks. This is the most obvious one. Social networking sites are designed for this purpose and I believe it suits information workers perfectly. Part of their job is to stay connected with “key stakeholders” and maintain these relationships. SN tools are the way to do this in the information age.

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