Comments on: Facebook: Open or closed?

By: Jacqueline

Jacqueline — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 06:17:56 +0000

I have posted some thoughts about gen Y and how perhaps they have a new concept of privacy here

http://jaxinteractive.wordpress.com/2007/08/21/some-thoughts-on-gen-y-online-habits/

By: JP

JP — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 19:00:50 +0000

Thanks Laurel, I will make sure I check it out and point to your posts.

By: Laurel Papworth

Laurel Papworth — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 18:57:27 +0000

Facebook has RSS. You just have to turn it on under PRIVACY.

Remember, facebook is not a walled garden – it has a gate that you can get stuff out. Only that gate is guarded by the members – if they don’t add you, you don’t get their content. if they don’t turn on RSS, you don’t get their feed updates in your reader or in your firefox browser toolbar. I set up Facebook Is/Not a Walled Garden on Facebook if you want more info and also have a few blog posts. :)

By: JP

JP — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 21:45:23 +0000

I wrestled with this for many years, which is why I wrote the post on paving the cowpats…..

By: Bill Barnett

Bill Barnett — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 20:30:42 +0000

I want to agree with you, JP. I want to believe that we are extended enterprises becoming more customer centric, and therefore should ignore the firewall issues. I want to live in a corporate environment with porous boundaries and radical collaboration across enterprises.

However, the reality is that technology moves tremendously faster than corporate policies and (especially) government regulations. There are significant benefits to be gained from enabling capabilities like wiki’s, del.icio.us, facebook, etc, for use strictly by employees. If the option to deploy within the firewall allows us to sidestep the regulatory issues and deploy faster, then I am inclined to be a pragmatist and go with it.

It is a sad situation when the expedient thing is to stand up your own hosted environment. Much better (by which I mean faster and nimbler and, I suspect, cheaper) when you can use an ASP like salesforce.com.

But there it is. :)

By: JP

JP — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 08:47:31 +0000

I’ve been stuck in this loop for some years now, the open-versus-behind-the-firewall argument. For years I supported the BTF side. Over the last two years I’ve changed. I am now far more interested in the outside-in no-BTF-instance side.

Why? I think it has to do with customers. It has to do with partners. It has to do with supply chain. We are extended enterprises that need to become more customer centric, and I think we’ve been getting this wrong.

By: Dominic Sayers

Dominic Sayers — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 08:40:14 +0000

Dec, we can get wikis, blogs and search engines that are deployable in the enterprise. We haven’t had as much luck with the equivalents of del.icio.us, flickr and craigslist so far. There are bits of deployable software out there (including IBM and Microsoft software if that’s your cup of tea), but none is nearly as successful in the enterprise as their public equivalents.

Don’t know exactly why, but I know Joshua Schacter has said he’s not interested in a deployable version of del.icio.us.

Interesting point.

By: declan

declan — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 08:05:51 +0000

I think the question should also be one of ownership. I think many enterprises see sites like Facebook as being part of the world wild web. Management belong to the Too Open crowd, Facebook is beyond their contol, their compliance procedures. Employees and the tech guys fall in with the Too Closed crowd, they want to exploit with these tools, mash them up, Generation M pushing through.

Several years ago blogs and wikis were frowned upon and misunderstood by companies. Now look where they are, integrated into the corporate world in surprising places – CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are blogging, financial institutions are using wikis.

One of the important factors that has allowed these previously frowned upon technologies to take root behind the corporate fence is that they can be bought in as appliances and SOAS. ‘Search in a Box’ by Google. ‘Wiki in a Box’ by Socialtext.

“Owning” the technology allows management to be more comfortable in allowing employees to exploit the possibilities. Open and closed at the same time.

So how long until we can buy Facebook, or an equivalent, for the enterprise? Internal Facebook could impact on existing software that all enterprises already have – phone books, meeting organisers, CRM tools and so on. Once that happens the open/closed debate will be partially resolved.

Roll on ‘Social Networking in a Box’.

By: Blob » CLOSEDvOPEN: Attitude and Generation gaps

Blob » CLOSEDvOPEN: Attitude and Generation gaps — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 01:18:29 +0000

[...] picks up on my “Walled Hearts” post and points to the Generation factor. He writes [...]

By: Steve P

Steve P — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 10:12:18 +0000

Paul – you aren’t the exception, Facebook is a walled garden. It’s popularity with developers is probably partly due to the ability to raise VC, write and monetize facebook applications.