I’ll only add another book to read (which is sitting next to my copy of “Community Building”): “Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability”, by Jenny Preece. Preece’s book complements the Kim book by looking at working health support communities, and exploring various theorectical reasons how/why supprt can be given electronically.

My take is that FB is a *metaphor* for what could happen in business but we don’t necessary think it will be FB because we don’t see any sign that they’re looking beyond the consumer play.

Personally, I think that’s crazy but I can understand how the identity issues inherent within FB create all sorts of knotty problems. (OpenID anyone?)

The trick FB has pulled is to allow devs to get access to selected data and yes, it can be pulled to enterprise systems like talent management and recruitment. I’ve had some promising discussions around that.

The black hole argument doesn’t apply to enterprise because as you know, it is possible to gatekeep however works best. I hear lot of AOL Mk 2 talk but I don’t hear anyone making a coherent case for change (as it would be understood by business) other than ‘it isn’t open.’

One thing I am hearing a LOT – the API is grubby.

@Rhion: I disagree. Past attempts at collaboration have been characterised by command and control systems that limit conversation and interaction. They’re not far off ECM. The thing to really understand here is transparency. That does NOT sit will with the organisations you work alongside. However, I did notice that politicans on both sides of the Atlantic are realising the agenda is slipping away from them. It’s only a short step from there to understanding that participation yields much richer results. FYI, I’m working on a 100K person project designed to do exactly that.

FB is fluid. There is one thing that’s definitely missing and that’s a profile based discovery mechanism. You could thrash about a lot in FB and not find what’s useful. FB could do that as they’re talking contextual ads based on profiles. That’s a tricky area but from an enterprise perspective, a no brainer because that’s exactly what you want to do. That could eg feed multi-disciplinary ad hoc project management systems. Or it could become the system.

Important to realise we’re early in this game and there are plenty of mistakes to be made. Fortunately, they can be made at very low cost and in such a way where there is little waste or damage. I’m not sure the same can be said of the way institutions usually contract.

Rhion, if you have been following the other comment chains, you may have seen my efforts to promote Goffman’s work on interaction rituals. If you are seriously interested in participation, then I recommend this work to you. I promised JP that I would provide some expository material on my own blog, and I have now done so.

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2007/08/interaction-rituals-introduction.html

Balaji, thanks for the comments. I’m very tempted to say “I know precisely what Facebook is NOT. It is not Usenet. In fact it is explicitly characterised by a membership largely made up of people who do not know what Usenet was or is, and actually don’t care about it either.”

Nevertheless, I take your point, and will do my best to respond in one of my closing posts on the subject of Facebook and the Enterprise.

BTW you seem to be labouring undering the misapprehension that I have some undeclared vested interest in Facebook. Not so. If anything, I want to prevent a wonderful opportunity from being wasted, an opportunity for many of us to learn about how virtual and real communities can coexist.

Complex multi-sided platforms are easier described by ‘What they are Not” to start with.

Your FaceBook (eulogy? :) ) series will also benefit from a ‘What FaceBook is Not post’. As you mentioned earlier, FB indeed is an Avatar of multi-sided platform/market. Not the most frictionless one, yet, multi-sided platform nevertheless.

Regards.
-Balaji S.

I have not read enough of the Tönnies treatise to have a clear sense of where he takes this distinction; but, in the absence of any good alternative characterizations, let’s use it as a point of departure. Since software itself is mechanical and since software-based virtuality is imaginary, it sounds to me like the coin is coming down on the side of Tönnies’ use of the term “society.” Individuals who engage with each other through such software are NOT mechanical; and, whether or not they engage through a designed avatar, by virtue of having an IDENTITY (one of your favorite concepts, as I recall), they are not imaginary. Neither, however, is a community, which, since it is organic, rather than artifactual, cannot be BUILT. (I may not reject a book by its cover, but the wording of its title has a lot to do with whether or not I look beyond the cover!)

So, to return to your proposition, I believe that communities can emerge, grow, and decay by virtue of personal engagements that are mediated by software; but the software will never be anything more that SECONDARY to those processes of emergence, growth, and decay. Kim’s chapter headings are a clever attempt to invoke the vocabulary of engagement, but they cannot be more than linguistic frills that (to invoke Balaji’s metaphor) define the current fashion. Thus we come to my more significant belief, which is my conviction that software should FACILITATE without being a DISTRACTION.

Back in June you actually planted the seeds for a methodology under which Facebook could be used as a tool for a better understanding of the nature of engagement:

http://confusedofcalcutta.com/2007/06/27/21st-century-technology-adoption-curves-and-facebook-and-innovation/

At that time I seem to recall writing a comment of enthusiastic support for such a methodology. I hope you do not neglect further attention to such concerns!