antonybrydon

A funny thing happened at last week's social networking conference...

A mobile conference broke out (punchline). OK, seriously, I participated in a wrap-up panel (after my panel) that included folks from across the social networking spectrum. The agenda was to simply follow the conversation where the audience took it, and after one mobile social networking question served as the bridge, the conversation moved squarely to mobile and stayed there for the next hour, only peripherally touching on social networks.

Granted, last Friday coincided with the launch of the 3G iPhone and the debut of the iPhone app store, and the technology cycles in the audience's mind was fully utilized by Apple, but there was a broader trend. Location, open networks, 3G bandwidth, mobile devices were the things people wanted to talk about, the topics that captured the imagination. Two things hit home for me:

Public vs private networks (the battle for the enterprise)

I presented at a session of the Enterprise Social Networking Conference today in San Francisco with Jim Fowler, CEO of Jigsaw. I had a couple of key points to make:

• It's not clear whether public networks (like LinkedIn) or enterprise networks (Lotus) will win the corporate market, and I expect it to be a fierce battle. Enterprise products like Lotus Connections, Microsoft Sharepoint, Visible Path, and Jive have some clear advantages such as privacy, security, the ability to integrate with enterprise applications, and the ability to direct the network to support company goals. But the public network vendors also have some indisputable advantages, such as mass, momentum (rapid growth rates), and engagement. 5 years ago it would seem impossible for an enterprise to rely on a public social network; today it seems plausible. 

• 'No decision' is actually a decision in favor of public networks. As each company delays or defers its decision about its own enterprise network, more employees join public networks and build their business of public networks. These networks are delivering indisputable business value, and people connecting to colleagues in their own company represents a large share of the connections.

LinkedIn vs. Lotus (Corporate social networking)

I had a good conversation with Laurie Flynn of the New York Times about corporate adoption of social networks; a big chunk of our conversation made it into her article titled MySpace Mindset Finally Shows Up at the Office in the Technology section of the April 9th paper.

While adoption is picking up and Forrester predicts corporate social networking growing from $258 million this year to $2 billion in 2013, it's going to be a difficult market for pure-play companies focused on delivering internal corporate social networks. There are two reasons. First, incumbents like IBM Lotus are building very strong products. Second, the adoption of these networks is threatened by public networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, which have become defacto corporate networks for most companies. Laurie and I touched on this in our conversation:

Today the battle lines in corporate social media are being drawn between established technology companies like Oracle, Microsoft and IBM, social media companies like Facebook and MySpace, and start-ups focused from the beginning on business...“It’s an open question who’s going to win this battle,” Mr. Brydon said. “As a whole, the question the Fortune 500 is asking is where is the Facebook for the Fortune 500 that can do for us what Facebook and MySpace have done for consumers?”

Fire Eagle buzz at the Web 2.0 expo

There's a fair amount of buzz about Fire Eagle, Yahoo's new location service, at the Web 2.0 expo this week, where the Yahoo! team has been promoting invites to the private beta of Fire Eagle and a new application called Fireball has launched. There is good information available on the web, but the best explanation is Tom Coates presentation at ETech in San Diego last month:

No technical solutions for email overload

A New York Times article today has reignited the email overload complaint in the blogosphere, refreshing now famous email bankruptcy posts of Fred Wilson, Larry Lessig, and Jason Calacanis.

All three are anchored in the tech industry, which makes it even more interesting that all three discount technical solutions:

Mr. Cuban and Mr. Arrington likewise could resort to a technological solution, preparing an auto-response for their public e-mail accounts that would warn strangers that the volume of e-mail precluded even a skimming, let alone dispatching responses. Yet both have resisted that course. (From the NYT)

But there are a few technical products that aim to save a user from email overload: