Legal Research

Will Facebook ever be an effective enterprise application?

By Jason

I am a little late coming to the ‘Facebook as intranet’ debate because I simply haven’t been able to figure out exactly how I feel about it. It’s one of those developments that made me say ‘huh’. I didn’t find it shocking or appalling. Nor did I find it particularly great or exciting. But now that I’ve had some time to digest it I do have some comments.

For those not following the news, awhile back Bill Ives at The Fast Forward Blog talked about Serena Software replacing their intranet with Facebook.

Doug Cornelius commented on this. So have the folks at SLAW. Most of comments have been positive, or at least eager to see the results over the long term. But SLAW also pointed to a list of 12 predictions for 2008, one of which predicts that there would be a backlash against Facebook in the enterprise.

My own thoughts on the matter are still divided, except I do have a bad feeling about this trend.

First, I should say that from a personal standpoint I hate it, as an employee I think I would hate it. I spend the better part of eight hours working on a computer, and when I get home I tend to shun things I need to do on the computer. During a weekend I might check my email, but that’s about it. My enthusiasm for social networking and new technologies comes from the potential they hold to help myself and other librarians do their jobs effectively. But I’ve also enjoyed separating my work life from my personal life. And although my social networks tend to include colleagues, I view those connections as larger view “career-oriented” connections which aren’t quite the same as my professional life.

However, I might be something of a dinosaur. Perhaps one of the characteristics of millennials may indeed be a blurring of the line between work life and personal life. I just know that if my social networks were suddenly inundated with work talk my work-life balance would tilt seriously out of whack.

But from a professional standpoint I find the idea intriguing. Obviously there are some security and privacy concerns, especially when you consider the recent Beacon mess. My big sticking point is that you need to be able to get your data out of any system in a standard format. Even if you have data hosted by a vendor, you have to have guarantees that you can get it out when you need to, in a nonproprietary format. While Facebook does have an API and developer platform, and some flexibility with their applications, I’m just not confident that I would be able to get the information I needed out of it. This could cause some serious problems down the line.

Full post as published by Jason the Content Librarian on December 21, 2007 (boomark / email).