IBM has just launched Lotus Connections, a suite of collaboration software, with functionality including staff profiles, communities, project spaces, social bookmarking, and blogging. This is a major release, but has long been on the cards. Back in November 2005 I discussed how Lotus executives were seeing the future in terms of social software. At the time blogs, photo sharing, social bookmarks and similar tools for consumers were rapidly emerging. These clearly had massive applicability to large corporations, where the tools and approaches of knowledge management had never fulfilled on their promise. Since then IBM has continued to roll out social software applications inside its own 300,000-strong organization and to select clients. There is no question that IBM sees social software as a key enabler of productivity in large organizations, and will continue to focus on development of the platforms.

There has been an interesting range of responses to the announcement. Steve Borsch says that it “legitimizes the entire category.” It certainly helps to have this major announcement, though the reality is that IBM and Microsoft have been active in this space in various ways for some time. There are a number of smaller companies providing social software for the enterprise, including SocialText, Blogtronix, iUpload, and Traction. All of them are finding that corporations are rapidly becoming receptive to these approaches. No doubt this trend will accelerate, bringing in another wave of corporations after the early adopters.

More intriguingly, the conclusion that Larry Dignan of ZDNet draws from IBM entering the market is that “the social networking run is over, kaput, done, finished.” I can only presume Larry is not familiar with what has been done over the last ten years in enabling collaboration inside the enterprise, what has and hasn’t worked, and how this release relates to previous enterprise collaboration software. This release is by no means a massive change in direction for the industry – much of IBM’s release today has been foreshadowed in enterprise software developments over the last few years. Larry no doubt thinks organizations would perform better if they communicated solely with email.

“Social networks” basically means people are connected and communicate. If you don’t have social networks, you don’t have an organization. We now have better software tools than in the past to enable people to communicate and be productive – it’s that simple. Not liking SecondLife or other applications that are tagged “social networkng” has no bearing on the value of the latest releases that support enterprise collaboration.

On a related note, I’ve just discovered that Ask.com uses what I’ve written on my blog when asked “what is enterprise 2.0?” I’m still planning to do a more lengthy post on enterprise 2.0, what it means, and why it’s important sometime soon.

Spying ain’t what it used to be. The latest issue of the New York Times magazine sports a very interesting in-depth article titled Open Source Spying. The piece examines the potential of emerging technologies such as blogs, wikis, and other social software to improve how intelligence agencies function. However the key point that emerges is that intelligence agencies are currently very poor at tapping approaches that require a more open and less linear mentality. John Arquilla, a professor at the US Naval Postgraduate School, summarizes the bureaucracy and rigidity of US intelligence analysis:

“Fifteen years ago we were fighting the Soviet Union,” he said. “Who knew it would be replicated today in the intelligence community?”

I have written repeatedly before about the rise of “open source intelligence” and how social network analysis tools are being used in the intelligence community. One of the most fundamental shifts over the last decades is the far greater availability of information (ranging across billions of websites, untold mobile camera photos, commentary and insights from millions of subject experts, through to the powerful purvey of Google Earth). For intelligence agencies, this dramatically shifts the central issue from gathering exclusive information, to making sense of an almost infinite amount of data, which is available to everyone.

The emergent properties of an effectively integrated community of blogs and wikis mean that the most relevant and important information floats to the top. These kinds of capabilities must be tapped by intelligence operations in order to filter and assess what is worth responding to and raising to the executive level. Linear report writing, editing, and escalation doesn’t have a hope of working effectively in this environment. Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School, the most prominent apostle of Enterprise 2.0, has written a thought-provoking blog post about the New York Times article, drawing out the deep commonality of the issues facing both intelligence agencies and corporations in implementing social software across organizations. It is certainly clear from the article that there are serious efforts across America’s army of intelligence agencies to tap these tools. However these initiatives are constrained by lack of collaboration between the agencies, and senior executive fears and lack of understanding. The shift of intelligence to using vast troves of newly public (as well as covert) information is not a trivial issue. Terrorism is a peculiarly networked and emergent phenomenon which requires similar approaches to contain it. On the other hand, as intelligence efforts improve, privacy is superceded for everyone, not just those targetted. Chris Anderson of Long Tail fame draws out the potential for radical transparency to mean not just spooks, but in fact everyone, uncovers and analyzes critical information. That’s absolutely the long-term trend, though it will take a rather long time to unfold given the current people in power.

I’ve just got back from the Influence event, held in the lovely Hunter Valley wine region north of Sydney. A very interesting experience, and as far as I’m aware a unique event globally. Phil Sim has been running Mediconnect, doing events and an online PR exchange for some years now. These bring together Australian technology journalists with tech vendors and PR. The company is also involved in the Asian market. This year the event has been renamed Influence, and broadened to Include not just journalists, but also other influencers such as analysts and new media players. The influencers come for free, while vendors and PR pay handsomely for sponsorship and attendance. The structure is highly conversational, with a series of panels on both enterprise IT and consumer IT topics, where the panelists give a five minute intro which is then opened out into Q&A and discussion by the entire room. The reason the event is, as far as I’m aware, unique, is the scale of the Australian market. It is possible to bring together in one venue a critical mass of the tech journalist community. Most have been in the industry for a good many years, they mainly know each other, and they value the chance to get together.

I asked people there their perception of the value of the event. Several PR people said it was fantastic, as wherever else could you ever access 50 top journalists for two days? But the journalists get a lot of value and stories from the event too. The concept is great – value for everyone here as there are truly interesting discussions of where technology is today in bringing together the right people. It does take the right execution, too, of course, and Phil clearly has the network and respect it takes to pull it off. Everyone I spoke to at the event was extremely interesting. No duds. Phil also is immensely oriented to the conversational, which is a very welcome relief to all as still most Australian conferences have very traditional formats.

Just a few fragments of what struck me from what I saw and heard:

* Met William Pramana – I just found out his blog is ranked #17 on Technorati – not bad for a guy hanging out in Western Sydney… Over a lunch chat on what Web 3.0 will be like, he suggested that the ability to share site revenue with participants and contributors to the site will be part of it. Very thought-provoking.

* Duncan Riley, head of operations of the blogging network b5 media, said that 80% of their 135 bloggers are female. Great to meet Duncan at last and hear his views as a top-tier blog businessman. His first post on the conference includes his thoughts on my presentation and the Web 2.0 panel.

* In the blog world as much as in traditional publishing, people are concerned about editorial independence and credibility. This is a topic that will last forever. How is information paid for? Does that influence its credibility?

* Dan Warne of APC talked about how journalists blogging makes news more granular. Smaller pieces are more acceptable and expected. You don’t take the time to craft a longer piece until later.

* In the IT-Enabled Innovation session, Andrew Lamble of Dimension Data spoke about collaborative sourcing, multisourcing, alignment of objective, tapping innovation in high trust relationships. Hey, that’s what I talk about too. I’ll be spending a lot more time on this sort of stuff soon – good to see this is very solidly on the business agenda, as it should be. Some people in the session didn’t seem to understand the idea of open innovation. People had better get this soon – you haven’t a hope if you rely solely on your own internal innovation capabilities.

Unfortunately had to leave a bit over half way through the event to get back to other commitments. I’m sure I’m missing lots more good conversations. Great to see this sort of thing happening in Oz – look forward to the next one.

The Sydney Morning Herald has just released an article titled Social networkers get mobilised, which examines how social networking is shifting to mobile platforms. I’m happy that the journalist used what I felt were my most important comments in my interview for the article:

But while initiatives in the US, Japan and Switzerland are flying thick and fast, Australia’s slow entry into the third-generation mobile market, and the prohibitive cost of mobile data downloads has meant that comparable services here remain thin on the ground, said Ross Dawson, the chairman of technology consultancy, Future Exploration Network.

Although the mobile phone offers an “extremely appropriate platform for social networks,” he said current pricing structures were holding back the market.

“The fundamental problem is in the way Australian mobile companies set up charges for data downloads compared with the US where most plans are based on on unlimited data downloads. This means people are far less likely to experiment with data transfers of multimedia based content,” he said.

and

In Japan, a company called ImaHima has also broken new ground, with technology that can locate where friends are at any given time for those looking to meet up. According to Mr Dawson, the service has been widely adopted in Japan, and could also prove a hit in the local market.

“People are currently using text for this purpose, which is pretty clunky. There would be immense value in having an easy mobile interface to see where a defined group of people is located, using instant messaging or chat. The latent demand is there, but it is up to Australian telecommunications companies to come up with a useful product at reasonable price,” Mr Dawson said.

There are a few critical points to add here. The first is that a large proportion of social networking will shift to mobile platforms. In particular, knowing where your friends are and where the action is are vital social functions, which text messaging only begins to address. This is going to be a very big market. I mentioned Imahima, which while it hasn’t grown strongly recently has a great product. Imahima was licensed by Telstra a couple of years ago in association with its deal with NTT DoCoMo, though it is not clear whether Telstra intends to do anything with it.

Second, the cost of mobile data is a critical enabler of these applications. The reason the US has leapfrogged Europe and Asia in some mobile applications over the last years, after being miles behind at the turn of the century, is that they have highly attractive mobile data plans. In most cases there is unlimited data and Internet access on an attractive plan. One Australian executive was recently showing off his mobile Internet access. I asked him what his mobile plan was, and he told me A$950 per month. This is hardly populist pricing. Australia is in danger of falling behind because of its telcos’ extortionate mobile data pricing policies. I will be beating this drum more in the future.

Third, while telcos should be frontrunners in mobile social networking, few have done well, apart from Swisscom, Switzerland’s leading telco. You may recall that Google bought the excellent mobile networking platform Dodgeball in May 2005 (and was rumored to be buying a similar service Meetroduction), which at the time seemed to indicate that Google was keen to get into this space. While O’Reilly Radar sees promise here, others wonder what Google has done with the service. In those countries where mobile devices can easily and cheaply access the Internet, mobile social networking is easy to implement. In other countries, telcos largely control access to these services, and are not exploiting what could be a great opportunity, if correctly marketed and priced.

Reuters just came out with a syndicated story on MySpace titled As freedom shrinks, teens seek MySpace to hang out. It describes how MySpace has matched its moniker by creating a place where young people can explore their identity under their own terms. The article quotes me about these issues of teen identity, and how technology is a natural landscape for those who have grown up with it. The way I see relational technologies such as mobiles, chat forums, multiplayer roleplaying games, video sharing and so on, is that they extend our capacity as humans to relate. People have a built-in drive to connect with others, and now that has a far wider canvas across which to express itself. We can now discover many of the latent propensities and characteristics of humans, because we have been given new tools to explore our human identity. In some contexts, face-to-face interactions are absolutely superior, however that does not mean that it is not fundamentally human to connect in other ways too. It is the so-called MySpace generation that is exploring these new ways of relating, and as-yet undiscovered aspects of what it means to be a human being.