Office Jotter

I had posted on this topic a few days ago but have thought again about how best to present the data from the survey I mentioned. I am therefore reposting the item with the changes included. The earlier version is no longer present.

In the blog posting titled “Social netting - the whats and whys (2)“, I mentioned at the end a forthcoming Bloor Research market overview of social networking for business. This is now available, free.

The main focus of the research Carl and I are doing is innovation in social networking for business. We asked companies to tell us what’s new from them in these three areas:

- the products or services themselves, such as new technologies or features
- how they deliver their products or services, such as via a ‘cloud’
- how their customers are using the product or service.

We got completed forms from 17 relevant companies, about a third of those we contacted. One (Open Text) bought another (Vignette) soon after, leaving 16 sets of results. That’s not bad for a first pass and includes companies of various sizes, from IBM down to small businesses. Their customers are similarly varied.

One company that responded but whose details don’t appear on the chart or in part 2 is Visible Technologies. Theirs is an interesting offering, consisting of a set of tools to allow companies to oversee, analyse and engage in social networks. One of its main values is in what marketers call sentiment analysis. Visible Technologies refer to “social media listening”. Unfortunately, their services don’t fit our framework, so with regret we have omitted them.

The other suppliers’ responses were mixed. Most were informative and to the point. At the other extreme, some read like copy-and-paste jobs from corporate literature. We’ve therefore supplemented what all the respondents said with research from elsewhere.

Product and service innovation

Each entry has a numerical rating that reflects our assessment of its product or service’s innovativeness. Part of the usefulness of software lies in the way it comes to the user organization, so innovation in this aspect is included in the score. The top score possible is 5.0.

Note that innovation is not the same as invention. Innovating is doing something new, not just dreaming it up and patenting it (otherwise Xerox PARC would feature in many answers!) Also, we’re interested only in useful innovation, that has practical value rather than being change for the sake of it.

Another consideration is that innovativeness is not an absolute. Features that might be only moderately advanced in a new product from a small start-up company would be seen as highly innovative in an established product from a large, enterprise-class supplier.

A new company is obliged to offer something innovative to gain funding and customers. Existing suppliers of enterprise software are judged on other matters as well, such as architectural continuity, product support and sustainability. Our assessments are therefore relative to the context.

You will see that there are no low scores for innovativeness. This is unsurprising, as only those companies who see themselves as innovators have responded.

Fitness for the purpose

We have also rated each entry by its likely fitness for application in a target user organization. This is an imaginary large corporate body, with a wide range of needs that span multiple countries and involve the use of several human languages.

The model organization has the competence and confidence to specify, install, use and manage the product well but will need support in all its operating countries. This could come direct from the supplier or through trading partners. Again, 5.0 is best.

Almost any product or service can be used within a large organization or part of it. By “fitness”, we mean how able it is — or soon will be — to meet the typical expectations for enterprise software. Those encompass such matters as data quality and quantity, security, compliance, reliability, and depth and breadth of interaction. They also include close integration with corporate data and processes, and single sign-on. ‘Skinning’ and branding also appeal to corporate buyers (but not in a cattle herding way).

Some suppliers, and users, might argue that all this is too much of a burden to place on a social networking product or service whose essence is ease and lightness. We would agree, if social networking were only ever to deal with discretionary or informal information or have local or external application. Once it starts being expected to handle corporate data or regarded as an enterprise-wide service, these requirements will make themselves felt.

This is not bad news. As IBM and others show, Web 2.0 tools (mashups, etc.) allow suppliers or user organizations to combine consumer-level ease of use and adaptability with industrial-strength security and robustness. Attractiveness and corporate fitness are not antithetical.

What we mean by social networking

A quick reminder that we see social netting products and services as offering most or all of the following:

1. Publishing tools — blogs, wikis, texting, tweeting, podcasting, videocasting, content feeds, etc.
2. Interpersonal communication and collaboration — instant messaging (IM), email and conferencing (text, voice or video), shared editing. Groupware, in effect
3. Searching and navigating — syndicated search, content maps, user directories and maps, machine- and user-created categorisation (bookmarks, tags and ratings)
4. Community creation and management — forum moderation, content promoting, invitation issuing, etc.
5. Tools for managing and extending the system.

A major part of the ethos of social networking is allowing personal choice and group direction-setting. These are matters of implementation and system control as much as of the products or services themselves and are hard to envisage within some organisations.

Looking at the results

Here below is a chart of our ratings of respondents’ offerings. Some of the data points are moved slightly away from their true positions for readability. Click on the chart to see it larger.

Social networking products and services assessed

The results are interestingly varied:

- only two companies — IBM and EMC — combine offerings that are demonstrably of enterprise strength with, in their context, significant innovation

- the most innovative offerings, again in context, come from Mzinga, Socialtext and ThoughtFarmer but all have yet to show their readiness for use in our target organization

- Traction Teampage scores highly on innovativeness but is not suited to enterprise use in the fuller sense

- DreamFace Interactive is similarly innovative but is a new entrant to this market, so has not yet demonstrated its readiness for corporate adoption

- Open Text is potentially strong in both dimensions but has few large users to boast of. Its newly-acquired Vignette product range has yet to be integrated

- three offerings — from Atlassian, Jive and Novell — occupy what we think of the up-and-comers’ space. They are moderately innovative but need the evidence of some successful large installations to convince of their enterprise strength

- the remaining 5 companies’ offerings are middle-sitters, with plenty of scope to improve in either direction.

Applying the results

Our choice of specimen organization favours software and services suited for working behind the firewall as well as outside it. This does not in any way belittle the usefulness of those offerings designed only for outward-looking use — it is a vital part of what social netting can do — but does bias our results.

Similarly, we concentrate on systems for large companies and have assessed products and services accordingly. Some of the software given a modest rating on corporate fitness could be well suited for use by a smaller organization or a division of a large enterprise.

Finally, please note that the results of our survey are not a general judgement on any company or its products or services. We have looked at only two of the many aspects that need considering when specifying a potential solution.

Next

Part 2, below, gives the details on which we based our assessments.

Innovation in products and services — part 2

Here below are summaries of the details on which we have based our assessment of the innovativeness and corporate readiness of the listed products and services.

1. Atlassian Confluence is Java-based wiki software that also provides scope for blogs, software project management (through Atlassian’s JIRA product), mashups and 100+ third-party plug-ins. It integrates with Microsoft SharePoint and runs in Microsoft, Apple and Linux environments.
Packaging: Downloadable from the Web or as hosted service.
Innovation score: 3.0. Apparently doing little new directly on features. Add-ins extend the range of tools but are unlikely to be as effective as native capabilities
Company: 200+ employees; 3 offices — Australia (home), USA & The Netherlands; partners worldwide; 9,000+ customers in 100 countries
Corporate fitness score: 4.0. Used by a long list of household names worldwide, with some large installations. Narrower set of features than some competitors. Smallish company supporting several products.

2. DreamFace Interactive is a open-source Web 2.0 product, based on AJAX, that lets users build their own social networking systems and mash-ups. Uses ‘DataWidgets’ for creating, distributing and syndicating content, all accessible from PCs, Web browsers and PDAs. Mobile services include banking and payments.
Packaging: Downloadable from the Web as an open source (Community Edition) or commercially-licensed (Enterprise Edition) product.
Innovation score: 4.0. An easily adaptable product, using modern tools and methods.
Company: 10+ employees; 1 office — France; some partners; no large customers listed
Corporate fitness score: 1.5. Potentially useful but little evidence of enterprise adoption so far.

3. EMC CenterStage is Web client software for the Documentum system. It comes in basic (’essentials’) and ‘Pro’ versions. Pro combines social networking tools with mobile access via BlackBerry devices, federated search and textual analysis, all with control of security, compliance and data retention. It is designed for use inside or outside the firewall.
Packaging: Available as a discrete, single-server version or, for larger installations, a multi-server, multi-tier product
Innovation score: 4.0. A wide set of tools all closely integrated with a leading enterprise electronic content management (ECM) system.
Company: 37,000 employees; 400 offices in 60 countries; many partners; many customers, of all sizes
Corporate fitness score: 4.5. EMC is a corporate software specialist. CenterStage has high potential but is not yet widely used, even by existing Documentum customers. It is unlikely to appeal to companies that don’t (or don’t intend to) use its ECM software.

4. FreshNetworks is a hosted service, built on the Drupal open-source content management system and offering a wide range of features. These can carry the customer’s branding. There is a strong marketing bias in the company’s software and services.
Packaging: FreshNetworks’ service includes installation, community management and traffic analysis. A network can carry the customer’s branding.
Innovation score: 3.5. Its reporting and analysis service make FreshNetworks especially useful for marketing-based communities.
Company: 25 employees; 2 offices — UK and Spain; no details offered on partners or customers
Corporate fitness score: 2.5. The company operates internationally but seems to have few customers. Its software service is outside the firewall.

5. Huddle.net is a networked service aimed at helping teams collaborate on-line, both internally and across the firewall. Tools include voice and web conferencing, whiteboards, management of digital assets, documents and projects, and personalised dashboards. Huddle is accessible from iPhones and via Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning and Xing. There is a connector to the InterCall conferencing service.
Packaging: Offered in free and paid versions. Branding is available. Aims for ‘viral’ spread.
Innovation score: 2.5. The network basis is attractive but the tools are more groupware than social netting.
Company: 30+ employees; 1 office — UK (+ USA in 2010); no details offered on partners; large number of users, including household names worldwide
Corporate fitness score: 3.5. There are some large installations.

6. IBM Lotus Connections combines adaptable social networking tools with enterprise-strength platforms. Wide range of social netting tools but needs other IBM tools for a full offering, typically at some cost in complexity. Client software runs in Microsoft, Apple and Linux operating environments and on various PDAs; server software runs in Microsoft, AIX and Linux environments. Integrates with Microsoft Exchange.
Packaging: Licensed software to run on customer’s machine(s), purchasable online or via partners. Many features are offered as a ‘cloud’ service, LotusLive Connections.
Innovation score: 4.5. Part of IBM’s campaign to bring Web 2.0 to its big (and smaller) iron. Enterprise-wide shared bookmarking (from its Dogear project) and task-centred working are ahead of its competitors’ offerings.
Company: Nearly 400,000 employees; offices in over 170 countries; many partners; many customers, of all sizes
Corporate fitness score: 5.0. IBM is a corporate software specialist and has several large installations of Connections worldwide. Will probably appeal mainly to existing IBM customers.

7. IGLOO produces and hosts turnkey social networking systems, branded for each customer. It offers a range of groupware, social netting and document management tools that integrate to form either internal (’Workplace Communities’) or external (’Marketplace Communities’) systems. These can integrate with Google Analytics and are accessible from BlackBerry and iPhone PDAs.
Packaging: A hosted service.
Innovation score: 3.5. A useful set of tools offered in easy-to-adopt packaging. Provide a best practice ‘playbook’ online.
Company: 50 employees; 1 office — Canada; some partners; good list of well-known customers but mainly in IGLOO’s domestic market
Corporate fitness score: 3.0. Can integrate with Microsoft SharePoint and other enterprise software. Small to medium-sized installations so far.

8. Jive Social Business Software offers a collection of groupware and social netting tools. They can integrate with YouTube, Twitter, Microsoft Office and SharePoint, SAP, Salesforce and, in 2010, Documentum. Access is possible from iPhone and BlackBerry PDAs, as well as PCs and browsers. Multilingual searching is offered, as is traffic analysis.
Packaging: As licensed software, as a hosted service or via a cloud.
Innovation score: 3.5. A good set of tools in a range of packagings. A new bridging tool lets users import external discussions to internal conferences.
Company: 150+ employees; 10 offices — USA (HQ) and Europe; some partners; wide range of customers
Corporate fitness score: 4.0. Has some large installations, mainly in North America and Europe, including EMC (q.v.).

9. Josh XCAP is a modular, Java-based product for external communities. It runs in all the main small-server operating environments and uses the MySQL database. XCAP offers more than 20 modules for a wide range of social netting functions, including content management.
Packaging: Downloadable licensed software for user organizations and site developers. XCAP Xpress is a ready-for-use version.
Innovation score: 3.5. XCAP’s environmental versatility, modular structure and large number of APIs help make it adaptable to most needs.
Company: 15 employees; 1 office, in Sweden; 4 partners, all in northern Europe; a good number of customers
Corporate fitness score: 2.5. The software is used outside the firewall by several large publishing companies but mainly in Scandinavia.

10. Liferay Social Office provides a good range of groupware, social networking and content management features for internal or external use. A plug-in to Liferay’s popular open-source Portal product, Social Office can mirror the organizational structure of a company. It is built in Java and offers an API for integration with corporate software.
Packaging: Downloadable free as open source software or licensed in an “enterprise” version
Innovation score: 3.0. Built around a hierarchical system of communities and organizations rather than individuals.
Company: 90+ employees; 6 offices — HQ in USA, others in Europe and Asia; there are Liferay Portal partners on 3 continents; many customers for Portal but Social Office is too new for that
Corporate fitness score: 3.5. Multilingual, with good integration with enterprise software. Product still in beta.

11. Mzinga OmniSocial integrates social networking, groupware, e-learning and learning management, and membership analysis tools.
Packaging: A hosted service supplied in three versions — for marketing, human resources and support — all able to carry the customer’s branding. These can occupy their own Web site or sites or can be made part of another site.
Innovation score: 5.0. The inclusion of its previously separate learning tools makes Mzinga’s software unusual, if not unique. Community activity analysis is a bonus.
Company: 170 employees; 9 offices — 2 real and 6 virtual in the USA, 1 (real) in Australia; no partners listed; customers around the world, some large
Corporate fitness score: 3.0. The combined product is new and has few customers so far. Enterprise integration is not evident.

12. Novell Teaming offers a wide range of social networking tools allied to groupware (GroupWise) and document management, with an option of workflow management. It is written in Java and runs on Linux servers. Access is by a range of Web browsers. Teaming integrates with Microsoft Office and OpenOffice and can use MySQL, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases.
Packaging: Licensed software to run on customer’s premises.
Innovation score: 3.5. The workflow tools make Teaming unusual.
Company: 3,900 employees; 100 offices around the world; many partners but few for this product; many existing customers, often large, but few for this product
Corporate fitness score: 4.0. Novell is a corporate software specialist. It seems to be aiming this product at formalised organizations. There are no public details of large installations.

13. Open Text ECM Suite is an integrated suite of groupware, document management, search, workflow and, latterly, social networking tools. It is an evolution of Open Text’s longstanding LiveLink enterprise offering and can integrate with Microsoft SharePoint, Oracle or SAP.
Packaging: As licensed, downloadable software and as a hosted service.
Innovation score: 3.5. A strong product but slightly off the pace in its social networking abilities. The company’s recent acquisition of Vignette should improve that.
Company: 3,000 employees; 46 offices, in Canada (HQ), others in North & South America and Europe; many partners worldwide; many existing customers, often large
Corporate fitness score: 4.5. Open Text is a corporate software specialist with worldwide offices; it aims ECM Suite at strongly formalised organizations. There are few publicly-listed large users of the social networking tools.

14. Socialtext offers a set of integrated social netting tools, including wikis, micro-blogging and, new this autumn, ’social’ spreadsheets. The tools are accessible from desktop devices running in Windows, Apple OS and Linux. Mobile access is also possible. Socialtext software uses the Google OpenSocial API, and can link to Microsoft SharePoint and IBM Lotus Connections.
Packaging: Available as a hosted service or as an ‘appliance’, a plug-and-go bundle of hardware and software on Socialtext’s premises or the customer’s.
Innovation score: 5.0. The appliance offering and the ‘behind the firewall’ wiki spreadsheet are unique.
Company: 75 employees; 5 offices, in the USA (HQ), Canada and the UK; no details listed of partners; many existing customers
Corporate fitness score: 3.0. Socialtext has a good set of features but it comes from a smallish organization with, so far, no large customers listed.

15. ThoughtFarmer is software for behind-the-firewall social networking. It offers a range of Web 2.0 tools that link closely with a user organization’s Microsoft infrastructure, such as .NET, SQL Server, Active Directory and Exchange Server. Access is by browser, running on varied devices, only Internet Explorer gives single sign-on. ThoughtFarmer is multilingual, offering localised user interfaces, multiple language versions of any page and automatic translation of content (using a Google service). The user interface can carry the user organization’s branding.
Packaging: Commercial product to run in a user organization’s Microsoft server environment.
Innovation score: 5.0. For being able to switch between 7 languages and for its relationship browser.
Company: 25 employees; 1 office, in Canada; has a few partners, in three continents; few large customers.
Corporate fitness score: 3.5. The reliance on Microsoft underpinnings narrows the range of potential user organizations. Growth will also be limited by the small number of partners.

16. Traction Teampage is a Java server for internal and external collaboration that gives users wiki and blog tools, with discussion and tagging. The latest release includes free-text search and analysis (from Attivio) and the option to link to Oracle databases. The server software can run on Windows, Linux, Solaris or Mac OS X computers. Access is by Web browser running on Windows, Macintosh or Unix machines or BlackBerry PDAs.
Packaging: TeamPage Server is a downloadable licensed package to run on the customer’s premises or from a cloud (Amazon EC3). TeamPage5 is a free, downloadable server package with limited use and capabilities.
Innovation score: 4.0. For its fluid user interface and access to Attivio’s information extraction tools. A broader range of social netting tools would be welcome.
Company: 11 employees; 1 office in the USA; 1 European partner and a Japanese reseller; users worldwide, some of them large.
Corporate fitness score: 3.0. Traction Software is a small company that is not growing. It has a popular product but there is no indication of its likely integration with corporate processes or application software.

= = = = =

That completes the summary of results on products, services and their delivery.

These news items caught my eye recently.

Brand leaders

The first, and most significant, is a report published jointly by Wetpaint, a social networking site, and the Altimeter Group, a firm of consultants. It gives the results of a survey by Charlene Li of Altimeter into how well-known organizations are using social netting.

First, Li looked at how much each organization uses each of 11 kinds of networking, including blogs, wikis, ratings and reviews, and external services such as Facebook. She also looked into these companies’ use of “innovation hubs”. By this, she means networks used for product support with an emphasis on customer suggestions. Dell’s IdeaStorm site is an example.

The EngagementDB site takes the ratings further by allowing people to add information to its database. The site is attractively laid-out and clear, as is the report.

Charlene Li also presents some case studies in the report and looks into potential links with companies’ financial performance. In her words, there is correlation between “those who are deeply engaged and those who outperform their peers”.

As the report admits, a correlative link is not a causative link. There is no direct chain of evidence connecting a company’s online customer engagement with its turnover or profits. The only link is suggestive but I think many people will take encouragement from it.

Is the evidence believable?

This part of the report reminds me of some work done over 20 years ago by Paul Strassmann, who has studied and written about the reality of computing benefits for many years. In his book, Information Payoff, he examined computer investments in the light of what he terms “management added value”. In other words, do computers help or hinder managers?

Strassmann concluded that information technology amplifies management performance. A well-managed company will gain strategic advantage from its computing investments. Conversely, a poorly-managed company will just make matters worse for itself by spending money on computers. The more it spends, the worse matters get. (You can probably think of examples of both results from your own experience.)

Charlene Li has rediscovered, or at least restated, the amplifier effect in her more narrowly-focused study. It doesn’t make it right, of course, but it accords with experience. Her engagement leaders are Strassmann’s well-managed companies.

I like the ENGAGEMENTdb report, for its content, its presentation and the link to an updated online resource. If I were reviewing it at length, I would ask some questions about the methods and terminology it uses but they are not important enough to air here. I recommend reading it.

And, afterwards, have a go at the online survey. Like most of its kind, it’s more indicative than definitive but it might get you thinking differently about the value of social networking.

B… loggers

In The Observer just over a week ago, the always readable John Naughton had some sensible things to say about large organizations’ expectations of social networking. They mostly seem to be chanting this refrain, like besuited protest marchers:
“What do we want” — “Financial payback”
“When do we want it” — “Now!”.

Naughton later compares their attitude with loggers who clear-fell everything in their path, even if the new growth they cut down is the basis of a new ecosystem. This works both ways. After southern Britain’s woodlands were devastated in the hurricane of 1987, foresters, tree surgeons and pretty well anyone with a chain saw set to work cutting up and removing fallen trees.

A few thoughtful characters, such as Oliver Rackham and Richard Mabey, pointed out that those trees were not all dead and were thus still able to make a useful contribution to their local ecology. They were right but still the ‘deadwood’ was cleared away.

So it is with social networking or any other comparable computing technology. There are twin dangers to consider. The first is that of expecting too much too soon, as Naughton points out. The other is to disregard the value and contribution of what already exists (which Charlotte Li does to an extent). Technoglitter can lure companies into some bad decisions and commentators into some rash judgements.

Thou shalt not

Sad and funny at the same time is the news that Portsmouth City Council has banned the use of Facebook by its employees. I get the feeling that its senior managers are saying, “I don’t understand it and I can’t control it, so I’ll ban it.”

This struthian attitude is not helped by the cheerleading from behavioural illiterates like the Taxpayer’s Alliance. (There are no prizes for guessing its leaders’ political affiliation.)

A more mature approach to the use of social networks by employees is evident here, in the guidelines SAP has set out. This German software house is one of the companies highlighted in the ENGAGEMENTdb report. Spend just a short while looking through the public parts of its community network and you’ll probably be impressed.

A good intro to the subject

If some of this talk about social networking is new or alien to you, I think you’ll be helped by this well-written outline by Laurie McCabe, of Hurwitz & Associates. (You might also share my feeling that Luke Grange should get a life, and go easy on the capital letters.)

That’s it for now!

Part 2 — Why have social netting?

Frameworks for thinking

In the first in this series of articles on social networking, I referred to the typical business uses of social networking as being for:
– customer intimacy
– product or market research
– employee or partner communities
- product support, and
- project management.

(I neglected to say in that posting how helpful I found the remarks of Charlie Osmond of Freshnetworks. A few days earlier he had kindly set aside time to discuss the subject of social netting with me and passed on some of what he and his colleagues had learned.)

Most recently, I looked at investment motives for businesses, identifying three primary motives for making any change:
– to continue what you’re already doing but cheaper
– to continue what you’re already doing but better
– to do new things.

Additional motives are investing for compliance, infrastructure and image.

Applying the frameworks

Consciously or not, organizations are in pursuit of combinations of these varied objectives when they set up or participate in social networks. The results of our survey, now closed, contain many examples of how social netting is being used.

I discuss six of those examples below and briefly analyse them in terms of the two frameworks. Afterwards I present the results in tables, for ease of comparison.

1. Aftonbladet

The Swedish tabloid newspaper, Aftonbladet, runs the most popular media Web site in Scandinavia, with more then 2 million unique visitors every day. Interactions are managed using Joshsthlm’s XCAP software, in combination with a content management system.

In May 2009, Aftonbladet launched the Snack community at the site. This allows readers to contribute to forums, set up blogs, post photographs and video clips, and comment on articles. More recently, the paper added viewer commenting on its WebTV clips and plans to let readers record video comments.

Aftonbladet intends launching similar services for another 50 editorial groups within the next few years, creating a sub-brand for each. It will move all its 27,000 (!) readers’ blogs to the XCAP system by the start of 2010.

The focus of Aftnbladet’s networks is customer intimacy. One can assume that, like most newspaper groups, it is keen to attract and retain the attention of readers of its paper editions. Investment motives, therefore, are likely to be outward-looking, combining better externally with new. There is also probably an element of cost saving involved. How all this will translate into greater revenue is not clear to me.

2. Disaster Relief Rotarian Action Group

Not just commercial organizations benefit from social networking. The Disaster Relief Rotarian Action Group uses IGLOO software to help it in its activities. (The group is separate from but associated with Rotary International.)

The DRRAG site connects Rotarians from more than 200 countries to provide immediate disaster relief support and instant access to international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and government resources. The site provides embedded video files, news, blogs, forums, volunteers’ profiles and other relevant content. Through these, people managing relief efforts can rapidly build and mobilise a team. Members can collaborate via the site wherever they are.

Disaster relief is an area where good and speedy communications are essential, primarily to get aid where it’s needed as quickly as possible. It can also minimise the duplication of effort and ‘turf wars’ that sometimes hamper emergency relief work.

DRRAG aims to build employee (that is, volunteer) and partner communities and assist project management. Its implied investment motives are better externally (and possibly internally), cheaper and infrastructure.

3. Rheinmetall

Rheinmetall AG is a large European manufacturer of automobile and military parts. Headquartered in Germany, it has factories and offices around the world, more than 70% of its sales coming from abroad. Rheinmetall employs 21,000 people and its 2008 turnover was about £3.3 billion.

Having grown through acquisition, in 2000 the company began consolidating its resources into its current two divisions — automobile and military. Among the usual drawbacks of such a structure are poor communication between the divisions and a separation of skills. Rheinmetall employees therefore work in process-specific teams, within elastic organizational units that often straddle the two divisions.

This structural plasticity is enabled by the company’s use of Lotus Connections, with Quickr and Sametime. People in particular industry segments form their own communities, often internationally, using bookmarking to help them find and share documents and other information. Corporate ‘white pages’ give a searchable catalogue of skills. Among Rheinmettal’s aims for the system are improving product quality and capitalizing on new markets to increase revenue.

The Rheinmetall community’s areas of application cover a wide range, including product and market research, employee and partner communities, and project management. Product support might be another ingredient.

The implied investment motives are equally broad, including better externally and internally, innovation and infrastructure. There is likely to be an element of ‘cheaper’, too.

4. Tierportal

Tierportal.de is a Liferay customer. It is a social network for pet owners in Germany. Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ), one of Germany’s largest publishing houses, funds and runs the site through its Gong Verlag subsidiary. Tierportal offers a new marketing channel for WAZ’s print magazines and a way for trading partners to sell their products and services.

The site has collections of information and content about a wide range of animals. Tierportal also offers tools for community knowledge sharing, including blogs, forums, photographs and videos. Members gain reward points for social activity, such as the number of forum posts. They can redeem these points for gifts from online vendors featured on the site.

Tierportal is aimed at customer intimacy, with scope for market research. The implied investment motives for Gong Verlag and its partners are doing better externally, doing new things and image.

Tierportal probably needs plenty of moderator activity to stop the quality of contribution falling unacceptably low as members pursue points. Should that happen, then “community binding” will possibly fail.

5. T-Mobile

The mobile telephone network operator, T-Mobile, is using Jive Software to aid collaboration within its business and retail sales teams. The company’s marketing department set up the network, which links roughly 700 sales people under the name MagentaNation (after the colour of T-Mobile’s trade mark).

Using company-wide or specific forums, employees can share competitive intelligence and ideas on best practice. RSS feeds bring newsfeeds from outside the company; video feeds deal with topics of sales interest. Team leaders post details of their activities and a scrolling header shows sales numbers and details of important updates.

The results of using MagentaNation include faster responses to customers’ questions, and a better-informed and more engaged sales force. New members of staff learn the ropes quicker. A possible next step is to make the software available on mobile devices.

MagentaNation is aimed at building and helping employee communities, possibly with some product support activities. The main investment motives would seem to be better internally and externally.

6. TransUnion

TransUnion is one of the world’s largest credit-checking companies, holding credit histories on an estimated 500 million consumers around the globe. It runs an internal social network based on Socialtext software, linked to an installation of Microsoft’s Sharepoint. The latter mainly handles formal processes.

The company set up its network because it found that most of its employees were using external social networks to discuss work matters. Employees had even asked permission to set up an employee group inside Facebook. The confidential nature of TransUnion’s business meant this posed an unacceptable security risk. Those discussions now run inside the firewall.

Since installing Socialtext, TransUnion’s employees have begun brainstorming ideas on improving the performance of the company’s computer systems. Its chief information officer says this is saving it significant amounts of money because those teams would previously have simply asked for more software or processing power. He estimates the saving to be $2.5 million in less than five months, from an expenditure of about $50,000.

The clear focus of TransUnion’s network is employee communities, with perhaps an element of project management. Its main investment motives look to have been better internally and externally (risk reduction) and infrastructure, possibly with some compliance concerns. The fact that it is saving money is a bonus, an emergent property not envisaged at the outset, so “cheaper” doesn’t apply.

Summary

These six brief case studies show not only that social networking can be helpful to organizations but also that it can apply to varied types of business. (I count DRRAG as a business.) They also illustrate the range of objectives and investment motives that can lie behind it. Social netting is no one-trick pony.

To make it easier to see the range and variety of reasons and results, I have compiled these two tables. As with the analyses above, each reflects my interpretation of the cases. I based them on what software vendors said in their survey responses and some brief research on the Web.

The first table summarises the application focuses for each case. A single filled star means the case falls into the category or one of them at the head of that column. Two stars show it meets both categories listed. An empty star means that category possibly applies.

(Click on either table to make it larger and clearer. “Back” returns you here.)

Table of application focuses

The second table summarises the investment motives for each case. Only single stars appear here, with the same meanings as above.

Table of investment motives

None of the cases has a return-on-investment number (ROI) attaching. This does not weaken the argument for social networking. It could perhaps mean these organizations have not bothered trying to calculate the ROI. This is common among such outward-looking initiatives.

It might be too early for some. The TransUnion case, for instance, looks promising but the installation is just a few months old.

Equally, it’s possible that some of the user organizations have done their financial sums but their suppliers did not include the results in their survey responses. We didn’t ask specifically about the topic, so that would be no surprise.

Following up

I hope this posting and the preceding material have been helpful. Please let me know if there’s anything you strongly agree or disagree with.

These postings will form the basis of the first of the forthcoming Bloor Research reports on social networking. It will appear in September.

Before looking at how social networking might help organizations, I thought it would be useful to set out a simple framework for discussing such investments.

Why invest?

In business, there are three primary motives for making any change:
– to do more or less what you’re already doing but cheaper
– to do more or less what you’re already doing but better
– to do new things.

These apply separately or in combination. They are also universal, being as applicable to corporate take-overs or buying a fleet of fork-lift trucks as they are to computer projects. In addition, they vary around the organization and can change with time.

In more detail

Cheaper applies to where organizations want to avoid or reduce costs such as labour, machines, materials or bought-in services.

Better can be thought of as two motives in one. The first deals with internal operations. The aims include greater control, better decision making or fewer errors. It is to do with improving capability.

The other part of the ‘better’ motive is concerned with external working, in areas such as customer support, delivery times or product quality. It is to do with improving performance.

Doing new things is concerned with innovation in such matters as operating methods, organizational structures or markets served. It includes gaining new customers, entering new relationships and markets, finding new routes to market and creating new products.

These motives can be thought of as occupying the quadrants of a circle. Cheaper is lower left, better internally is upper left, better externally is upper right and, finally, new is lower right.

This diagram shows what I mean. Click on it to get slightly better quality.

Note that this is a simple, fixed and two-dimensional depiction. The reality of the relationships and their sequences in more fluid and complex than that. Also, it can be cyclical, with investments made initially for cost saving, for example, but renewed with another motive in mind. This is normal.

There are two items on the diagram I haven’t yet explained:
– inward and outward focus
– second-tier motives.

Inward and outward-looking investments

It doesn’t take much to see that investments whose primary motivation is cheaper or better internally are typically focused inside the organization. Often they are also concerned with solving today’s problems and occasionally yesterday’s.

Conversely, those investments primarily concerned with external improvement or with innovation are usually looking outwith the organization’s boundaries. They tend, also, to be forward-looking.

Second-tier motives

There some other motives, which I show as a hub. They include compliance with mandatory demands, improving infrastructure and making someone or some group look better.

Investing for compliance is to meet requirements such as audit or legal standards, or to fall in line with a dominant trading partner.

Infrastructure investments are those that improve a system’s ability to serve most or all users. The benefits are not specific to a discrete section of users or to a particular task or process.

Image improvements are common. This is where an organization invests to impress. Occasionally these investments are to boost the image of a person or group but this motive is seldom owned up to. More often, there are business reasons for image improvement, such as indirect marketing or branding.

These three motives can apply to both inward and outward-looking investments, hence their neutral position on the diagram.

And the point is?

Briefly, self knowledge. I have used this model with groups of senior managers and directors. Before showing the diagram, I ask them to list their major recent computer investments. Then I invite them to tag each according to the primary motive. (That is, C, BI, BE, N, M [for mandatory], In[frastructure] and IM[age].) Multiple tags are frequent, which is fine.

I then total the numbers and put them on the diagram, by then revealed. Typically the left side gains by far the greater number of ‘votes’.

This exercise has no statistical validity, as you have no doubt already detected, but it is not intended as an objective measure. (There’s no pretend magic about these quadrants!) Rather, it is a mirror held up to the organization’s investment habits.

Then what?

More often than not, the result comes as a surprise to the group. Sometimes there is resistance to what the group sees in the mirror. That’s normal, too. It takes time for the truth revealed to sink in.

Typically, the next response is a request for a recommended ratio between left and right-hand sides. This is not possible to give — organizations and situations vary too much.

All you can say with certainty is that a zero score on either side is fatal. Having nothing on the right-hand side, for instance, would mean a complete lack of attention to market and customer matters.

Having nothing on the left would mean that no one is ‘minding the shop’. Such an organization would collapse, sooner rather than later.

It’s the stage after this that matters, when the group considers the implications. As people start to think about what they have discovered, they typically ask questions such as:
· Should the emphasis be changed?
· How does this compare with our competitors’ investment profile?
· Should we start thinking about outward-looking matters?

This is normal and usually signals the start of a healthy debate on investment policy. It’s an exercise worth repeating annually.

Getting to the truth

Beware a statement of investment purpose that is not easily or clearly expressible in terms of the seven motives. “To improve competitive edge,” is a common example. This is waffle.

Question the person making the statement until he or she does define it in terms of the seven motives. If he or she cannot, or will not, then you should doubt the value of what you hear. Intentionally or otherwise, this person is purveying bovine ordure.

The principle is simple — clear language stems from clear thinking, which leads to clear action. By enforcing clearer language, you can induce that clarity of thought or confirm its presence (or, indeed, absence).

The relevance to social networking

This is all very fine, you might say, but how does that help with introducing social netting to my organization? That’s simple:

1. First, go through the motives exercise, on your own or with colleagues.
2. If the result is all or overwhelmingly left side, think seriously if it’s worth bothering. Social netting is usually about outward and forward thinking. This is not always popular at the moment, with companies fighting just to survive.
3. If the result is better balanced or you think you can change minds, you will be armed with some cogent arguments for going ahead.

A bonus is that you can look at how other people have used social netting and translate their motives and experiences into this simple model. It’s good for decluttering verbiage and for pushing aside the stuff you find on the floor of cowsheds.

We’ll do some of that next time.

Part 1 — What is social netting?

Let’s start with the usual dichotomising

When thinking about this subject, it helps to distinguish between social networking and social media. Social networking is people conversing over a network. The network can be the Internet (including intranets and extranets) or a mobile telephone system.

The essence of social networking is interactivity. If you communicate with me, the system lets me respond promptly, sometimes immediately.

Social media is publishing. It can be one person to a few people, one to many or, on some networks, one to multitudes. Any interaction is slow and sometimes through another channel, such as emailing the author of an article.

A distinction already blurred

The division between the two social technologies is not always clear in practice (or, inevitably, in journalistic or marketing use). Many services that look at first like one-way publishing machines also include a way of responding.

Blogs are an example. These are the online equivalent of personal journals or, to use an old term, commonplace books. The difference is that almost all blogs let readers publicly comment on what the blog’s author has written. On the more active blogs, other people respond to those comments and the conversation expands and ramifies.

Twitter is similar. Indeed, some people call it micro-blogging. The service lets recipients reply to a sender’s messages or ‘tweets’ (nothing to do with Sylvester the Cat). This can be openly, so the rest of the receiving group (’followers’) see it, or privately, so only the original sender sees it.

According to the Alexa service, two of the most-visited Web sites in the United Kingdom are social networking sites — Facebook and YouTube. Both combine publishing and interactivity.

How is this relevant to your organisation?

The sites I have mentioned so far are all public services, free to join and open to anyone with a network connection. They have value for organizations, as I explain in Part 2, but are not designed for use in an organization. That calls for purpose-made software or a purpose-made service.

It is these organization-specific systems that Carl and I are concentrating on in our survey. All the same, looking at a good public site such as Yelp will give you a free education in the principles of social netting, should you feel you want one.

What should you look for?

Your organisation will need a product or service that offers at least some of the following features. They might duplicate or overlap with tools that your organisation uses already. That should influence your choice, as should the ease of integrating or at least linking with what’s there.

1. Publishing tools. These include, on their own or in combination, blogs, wikis, podcasts and content feeds (e.g. RSS, news; press releases or internal data)

2. Interpersonal communication and collaboration, such as instant messaging (IM), texting (SMS), email, forums and shared editing

3. Searching and navigating. Most of the major public services succeed because they make it easy for users to find what they want, be it information, people or other resources. This is equally important to company-owned networks. Maps, directories and ‘tunable’ searching are helpful, probably essential. So, too, is the ability for users to bookmark, tag or rate what they find.

4. Community creation and management. You are unlikely to develop and maintain a community feeling without some means of encouraging helpful communication. Tools include forum moderation, user rating, content promoting and invitation issuing.

5. As well as what the users see, there need to be robust and usable tools for managing the system. Fundamental requirements include security, audit trails and content management. Single sign-on improves usability. Tools for search engine optimisation can be helpful to publicise the system. In addition, you will need tools for, and possibly help with, installing and running your chosen software or service.

So what’s new?

If you’ve been in or around computing for a while, you might think this sounds familiar. Weren’t many of these features present in the groupware, like Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange, that began to be promoted in the 1990s?

Yes and no is the answer. Yes, in that those products were intended to promote and exploit group information creation and decision making. Some of the expectations then sound much like the things commentators say now:

…computers and their networks are more valuable to corporations when they are used to create and manage interpersonal relationships, not just to create and manage information.

Michael Schrage, Los Angeles Times, 10 June 1995

And no, because on the whole the products and the users weren’t ready. Notes was dogged for most of its early life by having a user interface that was, to put it politely, idiosyncratic. (It didn’t help that data centre staff found it hard to work with.) MS Exchange was hampered by being little more than an electronic mail server for much of its early life.

Other technical aspects have changed since then. On the publishing side, blogs, wikis and podcasts didn’t exist. Search has become faster and cleverer. In the communications side, tagging, instant messaging and SMS were rare, often absent.

Above all, the broader setting is different. Many people now see and use these newer tools every day in their personal lives. Familiarity breeds acceptance. Enthusiasm as well, often.

Everybody’s doing it, doing it

In March 2009 The Nielsen Company issued a multi-country survey of social netting, called “Global Faces and Networked Places“. It estimated that in 2008 two-thirds of the population of the world’s main Internet-using countries had visited a social networking site at least once.

Many of those people lingered. Nielson reckon that what it calls ‘member communities’ accounted for almost a tenth of the time people spent on the ‘Net overall. In the United Kingdom, they accounted for one in every six minutes online, more the double the figure for 2007. (In Brazil, social netting took up almost a quarter of people’s online time.)

As have others (see this posting), Nielson noted that much of the increase in use has come from mature users, not teenagers.

Whichever way you look at it, people working in organizations are getting plenty of free training in the use of social netting tools. As I mentioned last time, this is also conditioning their expectations of what they get at work and how easy it is to use.

OK, you might say, so people are used to these arrangements and might expect to see them at their place of work but of what value is that to their employers? The answers to that follow in part 2.

= = = = =

It’s not too late to take part in our survey. Just follow the link and you’ll see what to do.

Before looking at the social networking market overall (see my previous posting), I want to show you an example of what a successful system can offer. Not all its characteristics translate well into the corporate world but you might be surprised at how few those are.

I’m not here reviewing the service or the company behind it, nor am I endorsing it or its content. Instead, I’m suggesting it to you as a simple way of getting to know what a modern social networking system can offer. Even if you’re already au fait with these technologies, I recommend a visit, to see an example of well-executed design and good integration of features.

The service is Yelp, which apparently is a contraction of “Yellow Pages”. (If you want to see how soberly and literally the Yellow Pages people have adapted to the Web, look at Yell.com. It covers a much wider range of services, though.)

Yelp is a reviews and recommendation service for shoppers, diners and travellers. There’s nothing new about this. Amazon has for years shown reader recommendations, many of them genuine, to supplement product details from vendors. Buyers and sellers on eBay know that their respective ratings make the difference when choosing whom to sell to or buy from.

There are many other specialised ‘review and recommend’ sites but few come across as thriving, at least in Britain. One of the few is TripAdvisor, which has more visitors but has been going since 2000, 4 years longer than Yelp. Another, homegrown, is Qype.

The Yelp service boasts of over 20 million visits a month and says that members have posted more than over 6 million local reviews. It is both a measure of and a contributor to the service’s success that it currently covers most large American and Canadian cities. Since January 2009, it has also covered major towns and cities in the United Kingdom and, from June 2009, Ireland. It makes its money from associated advertising, with businesses also being able to promote favourable reviews in the list of search results.

Features

Yelp incorporates many of the tools you’d expect to find in a modern social networking system. There’s scarcely a trick missed. As well as supplier details and reviews, it offers, in alphabetical order:

- annotated maps of business locations
- blogs — here and here (by Yell’s senior staff in the USA only)
- bookmarking
- emailed summaries

- events listings
- forums
- its own email
- links to mobile phones and PDAs for results (but not presently for inputting reviews)

- live directories for each locality
- member profiles
- member rating, based mainly on the number of ‘friends’ each has and number of reviews he or she has submitted (including ‘firsts’). See this person’s profile for an example. Alternatively, this one (he’s Yelps’s CEO)
- members’ photographs of localities

- review rating — see these, for instance
- review responses from the relevant business (and advice on doing it). This is a recent addition
- RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Atom feeds
- searching for places and business (at the top of nearly every page) and for members
- tagging, and a ‘tag cloud’. See the bottom of this page.

Members can link to their existing public email services and online contacts and can create personal Web addresses, in the form “http://[name].yelp.co.uk”.

Like most social networking services, the Yell site also asks for personal details as part of one’s ‘profile’, such as “Things I love”. This is an option. Some people feel happier about giving this sort of information than do others.

About all Yelp lacks are a wiki, podcasts, chat (instant messaging) and members’ videos. I’m not saying it needs these, just pointing up how comprehensive its range of services is. They might be on the company’s list of improvements for the future.

Worth of the cool

Yell combines extensive, well-presented information with an attractive layout and that indefinable something that says “cool”. ‘Coolness’ is as hard to pin down as it is to retain. Some products and brands are cool for an instant. Others stay that way. Apple computers and devices have been cool for decades. This is through a combination of thoroughgoing good design, frequent product revamps and ceaseless work on maintaining its brand image.

You might not think a corporate social network needs such a quality. Think again. A user’s perception of a tool or service is fundamental to how likely he or she is to try it and to stay with it. People don’t leave their minds and opinions at the reception desk when they come to work.

The person working on your accounts receivable or your building maintenance system is the same person who, outside work, chooses his or her TV and radio programmes, clothing, holidays, shops and eateries on their attractiveness and social status as well as their utility. He or she will respond the same way to your organization’s social networking software.

Dull earnestness in a group communication system usually produces dutiful compliance among its users.

What does this site teach us?

1. Community attracts

Yelp has gone to great trouble to make people want to join its party, which they see as their own. The site makes it easy for the Yelp community to become involved with itself and enjoy doing so. This makes the site more attractive to and, as importantly, more retentive of members.

On its own, this does nothing for Yelp or its business subscribers but it is an essential precondition for lessons 3 and 4 below. This is true of all the most popular social netting sites, such as Flickr, Facebook and YouTube. Not all of them have turned that attractiveness into revenue (’monetized’, in the current jargon). Also, without lots of reviewers, there would be too few reviews to make the Yelp site worth visiting. Size counts in this sector.

2. Community binds

If you visit the site, you’ll notice that some reviewers are more active than others. Some gain their own popularity and have ‘fans’. This also is a normal characteristic of such sites, with trusted advisers having their own following. It’s common on corporate systems, too, both internal and external.

In anthropological terms, communities of trust are forming among the communities of interest that Yelp is being midwife to. These are often found in groups whose members are physically close, such as in a village or workplace. Social networking systems help them arise online. (Yelp supplements the process with ‘community events’ — real gatherings, sometimes with real hangovers afterwards.)

Communities of trust need work and time to develop online and can only form where the members do indeed trust one another or the expert, at least. This can be useful on networks where, say, customers are seeking advice on a company’s products and services.

3. Community sells

The business of Yelp is helping consumers help one another. Its business model is to create enough value from consumers’ expressed opinions for businesses to pay to advertise on the service and to sponsor select reviews. At this stage, it seems mainly to be living off the money that venture capitalists have advanced it.

In return for the fees they pay Yelp, businesses get their name and details seen by more people. They can also get useful feedback on product and service quality (see below).

4. Community improves

If asked, the owners of most businesses reviewed on Yelp would probably say they have benefited from any justified criticisms aired. They might say this through gritted teeth — most people prefer compliments — but impartial opinion is gold dust in any industry. Like most customer forums, Yelp gives businesses frank assessments and ideas on how to improve.

.

As I said at the outset, this is not a review of the Yelp service or company. I’m using it simply as an exemplar of good practice in social network design and management. However, if you would like to find out more about the company, these articles would be good starting points:
- The Guardian
- TechCrunch
- Slate
- Wikipedia (Yes, really!)

For the past few years, I’ve been working part of the time with Bloor Research — friendly folk, doing good work on analysing the markets for commercial software. One of my colleagues there, Carl Potter, has invited me to join him in looking at the potential for social networking within organisations.

The emphasis of our survey is on innovation, on doing something new. We’re interested in:
– new products
– new technologies
– new markets
– new ways of delivering social networking products or services
– new ways of using social networking within an enterprise.

We have worked up a short online survey for suppliers, using the Survey Monkey service. If you would like your company to take part, please contact Carl.

Out of the survey will come initially a short report summarising the responses and our researches elsewhere. Depending on what we receive, we will follow this with other reports on particular areas of use. These sector profiles are likely to include:
– customer intimacy (it’s both ethical and legal!)
– product or market research
– employee or partner communities.

Other possible application areas for us to report on will include product support and project management.

Meanwhile, we are writing a short overview of the market, along the lines to be set out in the next two Office Jotter items. They will appear over the next few days. The market overview will be free.

Danah Boyd is a researcher in social media at Microsoft Research. She describes herself as an ethnographer, which literally translates as someone who writes about people. Like other members of her trade, Ms Boyd uses statistical methods as a fundamental part of her investigations.

(Authors also write about people, with the likes of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Anton Chekhov being expert people analysts, but they write about people in the particular, not the mass.)

In June 2009, Boyd gave a talk entitled The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online in which she examined the use of two popular social networks, MySpace and Facebook. In particular, she looked at how people have moved from one to the other.

Unsurprisingly, Boyd found this movement to be influenced mainly by non-technical matters, such as whether a person’s friends are on there, the social class of other users and the way those users express themselves. Most of the switchers were teenagers. Peer pressure influences everyone but seems always to bear the hardest on the young.

It was a USA-only study, so some of the terminology might be unfamiliar to Britons. I suspect most of the ideas would not be. “White-flight”, for instance, describes the way in which a predominantly WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) community withdraws from an area that has a large influx of other, typically darker-skinned people. Here, the area is an online rather than geographical zone.

As Boyd puts it: “Fear of the “other” is core to white flight…”. For those who can afford it, that trend ultimately results in the creation of gated communities. In these reverse ghettos, people hide behind physical barriers to avoid contact with people they don’t like or whom they fear or both.

Monarchs and princes have done this for centuries, also having their own protected routes between properties to avoid contact with the great unwashed. The Vasari Corridor in Florence is a dramatic example.

These physical safe areas and protected routes were not and are not created by teenagers. Boyd continues: “In many ways, adult worlds are even more divided than teen worlds. Adults are less likely to know other adults who aren’t like them than teens are.”

Outside the workplace, adults have a freer choice of associates than young people. They have a freer choice of almost everything. However much teenagers might think of themselves as arbiters of what’s important — a belief encouraged by marketeers, for less than altruistic reasons — oldies run the world.

Are there any implications here for the business use of social networking? There are three I can think of straightaway:

1. Whatever the technical merits of the software or service you choose, the intended users must want to communicate, to form a community. Without some commonality of purpose, beliefs, background and the like, that community is unlikely to cohere or to last. Look at any failed groupware installation and this lack will often be the cause.

2. Conversely, an online community might need protecting against dilution by ‘others’. Allowing in people who don’t share the community’s values and aspirations could give rise to challenging behaviour (teacher-speak for being awkward), the creation of factions and the loss of critical mass. Conversely, for existing communities, it might reinvigorate what has become a stale, hidebound and inward-looking group. This has to be a matter of judgement of the condition and life-stage of the community.

3. Technical considerations such as cost, ease of use, range of features and ease of administration do make a difference. They modulate the kind and frequency of conversations among users. However, good ratings in each of those categories don’t guarantee a lively, constructive community — these depend on the social factors as discussed. On the other hand, a system scoring poorly on the technical aspects makes such a community hard to achieve and may strangle it at birth.

It’s worth going to the trouble to select a good system, therefore, but don’t expect it to do the job of community creation and sustenance for you..

Social networking for grown-ups

Another study published recently has been a survey of people using Facebook. Again, it looks only at the USA. I was surprised to see that that country accounts for only a third of the site’s 200 million users worldwide.

Facebook’s demographics and statistics is an interesting antidote to the common perception that this is a medium only or even mainly for teenagers. They barely accounted for a tenth of the total number of users. The largest age group is people aged between 35 and 54, with 1 in 12 users being older than that. It’s safe for grown-ups is the message.

Where young people now go to get away from their parents and other wrinklies is the question the authors raise. No doubt someone will soon be along with some ideas and even some numbers.

My main hobby is photography, so I’ve been interested and dismayed to see how police forces around the country are increasingly bullying amateur and professional snappers in the name of security. It’s never happened to me, I’m glad to say, probably because I seldom take pictures in cities and large towns (for the simple reason that I don’t visit them often).

You’ll no doubt be pleased to hear that I’m not going to rehash the arguments for and against the relevant legislation. I will though mention one recent news item that caught my eye. It’s on the Web site of Amateur Photographer (AP), probably Britain’s oldest photo magazine.

According to the article, the Metropolitan Police Service says it would take it “between one and two minutes” each time to search the relevant records. It reckons the total cost of this would take it beyond the current threshold of £450 (£600 for central government), so doesn’t have to comply with the AP’s freedom of information request. You can almost hear the “Naah naah na naah naah”, can’t you?

The idea of a cost limit was put in the Freedom of Information Act to save public bodies from having to deal with frivolous requests. As here, it is sometimes used as a pretext for continued secrecy, typically to conceal incompetence or to save embarrassment.

This assertion from ‘The Met’ is unbelievable. Scotland Yard is Britain’s oldest and largest customer for the Memex search system. More than 30,000 of its officers and 12,000 other employees use this software to gain near-instantaneous access to criminal intelligence. (That’s intelligence as information, not as an indication of intellectual capacity.)

In effect, The Met is saying it doesn’t have a computer-searchable record of the search and arrest records its officers are producing. What are all its information inputters and OCR scanners doing with their day? Has it wasted the many thousands of pounds it’s spent on Memex systems over the last 15 years?

Even if the search and arrest records for last year, say, still aren’t computerised (which is unlikely), you can bet they’re in the queue. The marginal cost of an FOI search on them once they’re scanned would therefore be minute.

The Metropolitan Police is apparently charging administrative time at £25 an hour. The FOI limit of £450 thus equates to 18 hours of its staff’s time. I reckon that would leave it at least 17 hours and 45 minutes to print and bind a computer-produced report on its search and arrest records and deliver it by hand to the AP’s offices. They’re all of 9 miles away from New Scotland Yard, mind, so it might be a bit of a scramble. Perhaps it should just email the report instead.

PS The eZ Systems CMS software on The Met’s Web site produced no hits when I searched its news bulletins just now for “photographer” and, separately, “photography”. Looks like Scotland Yard’s limiting that supply of information, too.