beatnic - just wondering

Bill Ives at FastForward blog writes about how the software company Serena has adopted Facebook as its corporate intranet.

They’re using it to take their 800 global employees through a big change programme. They’ve created a few custom apps that staff can use in their private network on Facebook. Apparently it’s boosted staff morale.

This is good news. Not because Facebook is the answer, but because it’s getting people thinking about the possibilities of intranets and moving the conversation on.

Much research has been done and the number one thing people want their intranet to help them with is finding other people.

What better way to help people find each other and the answers to their questions than by focusing the intranet - or rather the digital workspace - around people.

This very much fits in with my model which I call the DNA of the digital workspace - more on this soon - which places people at the centre of getting our work done.

Before the internet, dying was a simple business.

What you said, wrote, created in your lifetime lived on in people’s memories, passed down the generations and turned to myth. And sometimes these had more tangible manifestations, in letters, books, works of art, buildings and of course children.

Nowadays more and more of us have digital identities, and in many cases multiple digital identities. Every time we create a new profile on a website we’re creating another instance of ourselves, sometimes who we are, sometimes who we want to be.

What happens to all those accounts we’ve set up, frozen in virtual time?

What will your virtual legacy be? What will your last blog post say? Your final tweet on Twitter? Was it your turn in Scrabulous? Will your Flickr photographs gradually fade and curl at the edges?

Should we, as a friend of mine wondered, put all our login and password information in our will? And what then?

Someone once asked “If you died, how many of your Facebook friends would come to your funeral?”

Rather morbid, but they had a point.

I said “How would they know I’d died? I wouldn’t be able to update my status.

Talking about this - on Facebook - with a friend recently. They added:

Yes, I’ve often wondered whether I should include my logins and passwords in my will. Same goes for blogs. Then my heirs could put a message on my status saying something like, “XXXX is still dead” or suchlike and create a facebook event for my funeral — also announcing the fact that I would be attending. Although, would I really?

Two things struck me when reading this article about Google’s Orkut being bigger than Facebook in India and Brazil.

First, that people are prepared to wait up to five minutes for a page to load.

Orkut - 1.5 minutes
Facebook - 2.5 minutes
Myspace - 5 minutes

You can quickly see why Orkut is favoured over the others.

Those of us with broadband connections to the internet quickly forget how lucky we are - I get frustrated if a site takes longer than two seconds or so to load on my screen.

Second, that through a mixutre of poor product management and complacency, the Internet is awash with bloatware - i.e. inefficient and badly architected software - which takes longer to download, clogs up the Internet and, in the long run, will hamper the companies creating it.

From TechCrunch:

Facebook Takes the Microsoft Money And Runs.

The $240 million is a minority stake that values the company at $15 billion.

Uh oh…

On my Sunday run yesterday morning I suddenly caught myself turning everything I was doing in to Facebook status updates.

If you haven’t been on Facebook, status updates let you tell people in your group of friends or networks whatever you want in little SMS type messages which then appear on their Facebook pages next time they visit.

For example this morning I wrote “starting a new chapter” which was then translated to “Nic Price is starting a new chapter” on my friends’ Facebook pages.

It’s not just Facebook that has this feature. Twitter is one of a several other sites that let you do the same thing, but without inserting the word “is” in front of what you write. It’s a little like writing really really short blog posts.

So there I was… “finding this hill steeper than usual”… “wishing he’d been running more regularly recently”… when I suddenly caught myself at it. “Nic Price is thinking in status updates.”

Facebook seems to be becoming a necessary evil.

I’ve never felt particularly comfortable about it, but I do have an account and I do use it from time to time.

Somewhat worryingly found out today (thanks Chris T) that unless you change your privacy settings anyone in your network can see all your information as well as your “friends”.

This means that until I went in to “Privacy” and then “Edit settings” under Profile and selected “Only my friends” from the dropdown list, my fellow one million London network members could see everything about me!.

Fellow Facebook dabblers may wish to change their settings too.

I’m now wondering what else I don’t know about Facebook… like can I trust the “apps” that I occasionally add to my profile?

A friend recently told me they hadn’t used LinkedIn since discovering Facebook, which I found interesting.

I think they are very different animals, each with their own set of services - a few of which overlap.

Not all my “connections” on LinkedIn are “friends” on Facebook and vice versa. It makes a good Venn diagram though!

[And yes yes I did once said I'd remain "LinkedOut" :)]