...and bring that into our security and enterprise policies in a way that's not going to stifle that innovation, but in a way that's going to help it grow and help nurture that.
A lot of organisations have been very cool on social-networking sites such as Facebook. How will social networking win over the enterprise crowd, given that many such sites don't yet have the perceived longevity of instant-messaging applications?
Social networking — whether it's Facebook or LinkedIn or any specific instance of it — the notion of the social network is going to stick around. You mentioned instant messaging and, if you reduce that back to its bare bones, you have a social graph, that's just graphed through that buddy list there. And that morphed into the Facebooks and LinkedIns of the world, where you're able to check that and see that a little more transparently. That will morph into something else again, I'm sure, as our understanding of those technologies matures.
So, it's there. It's something that's part of that. IBM did a study again, looking at wikis in particular, in terms of the number of people that contribute to a wiki and the number of people that are really involved in that. You can trace domain knowledge through that, by looking at who it is contributing to an area, who the comments are coming from, where the edits are going. Wikipedia has a similar phenomenon on the global consumer web.
But again, that also forms a sort of social network, because you're able to understand who your domain experts are in a particular area. If you feed that out onto a graph, you have some additional metadata on your organisation there.
So I do think that those kinds of things will evolve organically out of the way technology is used, and frankly I don't think that we know how that will manifest.
We talk a lot about data portability and its need, and it's clearly an important aspect for the industry, but it's easy to overlook how deep that rabbit-hole goes
A number of organisations have tried to have these social networks on the intranet, creating internal social networks. I don't know that that works unless you have a very large organisation, because the value of a social network is in being able to tease out some of these relationships that aren't necessarily obvious. If you have 25 people and know what everybody does and what their skills are, a social network isn't going to layer a whole lot more on top of that.
But for larger enterprises or geographically distributed enterprises, they can have a lot of opportunities where that network is able to expose information that's not necessarily obvious. And I think that IT organisations will realise that and understand that there's value there.
Perhaps one reason instant messaging became more acceptable in organisations was that the networks became interoperable. But this is still not the case with social networking. How important do you think interoperability and the portability of personal data between sites will be? We haven't yet seen the fruits of initiatives such as OpenSocial, for instance…
Not yet, but these things take time. There's been a number of folks who have been working very hard on data-portability standards and protocols. Obviously there's that balance between what you want to expose and [conceal], and there are privacy concerns about that, making sure that we have iron-clad authentication and authorisation that goes with that.
We talk a lot about data portability and its need, and it's clearly an important aspect for the industry, but it's easy to overlook how deep that rabbit-hole goes sometimes. In order to have good data portability, you need to have strong authorisation. In order to have that, you need to have a strong notion of authentication, and in order to have strong authentication, you need to have identity management that everybody agrees on. These are frankly initiatives that people have been working on for the best part of the last decade.
I think that it will come — it's really important — but really what we're starting to see is the depth of how much there is to solve.
