Facebook and Portal 2.0, Are We There Yet?

I was not particularly surprised when I read Dion Hinchcliffe’s post on his Enterprise Web 2.0 blog on ZDNet. The number of articles and blog postings describing the ascendancy of Facebook are just too many to list here, but where I do agree with Dion is that Facebook’s strategy to expand its value by opening its platform to 3rd party application developers gives its growing audience so many more options to develop their experience in many directions internal developers at Facebook could ever think of.

It’s amazing to think that

Facebook currently has an entire category of business applications with over 227 different applications offered today, none of them built by Facebook itself.

Dion goes on to stress that while there is a growing sector of Facebook applications geared to the corporate user, many large organization are still unsure of the value of integrating with the platform:

But it’s abundantly clear that this phenomenon isn’t well understood or appreciated yet by most mainstream businesses, particularly large established ones that often take a parochial view of creating their own destination sites instead of going to where the audience is today. Despite the rise of widgets that spread the presence of a Web site or application to the far corners of the Internet, the mass dynamics of social networking sites has so far almost completely fallen outside of the imagination of the marketing, advertising, sales, CRM, and other departments in the traditional business world.

Naturally, businesses by their very nature are risk-averse and have to consider what the potential upside is then simply ever-increasing levels of collaboration. The focus of creating better means of internal collaboration has reached a tipping point that many businesses are seriously considering new platforms and applications to support this. But how do you incorporate something as unwieldy as integrating, even narrowly, with Facebook? How do you manage the flow of information exchange, assure its value, and then its dissemination to the right individuals across an organization?


It seems to me that there is still so much evolution that will happen on the broader social networking front with platforms like Facebook, before there is a definitive strategy for business and software developers to take full advantage of integrating. Nevertheless, it’s clearly something we all must be aware of and will be watching closely. I’m certainly going to find Jim Danenberg, PhD Candidate and Faculty at Western Michigan University’s discussion on SOA, Collaboration, Web 2.0, and Portals – Building Blocks for the New Work Environments a great forum to hear how others are following this trend and hear how some are taking their steps in the arena.