The Connected Web

One of the considerations that lead people to hold back from embracing the social Web -- especially in a business context -- is the amount of effort required to participate, often for seemingly little return. Maintaining a Facebook presence involves frequent visits to update or check the information flow. Following Twitter means keeping abreast of a constant flow of 'tweets'. The problem is multiplied with every additional service.

Even one of the social Web's biggest cheerleaders, Silicon Valley blogger Om Malik, sees room for improvement. Yesterday he wrote about two opposing mechanisms for consolidating how we interact with the social Web:

"A sharp increase in the number of web services and social networks has many of us yearning for a single sign-on, which has lead to the idea of 'federation'. On the flip side, we also want one place to manage our diverse web services in one place -- aggregate."

Federation is a means of taking our social network out with us when we go surfing the Web; the sites and services we interact with know who we are without us having to explicitly sign in to each one. Om cites as an example Facebook Connect, officially launched today and described in a write-up by the New York Times:

"Facebook Connect ... allows its members to log onto other Web sites using their Facebook identification and see their friends' activities on those sites," says the Times article. "For example, a person might alert his Facebook friends to the fact that he is watching a video on CBS.com and invite them to join him there to watch together and discuss the video as it plays."

Aggregation, by contrast, brings together information and services from many different sources into a personalized dashboard. Om's example is the newly launched Power.com, which, he writes "will show you all of your friends, messages and content -- from all their social networks, soon from instant messengers and email accounts -- in one place."

The big stumbling block with all of this, as Om goes on to discuss, is privacy. How much can one trust the services that are doing the federation and aggregation with all that personal data? In a business context, the question becomes one of confidentiality.

It's a question that still has to be resolved, and until it is satisfactorily answered, businesses will be reluctant to see their employees making use of the large consumer-focused social networks for internal collaboration. In the meantime, though, social networking does provide an important channel for marketing and other aspects of the customer relationship -- something I'll be covering in follow-up postings this week.