Corporate Entry into Social Networking - Ma.gnolia Opens Up

Organizational mandates impact your ability to use all these handy dandy web 2.0 services - and not only because updating your myspace from work is still considered “goofing off” by the majority of companies. Other, deeper concerns from IT about the stability and security of the company’s network abound. Though less obvious, concerns about giving away data to a proprietary cloud have their place as well - what happens when all your mission-critical stuff goes foom?

Social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia alleviated many of those concerns when they announced at Gnomedex that they were going to open the ma.gnolia code to the development community. Some commentators think that this is a huge coup in terms of enterprise level social bookmarking, either because it’s gutsy and innovative or because the technological benefits of being able to graft the code into existing information architectures provides a “safe” route to social networking in the office. Our man Marshall Kirkpatrick is less certain that there’s a “there” there:

If a federated Ma.gnolia thrives and can capture the network effects so important to social bookmarking, it will be because of the value of open technology and in spite of Ma.gnolia’s own struggles. Network effects are key to social bookmarking because a large number of users makes these services a place where you can discover cool things quickly, where popular items for a given tag have risen out of a large number of candidates and where the things you bookmark can be seen by a lot of people. If you want to do research, you want to do it at Delicious right now, not Ma.gnolia.
We hope that this strategy serves Ma.gnolia well. It does offer a business model in charging companies for custom implementation, but we’ll see how many companies go for it. Companies may be better served by a social bookmarking service aimed at enterprise use, with solid granular privacy controls, like ConnectBeam.

I think he’s got a point in terms of heavyweights who want to integrate massive numbers of worker bees into a network of expertise (and by the way, ConnectBeam looks awesome for that). But for people who want a toe in the water, I think ma.gnolia might offer an approach vector that neither buys nor sells the farm. Like any social bookmarking app, ma.gnolia is the campfire around which stories can be told - about the company, about competitors, about the opportunity for teams to be great. Providing the campfire isn’t enough, of course - you have to actually chop wood - but if you can build one on your terms, with minimal cost, and with an eye to improving communication throughout the organization, there’s definite value for your employees.

Plus, imagine how hip you’ll look asking your IT guys to put M2 on their radar as a possibility for ‘09…these things matter a little too, you know.