Facebook, “Is It A Business Application?”
by
on September 22, 2007,
This question has been haunting me since being posted on my Facebook fun wall by a colleague of mine. I needed to find an answer and put the nagging ghost to rest.
“Is Facebook a business application?”
Having previously joined Facebook myself out of curiosity and the fact like all techies I liked NSO’s (New Shiny Objects) I decided to begin my search by reading what Facebook itself had to say. Something I had not bothered with prior based on the fact I needed to see what it had to offer regardless. After all, as the old cliché goes, “You cannot judge a book by its cover.”
Social or Business
As I examined the Facebook home page I realized I had found a clue in Facebook itself in its opening paragraph. It states:
“Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them.” “Founded in February 2004, Facebook is a social utility”
In its own words it is a social program and in my past position in an office environment social means anything but work.
Social, according to Webster, means: 2 a: marked by or passed in pleasant companionship with one's friends or associates <leads a very full social life> b : SOCIABLE c : of, relating to, or designed for sociability <a social club>
Wikipedia describes Facebook as a social networking website. “ … invented by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. Initially the membership was restricted to students of Harvard College … As of July 2007, the website had the largest number of registered users among college-focused sites.”
“The name of the site refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of the campus community that US colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff.”
As the then information manager and the go to guy when problems arose with the computers for a major renovation firm, I installed MSN Messenger and later Skype on select computers. The need was based on cost-effective interoffice communications between their then Burnaby, White Rock and Kelowna, BC, showrooms. Approved staff would be able to communicate and transfer files too big for e-mail as opposed to a courier when timing was of the essence. Shortly after its start some employees had turned MSN into an opportunity to socialize with friends. To avoid the problem the company later moved to Skype.
Facebook from a multiple employee stand point gives greater advantage for abuse based on the latter example.
The truth is out there
My search for answers raised another question, “How can a social program become a business application? “
Facebook, without the provision to deactivate the ability to socialize, and redesign it to reflect business related networking opportunities without all the frivolities such as poking, sending naughty gifts and other items related to adult social add-ons, can’t.
Conclusion
Personally, a good networking program should contain a mix of all that is useful business wise in MS Outlook, Google Reader, Plaxo, LinkedIn and Maximizer, with a dash of Twitter for flavor and an efficient form of file transfer. Add to the mix the capacity to send large emails as in Gmail and the communication abilities of Skype.
Is Facebook close? If you said yes then go directly to jail. Do not pass go and do not collect two-hundred dollars.
To ensure my opinions were as unbiased as possible, I performed some off-line face-to-face research and asked a cross-section of random, nontechie, semi computer literate, individuals if they felt Facebook was or could be used as a business application.
I should note that not all of individuals asked were Facebook users, but all were aware of it and what it was about.
The consensus based on my research was that NONE of individuals asked would use it for business purposes. Their unified opinion was that Facebook was and will always remain a tool to find old friends and classmates and to socialize, period.
The question that business community and techies need to now ask is, “What is a true business application and is it out there?” The company that cannot only truthfully answer that question but also create and supply a cost-effective solution will be the supreme technological ruler.
