My colleagues know that I am a big fan of Facebook. Huge fan, actually. I am also a fan of LinkedIn. Both represent to me, a supremely busy professional mother, the best way to stay connected with friends and allows me to network without leaving my office or the house. I always knew that if you lined up my "friends" and categorized them that they would be pretty diverse and Facebook proved that for me. There are a lot of commonalities there but more importantly there are crucial differences that I would never have known without Facebook.
LinkedIn is a little different since that's where my thinking is business, business and business. I love the little counter that shows my connections and the 1,350,234 people that I am connected to. I feel as if I will always have a job with that many connections. Now, since LinkedIn has added discussions and groups it has become a real powerful tool. I will admit that sales and marketing people have started to abuse it a bit by making it a forum to sell products and solutions. However, at its core it has become a valuable resource for inside expert data that I would have had to search and search for. I have a community of experts at my fingertips all ready to give advice.
I'm still a little slow with Twitter, however now that I am learning how to reply to Tweets, even that is getting better for me.
Now, MicroLink's product team led by Malcolm Hyson, is launching a new social networking product for SharePoint, called DiscoverPoint. The whole suite will launch at SharePoint 2009 but with DiscoverPoint enterprises will have "Facebook" in SharePoint. That is coolness personified to me. It took me awhile to embrace SharePoint as a collaboration platform but as I learned how to use it, I totally got it. The other cool thing or dare I say innovation about DiscoverPoint, is the search capabilities that allows me to build and find communities of interest ( in Facebook and Linked in these are groups) based on my searches. The techies are all excited by the back end but for me the user who spends countless hours conducting market research, product that decreases that time helps my business. Plus adding walls, status updates, comments to SharePoint will allow me to make "friends "across the company. If its in SharePoint, what can my boss say now about all the time I spend "collaborating"!