Web 2.0 – desirable but still dangerous?
Jinfo Blog

21st February 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Some brisk backtracking by Facebook may have averted a crisis of confidence – apparently ill-founded – that the social networking service might be trying to claim the right to retain people’s personal information indefinitely, even if they deleted their account. (See http://digbig.com/4ygxw and http://digbig.com/4ygxx for blogs from Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg that give the back story.) It’s probably no big deal in itself, but it does reflect the continuing sensitivities that this desirable yet potentially dangerous medium arouses. More evidence comes from new research commissioned by Adobe and carried out by Forrester showing that European knowledge workers are far less keen on collaborating with each other using Web 2.0 than was previously thought. Nearly half are confident that information they share with co-workers is secure, says the research (reported in Infosecurity magazine – http://digbig.com/4ygxy), but only a fifth are happy about information being shared outside their company. And over a third still use printed paper instead of computer files as a means of controlling who has access to the information they do choose to share. But as another report, from Gartner, makes clear (http://digbig.com/4ygyb), businesses will have to cede some control if they are to encourage participation in the social networking applications that are going to be essential for effective future customer relationship management (CRM). Although 60% of Fortune 1000 companies will have some form of online CRM community by 2010, Gartner predicts that more than half of those will fail to manage it effectively; just because many social applications are nominally free, that’s no reason for not assessing the business case for deploying them, it says. This assumes that the subscriber fears that have assailed Facebook recently don’t in due course translate into a general backlash against people putting themselves on public view through such services at all. One might, for example, look askance at a new application from TrueScoop (http://digbig.com/4ygyc) which apparently allows anyone to do free public record searches on Facebook members to find out if they’ve been done for speeding, possession of drugs or debt – fine for potential employers doing due diligence perhaps, but OK for the pruriently curious too? Backlash or no, there’s little doubt that social networking services will continue their attempts to move into conventional business information territory. In a widely reported stunt at the recent World Economic Forum (see for example the Guardian at http://digbig.com/4ygye) Zuckerberg took the opportunity to demonstrate how near instant polling of thousands of Facebook members might sidestep the cost of commissioning market research or the logistics associated with setting up focus groups. Never mind that such polling exercises offer few if any guarantees that the results are representative or the sample appropriately weighted. They should at least be cheap.

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