In first talk at Social Networking Conference

I'm now in the first talk at the Social Networking Conference called Enterprise social Networking at IBM presented by Ian McNairn. He mentioned about most of the people in IBM have been there for less than 5 years and IBM uses enterprise tagging and social networking extensively in the company. It is part of their company strategy. Heath McCarthy from IBM mentions we use social networking software is for connecting with people. In IBM, approximately 60% of employees are actively using social networking mostly outside IBM. IBMers used LinkedIn as the most popular social network. The benefits of Web 2.0 social networking is improving the productivity of knowledge workers and building communities. It helps you to find people, find information, sharing, socializing and promoting yourself.

But why run social software internally? It is to increase innovation, employee cohesiveness, work quality, knowledge sharing and reduces risk. In the company, we have many profiles in the organization and right now there are different systems and it is not connected together. We need software to link all these resources together.IBM has harvested the data and have taken the homegrown solutions and created an internal product. IBM has a social networking software called Lotus Connections.

Ian just asked the audience how many people have an online CV (all the attendees raised their hands). How many updated the CV within a month, all hands went down. But it is easy to update your status on social networking sites. With tagging, we create knowledge communities and knowledge sharing. Also IBM's social networking software can help to make connections with other people in the organization based on mutual systems and things that are in common and tells you how you know that person. At IBM, you can use social bookmarks of particular web sites that you bookmark and then it gets harvested and put into Lotus Connections. Ian just showed the tag cloud of Sacha Chua, an IBM social networking expert, and also a colleague of mine from my PhD days at University of Toronto in the Interactive Media Lab.

Second day of IEEE SocialCom conference

Yesterday, after the conference, there was a very great reception (thanks organizers!) at the Renaissance hotel where I was able to network with important people and eat great food! Today is the second day of the conference with lots of parallel sessions and workshops, so it's going to be a busy day. There is a workshop on Mobile Phones sensing which I'm attending. The first is an invited talk on Social Computing with Mobile Phones and Sensors and the talk is about creating social computing applications using sensory data from the mobile phone, for example, one application for determining where to put recycling bins based on pictures, tagging, geocoding and location traces. Another application is for health and wellness, one example is AndWellness.

The first paper in this workshop is on Touch Me Wear, which is about physical contact with social networks presented by Aaron Beach. They created a touch me shirt where if you hug people, it will show on Facebook who are the people you have hugged. It uses Bluetooth to upload the hug to Facebook through a contact access point. This group is the author of the paper WhozThat. There are lots of mobile social networking companies like BrightKite that can find out who are around you and what are you doing through activity inference. This is a very good example of merging actual physical interaction with social interaction and bringing it to virtual communities like Facebook.