Users are easily able to access and share a large variety of
applications. By September of 2007 there were over 3,500
applications and as of April 2008 this number has increased
to over 22,000. Consumers like choice of applications as it
enables them to personalize their experience, without requir-
ing application providers to do extra work.
As an indication of the perceived value of an application
development platform, other social networking sites, such
as MySpace and hi5 [9], have followed suit. MySpace and
hi5 use the OpenSocial API [8] being developed by Google.
This is in contrast to the proprietary platform being used
by Facebook. Applications developed using the OpenSocial
API will be able to have more rapid and widespread deploy-
ment on all of the sites that support the API.
A major problem facing application developers for social
networking platforms is that it is very difficult to predict the
popularity and lifespan of applications. Figure 1 shows that
most applications on Facebook are very unpopular; of the
15,036 applications that we had data for on April 21, 2008,
13,838 (92%) had less than one thousand active users, com-
pared to the top 3 applications that had over one million ac-
tive users. We expect a similar trend to exist for applications
in an enterprise. A flexible IT infrastructure to support ap-
plications in a cost effective and scalable manner is needed.
Figure 1. Daily active users vs. rank of Face-
book applications.
3. Requirements and Concerns of Enterprises
We consider the requirements of enterprises from three
different perspectives; CXOs (i.e., company executives),
employees and IT organizations. CXOs have a variety of
goals that directly affect the way their IT infrastructure is
managed. These goals could include things such as “reduce
costs”, “increase business flexibility” and/or “provide busi-
ness continuity”. CXOs are concerned about security and
risk. They regard data as a significant asset of the company
and do not want that information shared with the world.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, employees want an
easily accessible and complete set of tools that enables them
to more effectively do their jobs. Members of generation
Y are the new enterprise employees. They grew up with
the Internet and are quite familiar with social networking
technologies. Use of these technologies in enterprise would
therefore be very appealing to this new workforce.
In the middle is the corporate IT organization, which must
try to support this conflicting set of requirements. A com-
mon approach today is to make the IT infrastructure (includ-
ing applications) very static and controlled. This helps re-
duce cost (the easiest goal to measure), but can limit flexi-
bility and restrict the tools available to users. Much of IT
infrastructure is underutilized much of the time. Methods
to consolidate and make more efficient use of resources are
always being sought. Enabling business continuity requires
the maintenance of legacy applications which are typically
not easily adapted to newer and more efficient IT manage-
ment approaches. While many new technologies are emerg-
ing, enterprises are more conservative than consumers. They
need slower migration paths in the adoption of new technolo-
gies.
Enterprises also have many concerns when it comes to
adopting general consumer social networking platforms.
Adoption of such platforms has been limited in enterprise
due to the lack of a professional feel, security concerns, and
access to applications that so far, are typically more of a dis-
traction than benefit to the workplace. The lifecycle of appli-
cations is more dynamic and less predictable than enterprises
are used to dealing with. Furthermore, applications can be
developed and shared by anybody so concerns over who con-
tinues to support and update applications becomes an issue.
Enterprises have typically had a great deal of control over
the application environment provided to employees.
There are many social networking tools, such as Hud-
dle [10], LinkedIn [13] and VisiblePath [21], that have been
developed with enterprise users in mind. However, most
focus on networking, collaborating and/or sharing informa-
tion and not on providing a platform for accessing applica-
tions. The recent release of the OpenSocial API based Intel-
ligent Applications Platform [14] for LinkedIn could change
this. There have also been some efforts to make some of
the general purpose social networking tools more appropri-
ate for enterprise. Huddle has a Facebook application called
Workspaces [11] and WorkLight has a Facebook application
called WorkBook [22], both aimed at enabling more secure
use of Facebook in an enterprise setting.
We argue that it is important to identify methods that
make useful applications and services more accessible to
employees (to improve productivity), enable more rapid de-
ployment and dynamic configuration of these services (to in-
crease flexibility), while allowing IT organizations to retain
or increase control over the infrastructure they manage (to
maintain cost accountability). Solving these issues could re-
shape how computing is done within enterprises.
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