Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

I’ve been wanting to write an article for some time now about how the social (web 2.0) web works, and why there are so many different sites out there. specifically I wanted to explain the use of sites like FriendFeed, Profilactic and Ping.fm

I have built a small diagram that hopefully illustrates a small portion of this. It is not comprehensive, though it is accurate in the detail it does show.

The missing stuff includes a dotted line back from any of the sites in the 2nd or 3rd columns back to the first column.

Let me explain the circle of internet life and how Ping.fm, Profilactic and Friend Feed play a part.

So what is it? Why do you need to keep reading this? Well you probably don’t, unless you work in an organisation with internet access and more than one person there. Well that’s most if us!

Did that get your attention?

How about this?

Has Facebook, MySpace, YouTube or Google videos been banned in your workplace? What about instant messaging or Skype?

I want to talk a little about why this has happened, and for the wrong reasons, and also how it will change in the very near future.

Organisations have been very jealous of their employees time (and they have a legitimate right to require their workers to be focussed on work not their social lives while in their employ. IT managers and CIO’s have seen applications like Facebook and messenger to be purely time wasting social applications with no business use. That is starting to change.

What place does twitter have in a corporate environment? Social networking sites such as facebook is largely banned in corporate workplaces, especially government departments. Most of these places also feel threatened by the idea of instant messaging and suspect that their workers become less productive as a result. And maybe they are right in some circumstances.

Twitter can be abused as can IM and facebook. If all workers are using these “tools” for is to share pics of their weekend parties, and organise their social lives then they are effectively “stealing” time from their employer. And their employer can rightly block that sort of behaviour.

So what is the place of these activities?