How Can Social Networks Constructed by Technology Understand Friendship?

When Google launched Buzz, a microblogging social network, several months ago, the company boasted that the network had been generated automatically, by algorithms that could connect users to each other based on communications revealed through Gmail and other services. However, many users balked at having what they perceived as mischaracterized social connections, forcing the company to frantically backpedal and make the Buzz service less automated and more under users' control. This incident notwithstanding, many companies are increasingly interested in automatically determining users' social ties through e-mail and social network communications. For example, IBM's Lotus division offers a product called Atlas that constructs social data from corporate communications, and Microsoft has investigated using such data to automatically prioritize the e-mails that workers receive. But researchers say there are a lot of unsolved problems with generating and analyzing social networks based on patterns of communication.

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Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time To Reclaim Our Privacy | Epicenter | Wired.com

Are we beginning to see the emergence of a social and critical movement attacking the hegemony of social media, allowing us to take back our identities, return privacy into our own hands in the process returning real meaning to the word " friend" . Maybe not, but his article from Wired is thought provoking. Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination. It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed. Facebook used to be a place to share photos and thoughts with friends and family and maybe play a few stupid games that let you pretend you were a mafia don or a homesteader. It became a very useful way to connect with your friends, long-lost friends and family members. Even if you didn’t really want to keep up with them. Soon everybody

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Managing Information In The Enterprise and The Cost of Failing To Do So - New Forbes Global Survey.

In their effort to turn piles of data into actionable information, large global enterprises are applying rigorous strategic thinking to using information management to contain costs and provide a competitive advantage. This study uncovers significant trends, misconceptions, and underlying roadblocks to better information management. How important is this? The study found that data-related problems could be costing most enterprises more than $5 million annually.

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Why Syncing Contacts in Social Media is such an Impossible Dream - Harvard Business Review

Of all the problems that plague the plugged-in, social worker, one of the simplest remains the hardest to solve: Syncing contacts. Most of us have so many contacts spread across so many networks we lose track of them, can't access them when and where we need to and miss opportunities to connect. All we want is to synchronize all of our contact lists. A master rolodex. Why is that so hard? Google offered to connect me with Joseph Smarr, the former CTO of Plaxo, a company that's been trying to create this for the past 8 years now; Smarr is now with Google on a team focused on the social Web. I asked Smarr to help me understand the limitations of contact syncing today, why something so simple is actually complex, and when we can expect it to get easier.

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The Impossibility of Keeping Up With Change - April Editor’s Note from MIT Sloan Management Review

This is a great editorial from the MIT Sloan Management Review on the impossibility of keeping up with change. "...I want to pass along a story about a Cray supercomputer and your computer — a story that’s partly about change but mostly about our inability to keep up with it. First, though, some context. In the new Spring 2010 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review you’ll find five loosely linked stories that spring from one far-reaching trend: the smart-tech explosion. The continued exponential increases in computing power, storage capacity, communications speed and, now, “smart-world” instrumentation have produced both a flood of new data and also new ways to analyze and use the data in that flood.

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