EnterpriseBook - Facebook for the Enterprise?

Imagine that a Sales Manager gets a notification that says "Opportunity X has moved to the next level. $250K". The Sales Manager "comments" on that update asking for some details. The "comment" gets sent to the sales person who entered that opportunity X, and can then address those questions. Based on the responses, the sales manager also "recommends" a "group" that focuses on such specific deals. The Country Manager "likes" the update to keep the sales person motivated and also subtly informing him that he is aware and can make himself available if the need arises. The Country Manager can also "follow" this opportunity so that he gets any updates to this particular deal.

You get the idea. Taking Facebook & Twitter and creating an Enterprise focused social networking solution. There are many questions that come to mind when you think of such a solution -
does it replace email, instant messaging or team workspaces or is it a new medium altogether?,
will it improve productivity or reduce it?,
with so many emails to respond to already does this application require me to update-on/respond to/take-note-of all "updates" and activities?,
would this only be restricted to the enterprise, or can partner companies also join the network?,
what impact does it have on storage needs, security needs, content management, etc?

Instead of trying to address all these questions, lets evaluate the potential benefits of such an application. In order to do that, let's analyze what happened in the consumer world with Facebook & Twitter. What benefits did Facebook bring to consumers, what existing communication channels did it replace? I don't think Facebook replaced Email but yes, it definitely would have replaced the number of emails that people sent to their friends & family. I don't think Facebook replaced Instant Messaging, but Facebook realized that it is a complimentary communication channel and it has added that capability to its website. Facebook did definitely challenge a Flickr, as many people just upload their photos to Facebook now instead of doing it separately to Picassa or Flickr. Facebook improved our ability to "connect" with our friends, even though we could not meet often in the real world. Facebook gave users the ability to know what was happening in their friends life, and they could just share their life-happenings on Facebook knowing that their family & friends would get to see/read about it (maybe reducing some IDD phone calls here). Facebook didn't replace blogs, but made it a feature for users to be able to share "notes". In a nutshell, Facebook did a bit of everything and provided a single platform that was social in nature, and could be viewed by friends & family.

If we take this to the Enterprise, a Facebook-like application or what we might call an Enterprise Social Networking solution would not necessarily replace Email, Instant Messaging or Workspace. But it could become either a platform through which all these can either be accessed and complimented by the features such as status updates, rating/tagging, etc. or a platform that can be used to offer a Email-like, IM-like, Workspace-like environment. The important thing in both scenarios will be that this platform will be a "social" platform.

The obvious benefits of such a solution would be better information sharing across teams in the enterprise, better knowledge of what's happening in the enterprise, better connect with employees (especially in geographically dispersed teams) improving collaboration amongst teams, and providing a communications platform that is social, increasingly popular and partly informal.

An Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) solution could possibly be an addition to the existing communication channels that exist within an enterprise. What I believe will become important for ESN is that it could become an integration portal or access portal for other communication channels, a bit like IM on Facebook, Messages (Email) on Facebook, etc. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that you could add voice capability & web conferencing as an application to ESN as well. What could start as a new communication channel, eventually has the potential to be a communication platform that can truly connect the other communication channels and deliver a quasi-UC (Unified Communications) experience.

Whether or not ESN will become popular in the enterprise can only be decided once the solutions from players such as Cisco, Salesforce.com, IBM, etc. get into the market, and how enterprise CIOs react to these. There is a bit of a precedence for ESN in the way Instant Messaging is becoming popular in the enterprise now. Starting as a consumer communication channel, IM has now become an enterprise solution, and it took a good 3-5 years after IM was already in the consumer world, that it reached the enterprise, and another 3-4 years before it became mainstream. Even if you improve that rate of adoption, one should not expect ESN to become popular before 2012.

My biggest worry is what will happen when my boss "pokes" me about some deliverables? Is "Super Poke" the new micro-managing tool?