Two Social Search Twitches: IBM and Vivisimo Announce Moves
September 18, 2008
What caught my attention was two unrelated announces about social search. I define the opaque yet trendy term as plain old search and email with some sort of ad hoc user interaction permitted. In the right situation, “social search” can be a useful short cut around the need to index at Google scale. Without a slick implementation, “social search” can raise some interesting security issues. But in today’s pressure packed financial world, I think making sales takes precedence over worrying too much about what toothless regulators want organizations to do to conform to ineffectual rules and regulations.
First, IBM announced that it will open an IBM Center for Social Software as part of its Tomorrow at Work program. You can read about YAIL (yet another IBM lab) here. The motivation for the CSS (no, not cascading style sheet, it’s an acronym for the Center for Social Software) is to overcome enterprise resistance to social networking, social search, and other social functions. IBM has enlisted Dow Jones and Thomson Reuters as its first partners in CSS. I am curious about the type of news and financial functions that will be “invented” at the CSS. I find a great many social software functions readily available, including well known (Facebook and MySpace) and less well known or publicized services cataloged quite well on Wikipedia here. I am certain CSS and its partners will push beyond these lesser social innovations in record time.
Second, Vivisimo told Earthtimes here that social search (a branch of social software) can be “a powerful technology deployed by visionary firms to nurture and grow their social capital.” The idea is that getting employees to interact can improve productivity, knowledge sharing, and performance. You can find direct links to a 1998 journal article on the topic and a Vivisimo white paper.
My thought is that email and mobile phones provide most, if not all, of the benefits attributed to social software. Both IBM and Vivisimo want to encourage organizations to use Web 2.0 (whatever that means) technology to gain even greater benefits. The payoff for IBM will be increased sale of its consulting services and products. For Vivisimo, the benefit will be more licenses for its Velocity search system and its function that allows a user to add metadata to a retrieved document.
I look forward to innovations from IBM and more social search functionality from Vivisimo. For me, I will stick to email, my mobile, and some SMS texting to oil the feathers of the Beyond Search addled goose. Social software raises too many issues about security, privacy, and compliance for me to push my beak too deeply into these murky waters.
Stephen Arnold, September 18, 2008
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