Google did say it would continue development of Wave, but instead seek to integrate it into its other applications. As a model for future collaboration, Wave did make a wave. But its greatest impact will be to drive co-authoring capabilities into other collaboration applications.

Microsoft last week announced a connector between Microsoft Outlook, and profile information in Facebook. The service works by matching a user’s e-mail address to their Facebook profile. So if one of your contacts in Outlook is on Facebook, you will see whatever information is publicly available from their profile within Outlook (or whatever information you can access if you are “friends”). Microsoft previously announced a similar integration between Outlook at LinkedIn.

Microsoft’s move creates new challenges for organizations trying to balance the need to embrace the world of social software with concerns over security, compliance, privacy and productivity. Our 2010 benchmark of over 200 companies shows that 40% block access to public social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, but often are forced to back off blanket bans due to employee demand or business justifications to participate in public social communities. Meanwhile, only 23% have a formal social strategy.

Allowing employees to engage with public social networks can provide real benefits in terms of building personal relationships with customers, partners, and suppliers, but of course carries risk and must be implemented with respect to information protection requirements (See Socialware’s recently released Guide to Facebook Social Networking Compliance).

We continue to spend a lot of time working with our clients to try and help them balance the need for openness with the reality of governance. Enterprise managers should take efforts by Microsoft and others to poke holes in the social firewall as further justification for a proactive enterprise social strategy.

For the last few years the social product landscape has been centered on delivering applications that provided specific uses or functionalities. For example; blogs, wikis, microblogs, discussion forums, etc. Over time stand-alone applications have merged into social computing suites such as Newsgator social sites, Jive SBS, and Socialtext.

Now, we’re seeing the next wave: Social computing in the context of organizational applications and processes. The first shot across the bow was Salesforce.com’s Chatter, introduced a few months ago as a social application that is baked into Salesforce’s CRM; meaning employees could leverage social collaboration tools directly from within the application they were already using. We’ve seen other examples such as integration of public social network connectors into Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange. Recently Jive demonstrated integration of SBS with SAP at this year’s SAPPHIRE NOW event in Orlando.

Vendors at Enterprise 2.0 took this concept one step further with announcements from Cisco, Jive, and Socialtext not only enhanced collaboration/social platforms (Quad, SBS 4.5, and Socialtext 4.0 respectively), but new APIs and developer support to interface these social tools with business process applications. Initially this means a greater ability to collaborate in the context of specific reports, management information, or ERP applications.

Longer term, I expect we’ll see collaboration flow the opposite way; so as with Salesforce chatter, social tools will be available within business application interfaces as well as within stand-alone social suites. This presents some challenges for those responsible for social strategy. It’s possible that rather than deploying an enterprise-wide social platform, the challenge becomes to integrate various islands of social applications that are wrapped into business process tools to enable common search, profile management, and administration. Perhaps we’ll see OpenSocial become the de-facto tool for interconnecting these islands.

Another aspect of this trend is a requirement for greater communication between collaboration planners and application developers. One of the key trends we’ve highlighted in our recent research is growing integration of those responsible for voice, messaging, and video with those responsible for social software, now that group will need to include internal application development resources who can leverage these new integration capabilities.

What we’re seeing is a maturation of the social computing landscape. It’s no longer about “which cool new tool can I deploy” but how can I leverage these tools to improve the overall ability of those within and outside my organization to communicate and collaborate.

SAP Co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe’s keynote this morning highlighted a new “Chatter-like” activity stream within CRM On-Demand. Jim called this “Facebook for the Enterprise”, which is one of the more beaten-to-death marketing slogans, but activity streams within the SalesOnDemand UI gives field sales personnel the ability to engage in chats and share information tied to specific accounts and opportunities. Like Salesforce.com Chatter, this new capability is tied into the workspace that sales people already use, meaning that it doesn’t require learning a whole new interface or deploying a new application. Rather, the activity stream simply adds additional value to an existing application.

Earlier I had a chance to sit down with David Meyer, SAP’s SVP Business Insight and Emerging Technologies and see a demo of Streamwork, SAP’s new collaboration tool for group decision making. Like On-Demand’s activity stream, Streamwork can integrate with existing SAP applications to enable discussions around specific contexts, such as reports, projects, or business processes. As a cloud-based service, Streamwork is especially effective for supporting external collaboration, a key activity for SAP customers across a range of verticals or processes such as supply chain management.

The entry of companies like Salesforce and SAP into the Enterprise 2.0 space poses significant risks to stand-alone social computing vendors who don’t have the same level of integration into the applications companies use to run their business. But there are also partnership opportunities as Jive’s presence here at SAPPHIRENOW demonstrates. It will be interesting to watch the continued integration of social applications into enterprise BI and ERP systems.

Last week I got exposed to the other side of Facebook, namely their ability to rescind or suspend accounts without any notification, explanation, or seemingly any recourse. It all started on Monday morning when I received a few messages from my European friends letting me know that someone had reached out to them via Facebook IM, said that I was stuck in London, had been robbed, and needed them to wire me money so I can get home. This scam is not new, in fact Facebook has documented it. Fortunately my friends were savvy enough to realize I probably wasn’t in London, and even if I was, I wouldn’t ask them to send me any cash.

So I immediately logged into my account and changed my password. I then reported the attack to Facebook via their “privacy@facebook.com” account. A few hours later I noticed that Adium became disconnected, and when I logged into Facebook I got a message that my account had been disabled with no explanation.

The disabled message pointed me to their FAQ (http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=45), which said to e-mail disabled@facebook.com from the associated e-mail account, so that’s what I did. That was on March 15th. Since then I’ve heard nothing. Apparently I’m not alone. Searching twitter or google for “Facebook” and “disabled” reveals numerous other individuals who have had the same experience. There’s even a rapidly growing discussion over at Getsatisfaction.com. In some cases users report their accounts being reactivated in days, for others its weeks or not at all.

So what does this mean for your efforts to use Facebook for your public-facing community?

1. You better have multiple administrators! There are numerous examples in the link I noted above of those responsible for their company’s community being locked out, often at inopportune time such as during a new product launch.

2. You better be prepared to tell your customers who get locked out of their Facebook account and can’t access your community that you can’t help them.

The fact that Facebook not only can’t adequately support its users, but shades its policies such that many will never learn why their account was disabled should drive you to consider other options. Go ahead and create a Facebook page, but consider using it for sharing information while creating your own public facing community using a built-for-business platform to enable information sharing for your customers. They’ll thank you for it.

In the meantime, if anyone from Facebook is reading this, how about a response?

Instead, is it possible that Google aims to position DocVerse as a hosted alternative to SharePoint for workgroup collaboratation, delivering a Wave-like functionality that integrates with Microsoft Office as a separate service from its Apps? The universe of Microsoft Office users is a massive order of magnitude larger than those using Google Apps, or who will use Google Apps in the next few years, so why not challenge Microsoft’s two big growth engines - SharePoint, and the forthcoming Office Live Workspace to provide a real-time collaboration capability compatible with Microsoft’s desktop suite?

I think Chatter has the potential to be extremely disruptive. Salesforce brings some inherent strengths to the table, it’s arguably the most widely deployed software as a service, via the SaaS delivery model Salesforce can bundle Chatter with the services it’s already providing to end-user customers, in effect going around IT and undercutting more centralized attempts to bring social computing to the enterprise via stand-alone platforms such as Confluence, Jive, and SocialText, or as add-ons to collaboration tools such as SharePoint or the Notes/Domino/Quickr suite. Salesforce also points to the opportunity for its development partners to integrate Chatter into the tens of thousands of Force.Com developers, but to succeed Chatter must evolve beyond a Salesforce-based application and offer the opportunity to integrate into other collaboration applications. It must also overcome concerns related to compliance and security of storing potentially discoverable conversations in the cloud.

I think the biggest issue with Buzz is its reliance on Gmail. Google makes the assumption that your e-mail contacts are your buddies, but that’s not necessarily the case. I’ve got a lot of folks in my in-box who are business or casual acquaintances, or whom are on mailing lists that I’m on, and who aren’t friends I’d want to follow. The people I want to follow are all in my Facebook account, but Google doesn’t yet connect to Facebook. If there’s a “killer app” that will move people from Facebook to Google, I don’t see it.   Buzz may have some use as another social computing channel, but at this point I don’t see it replacing Facebook (or even LinkedIn).

Where Buzz, I think, has the greatest appeal is in creating a social community within companies using Gmail or Google apps as their corporate messaging environment. Buzz just fired a shot across the bow of all the social computing software or service vendors targeting SMBs. If you are already paying for a corporate Gmail service, you just got a whole suite of social tools as well.

There is one other problem, it doesn’t work. At this point I don’t see the “Buzz” link in my Gmail in-box, and from following various twitter comments, neither do many others.

Update: Buzz has a massive privacy flaw

FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, issued new guidelines this week designed to help financial firms balance the need to enter the social world with the need to meet electronic records retention rules. The problem for enforcement managers so far has been the lack of tools. While companies such as Facetime Communications have introduced social site enforcement gateways, it remains difficult to cover all the bases as social sites rapidly grow. Ultimately the heart of any successful compliance strategy is user training and a solid acceptable use policy for those accessing social sites. Financial firms would be wise to carefully read FINRA’s recommendations and proactively take measure to limit their risk.