Last week I came across Dennis Howlett’s video about open/closed networks and Facebook. On a side note I found it posted up on Facebook by Scoble and had a devil of a time finding Dennis’ original post. It seems that once something goes off the bottom of your Facebook feed it is gone for good!
To quote Dennis, he was asking: “What is the situation on the open/closed nature of Facebook? I’m thinking about this from the business perspective. Business will not really want to be participating in these totally open networks.”…”There doesn’t seem to be a very good way of being able to do all of the things you would want to do with Facebook but within a controlled environment. So maybe the situation is that Facebook is a great metaphor for what can be done but maybe it’s not the thing for the future. I just wonder what other people think about this.”
This got me very excited as allowing a controlled environment where you can keep groups of people separate is one of the key benefits of Phuser! It has also been incredibly complex to code which is probably why you don’t see it on many websites.
I got in touch with Dennis and had a long chat with him the other evening. After giving it a bit of a test he was happy to write it up in his ZDNet blog.
It is great for us that the discussions are looking at how businesses could use social networking and social software and thinking about what business value. We designed this control into Phuser as we think many groups of people will value being able to make their team discussions and planning private but still use the same website for multiple teams and projects.
