Andrew McAfee, Harvard Business School

Video presentation followed by Q&A on video conference link from Orlando, Florida.

Definition - use of social software tools. About use not development or delivery etc. All about how end users make use of it.

1. Free and easy communication technologies. Channels at the moment don't add up to anything they remain point to point. Platforms are technologies that let us share. Problem with trad. websites is that only a few people can add content too. First trend is incredible democratisation of content.
2. Developers are trying to impose very little structure. We're comfortable with highly structured communications. 2.0 carries a very different choice - don't determine roles etc up front. Keeping ground rules to a minimum. Getting structure out of the way releases something very powerful.
   
3. New 2.0 platforms allow structure to emerge overtime.Eg google and the world wide web, founders recognised the inherent structure in the web (ie linking patterns). Del.icio.us works the same way.

Benefits of E2.0? Four rings of colleague relationships - strong, weak, potentially useful, not useful.

1. Strongly tied co-workers - wiki, an online white board. Wikis overcome problems of version control etc
2. Weakly tied co-workers - weak ties are very important but orgs do not have good ways to help people maintain them and exploit them. Facebook lets people stay on top of what people are doing. Allows people to ask questions of a distributed group of people
3. Potential - orgs have struggled to bring people together. Healthy blogosphere together with search allows people to find information and the right people.
4. Not useful - prediction markets. Conclusion from a lot of research that bizarrely these markets deliver great results. Some corps are starting to use prediction markets internally. Used to be a sceptic of 'wisdom of crowds' but now sees potential

Serious challenges to using this new type of communications. Email is an existing incumbent collaboration technology that we are used to and which has some real advantages. We are biased to the existing technologies. 2.0 has to be 10x better than email to displace it.

Still sees too much structure being imposed on E2.0 when it is introduced in organisations. Too much hangover from the world of imposed structure.

People will use 2.0 if it makes their job easier. Will you be 'rewarded' for blogging etc or will people think you are just goofing off.

Culture not the end all and be all. But places with a conducive culture will be the places where 2.0 takes off.

The more content on the intranet will imporve the value of social search internally. Search is going to be, if it isn't already, the dominant navigation paradigm.

Technology is not a competitive leveller - it accentuates differences between companies in culture, collaboration.

Email is coming to be seen as a bit quaint by young people but it won't go away.

Examples of prediction markets internally - Google

US intelligence community an early adoptor of 2.0 tools. If they can do it, anyone can. The impetus for change was big ie 9/11.