ANTenna Blog -- Internet/Web

Is there any greater indication that Web 2.0 apps are, and will continue to, infiltrate and redefine the workforce than the fact that IBM is opening up a research center dedicated to developing Web 2.0 tools for the workplace? I don't think so.

IBM made the announcement about the research center at Interop NY. The IBM Center for Social Software will be located in Cambridge, Mass. and will be "dedicated to developing collaborative applications and other types of social software."

The research model will be based on collaboration between academia and the private sector on developing social media technologies with business applications, and, according to IBM it's the "first instance of a tech company establishing a center around these very popular emerging -- but still consumer-focused -- technologies."

Lest anyone think IBM is hoping to develop Facebook for the corporate world, the center's director, Irene Greif, an IBM Fellow who currently heads the company’s Collaborative User Experience (CUE) group, tells Xconomy that's not exactly the case:

"I’ve been networking systematically for years and I do appreciate outside systems like LinkedIn. But we're talking about social software, not social networking. We are seeing a real change from people using social software in who knows whom, and how people find people. We have anecdote after anecdote about people who learn about colleagues they wouldn't have learned about from using social software inside their companies. A lot of what our research is about is understanding the broad impact of this category of software."

InformationWeek's David Berlind heard IBM Lotus Software and WebSphere Portal general manager Bob Picciano speak at Interop NY and his speech gives insight into IBM's direction in social software. Berlind writes: "In his keynote here, Picciano pitched a blend of unified communications and social networks that, at least from an enterprise perspective, is probably the closest thing I've seen to a cohesive strategy around how the two infrastructures can strip out the inefficiencies in collaborative business process."

Berlind continues: "So, imagine a social networking infrastructure that's not unlike Facebook where people (in your organization, out of your organization) are happy to load the same sort of profile information about themselves that they'd load into Facebook. But in this case, the information is more business oriented. For example, the aforementioned trademark attorney may have created a profile that contains her picture and information about her areas of expertise (e.g.: trademark law). She might also program into that profile some links to her internal (or external) blog (another piece of the social network) as well as links (essentially, social bookmarks) to the sort of news and information she tracks that's relevant to the art of trademarking new brands (for example, a news story on how to search both the USPTO for a trademark as well as the WHOIS database for the same Internet domain name)."

So maybe what IBM will develop will be a little like Facebook for business.

But Big Blue's focus on Web 2.0 apps for business is as clear an indication as anything that these consumer technologies have only begun to make their mark on the business world. They have already started to inform how business gets done but it's clear that the role of social media in business is only to get more prominent -- and more useful.

More From bMighty:

• Obama + Web 2.0 = A (Presumptive) Presidential Nomination
• Midmarket Heroes: Scuba Toys -- Scuba Community Dives into Web 2.0
• Yelp Controversy Exposes Dark Side of Web 2.0