BusinessWeek.com published last month a special report, titled Social Networking with the Elite. With the growing popularity of social sites such as Facebook, Linked-In, not to mention the whopping millions of MySpace, the alternatives have started to appear. Private-by-invitation-only-closed communities, that consciously discriminate members are here. Some are private by firewall, other by pure discrimination. BusinessWeek lists, among others, A-Space, aSmallWorld, INMobile.org, Diamond Lounge, Behance Network and my personal favorite ModelsHotel.com (guess why it’s a closed network…;-).
The first private site in the slide show really surprised me – A-Space. This CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) internal site, launching these days, is for members of the CIA and other US intelligence agencies. Yes, only spooks like Mulder and Scally, and maybe some guys from Heroes are allowed to enter. Now, seriously, the purpose of A-Space is to use collaborative “social software”—not all that different from features found on Facebook, Wikipedia, and social bookmarking site del.icio.us—to share intelligence reports more rapidly across agencies.
Reuters Spaces is another example of how social software can do wonders for your business. Reuters, much like IBM, are considered early adapters – they’ve deployed reporters in Second Life, and now opened up Spaces, a private network for Hedge Funds Executives.
Wow !! As an advocate of social software in general and social software for the business in particular – great news. Now we have more example and best practices of why social networking is important to the business. If the CIA has realized the potential of sharing information and expertise internally, I guess they see some added value in it, wouldn’t you agree?
CIA employees also use internal blogs and Wikis. So, if anyone would ask you about the information security hazards involved in the utilizing of social software, tell them that “if the CIA use it, you can probably use it too”…:)
I’ve been a member of many elite social networking sites (aSmallWorld, DiamondLounge, Quebe, etc.) but none of them are a better networking platform than Affluence.org
Since Affluence is the only site that validates a person’s net worth I know that I’m networking with all millionaires and billionaires. It doesn’t even compare to LinkedIn in terms of getting business done. I am also a big Facebook fan which I think is ideal for connecting with old classmates and friends.
Israel, not sure if I replied to your comment (maybe offline ;-), but yes, it’s a strong case for social software – if the CIA are using it, anyone can use it.
Anonymous, thanks for the comment. Unfortunately I’m not as connected as you in those private networks – linkedin, facebook, friendfeed, last.fm are more than enough.. not to mention the IBM internal networks of course.. 😉