For years i tried to correct my friends when they said things like 'my friend at work said' or 'my friend on the team said' with questions like 'are they really friends or co-workers, teammates, acquaintances or someone you know?'. They probably thought i was annoying when i asked, well actually i know they do sometimes find me annoying but that is a story for another blog.

Fast forward a couple of years after most of them were well 'trained' to use the term as i deemed appropriate and now a days everyone seems to be every one's friend. Today's New York Times has an article 'Myspacebook. past. Friending, Ancient or Otherwise' (found via Techmeme) which is about how some Academic researchers are starting to explore the parallels between online social networks and tribal societies and how they are seeing a resurgence of ancient patterns of oral communication. Aside from picking up another new word to use safely in describing social media, 'orality' - the article does make some interesting points on the emergence of oral culture online. “Orality is participatory, interactive, communal and focused on the present. The Web is all of these things.”

So i just grabbed our beautiful 1982 edition of America Heritage Dictionary (you know the one with the small pictures on the margin), that was given to my husband for his 8th grade graduation - spent a good simple 15 minutes of pleasure looking at words like exacerbate- and got to the definition of friend:

friend n. 1. A person whom one knows, likes, and trusts. 2. An acquaintance. 3. A person with whom one is allied in a struggle or cause; comrade 4.One who supports, sympathizes with, or patronizes a group, cause, or movement.

So maybe my friends where right- if i kinda like my coworker i may be able to use the phrase 'my friend at work' when describing them in a casual conversation. So folks, yes the word 'friend' can be used to describe different levels of friendship but going forward i insist that we only reserve BFF for the truest of friends of course...

So this morning, i logged into Facebook to see what my 'friends' are up to today and noticed that my friend Mario Sundar who is the Community Evangelist at LinkedIn just posted a link to a 2006 article from the Columbia Business School How Well Do Your Friends Know You? . With all the controversy around the recent Facebook Ad Beacon advertising program it is an interesting read because it questions how much we really know about the people we call our 'friends' and that most people want specific, personalized suggestions from friends whom they believe, correctly or not, know them well.

The key however is that i want to be able to call on the different levels of 'friendships' i have both online and off across multiple networks when i look for recommendations. You might be my friend because we like the same type of music so i might be interested in what new albums you are buying, but i might really have no desire whatsoever to trust your purchasing decision around cars or tech gadgets. But most importantly i want to control and own that data about who and why people are my friends and be able to use it where and when i want to. At this point, although there are some initiatives on their way to solve this starting with the ability to port my data, that knowledge of who i trust when is only in my brain.

Want to be my friend? Well then just 'friend me' already! (but please don't make it a random request- if you tell me where you found me and how we are connected (even owing up to being a random find) it might increase the chances of me wanting to be your friend.

yes i use the root word 'friend' over 25 times in this post- so get over it my friends.

Via the Between the Lines Blog, a pointer to this short video clip of a question Robert Scoble asked of Berners-Lee (I am sure Robert will be posting additional video over at Podtech eventully). In it Berners-Lee clearly explains why users want control of their data and why service providers need to listen.

Dave Winer among many others are also calling for control of their data across the internet and one of the groups i am involved dataportability.org is making some traction in defining some of the standards for just that.

PS> boo on CNET for not allowing embeds of their videos .

Two Fridays ago i got to spend one of the most memorable thinking and learning sessions in a small conference room at the Sun Microsystems office in Menlo Park with a handful of folks including Peter Reiser and Mike Briggs from Sun, Robert Scoble and my colleague Greg Merkle.

Robert, Greg and I had already had some good conversations about a 'new media' white paper (more on that to follow in another post) we are writing together around emerging technologies and behaviors in the enterprise and i had this crazy idea to invite Peter and Mike to join our working session on Friday and they agreed which i was thrilled with because i knew they were up to something cool- and they certainly did not disappoint.

I met Peter and Mike two years ago through some of my other contacts at Sun- and since then we have been keeping in touch through our blogs, twitter, facebook, flickr, eyejot and whatever else we find ourselves in. Peter just renamed his blog Reiser 2.0 because that is what everyone at Sun calls him now a days and Mike and his team share much of what they do publicly over at the OneStop Secret Sauce Blog. They are part of the Sun Customer Engineering group that just had their annual Conference in Vegas and we got to see a preview of what they were going to roll out at the conference last week.

We weren't supposed to make it public before they announced it at the conference so Peter finally got a post up on Community Equity in Action over on his blog that provides a nice overview of how they used the conference to launch their home grown "Facebook for the Enterprise" service that will hopefully become a very successful key part of their CE 2.0 architecture. Peters thoughts and passion for Community Equity as a way to measure Social Capital for an enterprise is both fascinating and promising.

I personally think that what they are building will eventually become a common tool for collaboration in the Enterprise and look forward to hearing more from them as to how it is adopted and the returns they start seeing from their deployments. I have no doubt that soon enough we will also see Facebook like white label platforms for Enterprises.

In the upcoming weeks i will hopefully be sharing more about the 'new media' white paper we are tasked with writing including some of the things we learned at Sun. Our hope is to also reach out to the community for you participation so... watch this space.

CE 2.0 logo photo credit- by Neeraj Mathur who also works on Reiser's team and we met last week and was instrumental to their CE 2.0 launch.

The other day i posted some jobs that are open in the Dow Jones San Francisco office in my Facebook Marketplace profile- while i was posting them the option to buy a Facebook Flyer was presented and i wondered if it would be worth it. The costs didn't seem too high but i passed- well today via a twitter message from Jeremiah Owyang i saw this post on Charlene Li's blog about a test she is running with Facebook Flyers so i thought i would give it a try since i had a new posting to put up. Hey for 4 bucks it is definitely worth it- perhaps even better then a virtual Facebook beer for a buck that i will send to anyone that gets the job. Shel Israel also got into the action via the same Twitter message.A couple of things Facebook can do to make the service better would be to guide the flyer creator (i did it through the marketplace prompts)- for example providing a preview prior to publishing, suggesting a length for the title etc. Unless you go through the main page to create a flyer it doesn't tell you that you can't make any changes to the flyer once you purchase (BOO they should have at least had a warning!).

In the FAQ section (after i purchased) i found good information including the following : There is a 200 character limit for the body of the Flyer (including spaces and returns) and a 25 character limit for the title. In addition, there is a 15 character limit for words in the body of the Flyer.

Via Tom Mandel's post over at the SuperNova Conversation Hub comes word that Reuters is making public a new social networking service built on Blogtronix called Reuters InterActive. I am suspecting that this the Financial services "MySpace" that Tom Glocer mentioned in the Guardian?

Last night i signed up (had to use corporate e-mail address) and it seems that there are currently three active communities; Carbon Market, Oil Market and Midnight Trader- US Equities some with thousands of members already. They have a short flash movie that takes you through the site.

The introduction material states that this is a place for users to interact with the market and enables those users to get questions answered by the market and get market opinion. There are many other media players that are trying to build communities with their readers- but i really like what Reuters is doing here- it is NOT just about Reuters content, they are providing a place for people to participate add their own content above and beyond comments and tags that you typically see in media communities.

Of course distributing their own content is important and in addition to building these communities - it is yet another way for Reuters to spread and bring value to their brand name, for example, it even has easy access to subscribe to Reuters Newsletters on specific subjects built in.

All this behind a login that allows them to know the user base and target the service as it matures to the communities' needs. I would suspect that as large amounts of people from specific companies become members, premium services could be eventually activated through Reuters Interactive in some way (read the fees section in the terms of use).

The targeting of the communities-come on only if you are really really interested in the Carbon Market are you going to join- will hopefully lead to a very engaged community that produces high value to all its members. Well done-

As a member of a community (you need to be accepted as a member) you can create posts, add comments (also allows for anonymous comments), upload information like spreadsheets (but only spreadsheets) and create your own site that you can can manage and invite others to see.

On the top left of this post is an example of the resources available to each community- including of course Reuters branded content, industry information like key facts, and web content that includes top Internet blogs.

The big thing that really bugged me was that i could not easily find who the Community Managers are- it seems like they are Reuters Editors and market experts? but i would like that prominently displayed prior to making a decision if i wanted to be in that community. You can easily find the other members of the community- but understanding who is the Community Manager could be important.

Communities around markets and such have been around for a long time- think of all the forums, blogs etc that trade industries have but this is something a bit different- if it works it is a very specialized social networking community that allows all participants to create and collaborate on content.

Over all good stuff and i look forward to keeping an eye on the process they make.

ADDED POST PUBLISH- the other thing that kinda baffled me was one item in their terms of use statement, "by posting material you warrant that such material...was not produced by you in the course of your employment"- employment with the company whose e-mail i had to use as part of my subscription? not sure.

Oh yeah- if you are new reader to my blog please don't forget that : " The opinions expressed on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my past,future or present employer".

Very interesting and in my mind wonderful news about Cisco's upcoming acquisition announcement of Tribe.com. Cisco will acquire the underlying technology but it seems that Tribe.net will continue as a standalone site.

Cisco, who in October of 2006 re-branded itself and launched the theme "Welcome to the Human Network" a campaign that focuses on the ways Cisco's Internet infrastructure enables people to connect and assemble their own networks- is making a play into the Social Networking space and i would very much like to see them being successful at it. According to the New York Times Article, Dan Scheinman, the mergers and acquisition chief who led the Linksys and Scientific Atlanta purchases, now runs a new division at Cisco called the Media Solutions Group, which has been responsible for the deals for Five Across and Tribe.net. The Cisco Media Solutions Group was put together late last year and is responsible for developing and marketing infrastructure products that will help digital media content owners improve the content experience for consumers.

Some bloggers commenting on the subject are saying that Cisco is purchasing this technology to build an internal social networking site for their 49,000 plus emplyees while others are writing that the move is for Cisco to help its customers -- such as TV networks and cable TV companies, create online environments for their employees and for their customers. Others are having a hard time understanding why this makes sense. Sure makes sense to me- both for their internal use - there are many social networking advocates within Cisco and i am sure that their push from 'below' influenced this decision- as well as an underlying technology that their customers can use to build social networks- for their own internal use, for customer sites and for partner sites. Oh yeah and all this while increasing the use of Cisco's core business of running Internet traffic on their infrastructure.

Yesterday the Guardian covered a story (light on details so i am waiting for more information before i really blog more about it) that Reuters was going to start a Financial Services Social Networking site for their financial subscribers that had my mind a-buzzing about opportunities in enterprise communities like financial services markets. There are other sites like MyBusinessTies that provide vertical specific social networking sites for companies. This morning I am a-buzzing about all the other corporate opportunities. Jeremiah Owyang recently blogged about White Labeled (Applications you can re-brand) Social Networking sites were a litany of comments created a comprehensive list of such services.