Government Technology - January 2008 - (Page 58)

signal: noise BY PAU L W. TAYLO R CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER CENTER FOR DIGITAL GOVERNMENT index Jurisdictions/Agencies: j Socialize This went out with signs that the first wave of social networking excitement reached what Wall Street would call a market top. To recap, Microsoft paid $240 million for a 1.6 percent equity stake in Facebook that included an exclusive ad deal. The move effectively boosted Facebook’s market valuation to $15 billion and made News Corp.’s $580 million purchase of MySpace in 2005 look like a bargain. Google responded by announcing OpenSocial, a social networking platform that lets third-party developers create widgets to use personal data and profile connections across social networking sites (inadvertently fueling calls for the FTC to create a Do Not Track registry). The invitation was open to all comers — including Google’s own Orkut, LinkedIn, Ning, Nexo, Plaxo and Twango, and even MySpace (which, while still leading in traffic and membership, struggled with its own platform strategy and was surpassed in the battle for buzz). Perhaps you’ve already made up your mind about social networking, either by opening accounts on these services or restricting — or carefully monitoring — your kids’ online socializing. To its credit, the National Electronic Commerce Coordinating Council held a symposium to explore what social networking means to the act of governing. The result is a new report, Government in the Age of YouTube: Implications of Internet Social Networks to Government, which is cautiously optimistic in content and cautious in tone. (See page 40 for more on the report.) As social networking ascended to the “peak of inflated expectations”— Gartner’s language for another flavor of a market top — what has been largely overlooked is that social networking DNA contradicts the longestablished “network effect,” which posits that a network’s value rises with the number of users. Social networks actually lose value when they grow too large — the promised intimacy succumbs to spam-level volumes of “friend requests.” The Economist observed that the real value of these networks and the “social graphs” they create is in the gate-keeping function. “This suggests that the future of social networking will not be one big social graph, but instead myriad small communities on the Internet to replicate the millions that exist offline.” Many of the new, less popular but fastgrowing companies with funny names offer to do just that — create user communities around communities of interest. As I’ve noted before, Virginia uses social graphs to increase its service delivery capacity by tapping people who need particular services to help one another. In the uncertain times that follow a market top, financial advisers often remind clients to take a deep breath, revisit their strategy and rebalance their portfolio as needed. That’s good counsel at the dawn of a new year because it helps recognize that (a) government may not be an early adopter, but it’s not as late as many thought in implementing these practices; and (b) here at the beginning of the fifth decade of the open government movement, social networking and Web 2.0 collaboration are what people increasingly expect transparency to look and act like. Brownsville, Texas 32 California DMV 40 California Franchise Tax Board 42 CGI Group Inc. 44 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency 14 Division of Children and Family Services 48 Folsom, California 14 Fresno, California 32 Information Technology Association of America 15 Las Vegas, Nevada 18 Manchester, Connecticut 32 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 10 Michigan Department of Information Technology 15 Nashville, Tennessee 28 New Jersey’s Division of Youth and Family Services 44 Sacramento, California 14 Seattle 14 Sheboygan, Wisconsin 18 Victorville, California 14 Virginia 40 Virginia Department of Agriculture 51 Waukesha Department of Public Works 36 Vendors: AcerPower 51 Apple 17 Autodesk 18 CARIS 18 Cisco 14, 32 Citrix 32 Clearwire 32 DeCarta 18 Dell 17 Digital Globe 18 ESRI 18 Gateway 17 Google 18 Hewlett-Packard 17 HTC Corp 50 IBM 17 Intel 32 Johnson Controls 36 Lenovo 17 Microsoft 18, 32, 42, 48 Navini 32 New World Systems 32 Nokia 32 Northrop Grumman 18 Philips 50 Shell Oil Co 17 Sprint 32, 50 Targus 50 V7 50 Verizon 32 Yahoo! 51 Advertisers Index Accenture 21 BULL 7 CDW-G 25 CGI 5 DLT 52 ESRI 53 Gateway 2-3 GTSI 56 HP Blades 60 HP Low End 9 Toshiba 45 JAN_08 http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - January 2008

Government Technology - January 2008 Contents Point of View Big Picture The Last Mile On the Scene CIO Sightings Four Questions for... Spectrum Location, Location, Location Digital Governor Back to the Drawing Board Waukesha Goes Green Collaring Dangerous Dogs Public Sector Goes Web 2.0 Bounce Back SACWIS Rollout Simple Strategy Products Personal Computing How It Works signal:noise

Government Technology - January 2008

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