Justin Rosenstein

Asana, a year-old stealthy startup co-founded by two Facebook alumni, Justin Rosenstein and Dustin Moskovitz, said today it’s raised $9 million in a Series A round led by Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. While intentionally vague about how the Asana software will work, the two are very clear as to what they want it to do: help people collaborate and better manage their time in an office (and eventually home) environment, where there are a lot of tasks and too much information coming at workers. Put another way, they want it to enable everyone on a team to read each other’s minds and act accordingly.

We’ve been tracking the growing problem of information overload for a while now, including during the recent GigaOM Bunker Series Event, The New Web. It will become even more acute as the work forces of tomorrow become even more geographically distributed and are forced to use online tools to interact with each other. Asana proposes to fix some of those problems.

From an email attributed to Rosenstein:

And still it felt like not a day went by that there wasn’t some miscommunication or misunderstanding that slowed down the project just a little, a death by a thousand cuts. You see it in every organization. One person will think that X is the most important thing they could be working on, but if they’d talked to their manager they would have gotten a different answer, and their teammates might think it was a third thing. These are all problems of information transparency. This problem has only gotten worse with the explosion of information that knowledge workers need to manage, often coming at them from a variety of tools and inboxes, none of which work together.

Dustin Moskovitz

Both Rosenstein and Moskovitz (a Facebook co-founder) admit this is a hard problem, which is why they’ve started small with a five-person team (one’s an admin) and lots of brand-name Silicon Valley advisers. The most recent funding, which comes on top of $1.2 million raised from angels including Facebook investor Peter Thiel, super angel Ron Conway, Lotus developer Mitch Kapor and Napster founder Sean Parker, could help the company hire more people to build out this magical software. But Asana doesn’t plan on hiring too many people.

Rosenstein says they want to keep the company small because it’s hard to write software that’s going to solve these intra-office communications problems with too many people — a situation I found terribly ironic. Given the desire to keep hiring low, $9 million is a lot of money. And the funding is not going to servers, as Rosenstein told me Asana is currently hosting its development efforts on Amazon’s Web Services, so perhaps it’s going to the perks outlined on the company’s web site that include private and group yoga lessons, up to $10,000 to set up your office and two organic, home-cooked meals served twice a day.

Rosenstein said some of the key ways the web has changed collaboration that he wants Asana’s software to take advantage of include the ease of moving information around, the ability of changes someone makes be transparent to other people instantly, and a hosted distribution model. We’ll have to wait to see how Asana’s product stacks up, but I have no idea how long the wait will be, as Rosenstein didn’t have a date to give me for the product’s beta launch or general availability. While the founders assure me that Asana’s product is completely different from anything on the market today, it comes across as mishmash of Yammer, Basecamp and Google Wave.

After talking to the founders and getting what information I could, I agree that the problem they are going after represents a huge opportunity for a company that can help change the way enterprises collaborate. But with an enterprise focus, Asana will be going up against huge vendors in the collaboration and project management space, among them Microsoft, Cisco and IBM. The likely goal would be an acquisition by a larger player, because while building software is hard, building telepathic software is even harder, and supporting enterprise customers of your telepathic software is the hardest thing of all.

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Europe Struggles With Three Strikes, Fox Exec Wants It Anyway NewTeeVee – by Janko Roettgers "; Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Dealing With the Avalanches In Life and Business WebWorkerDaily – by Amber Riviere ";

Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  3 Comments
Tags: asana, facebook

Employee shares of Facebook are selling for $21 on SecondMarket, valuing the social network’s common stock at $9.5 billion, Bloomberg is reporting today. That’s up 42 percent in the past four months, which SecondMarket takes to mean that an IPO is nigh, but could also just reflect Facebook’s recent announcement that it’s cash-flow positive. And $9.5 billion doesn’t include the preferred shares issued to investors.

However, a recent report by Next Up Research (reg. req.) put out by a competing private company stock exchange, SharesPost, puts Facebook’s value much lower. Interestingly, it doesn’t use data from SharesPost’s own stock trades — though that may be due to the fact that the exchange’s last noted Facebook transaction is from August at $12 per share — but rather uses revenue projections, value vs. comparable companies and Digital Sky’s recent investment in the company (which included purchasing of employee stock). Those three methods give Facebook a total valuation of $5.48 billion, $5.07 billion and $6.5 billion, respectively.

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Posted by Liz Gannes on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  5 Comments
Tags: facebook, Next Up Research, SecondMarket, SharesPos

While the Googlebot’s YouTube is a web video behemoth, Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook nation have become an online video sleeping giant, and it may have just woken up. Facebook jumped to No. 3 behind established video powerhouses YouTube and Hulu in terms of total streams, according to Nielsen’s VideoCensus numbers for October. That’s up from No. 10 just last month. Facebook generated more than 217 million streams in October to more than 31.5 million unique viewers, up from 110 million streams to 23 million viewers in September. Get the full breakdown of Nielsen’s Top 10 and analysis over at NewTeeVee.

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Posted by Chris Albrecht on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  1 Comments
Tags: facebook, Video, YouTube

Microsoft today at its developer conference in Los Angeles unveiled its Pinpoint service, which looks kind of like an app store aimed at enterprise developers and customers using Microsoft’s Azure cloud offerings, albeit one that goes beyond mere apps. It also showed off  a data repository, code-named Dallas, that offers developers access to a wide variety of public and fee-based data sets with which they can build useful programs. Dallas, which can be found in the Pinpoint market, strongly resembles the service shown off this year at DEMO from Austin, Texas-based Infochimps. It was also by far the most interesting element of Microsoft’s chief software architect Ray Ozzie’s opening keynote, which highlighted what he called Redmond’s “three screens and cloud” view of the world.

If the remainder of the conference’s speaker line-up is any indication, Microsoft is embracing a world of apps and mashups to enable developers to build software that can run across mobile, PC and other device platforms. Linking all this together will be Microsoft’s Azure cloud, which will go into production Jan. 1, 2010. For more on Azure, check out our previous coverage. With Pinpoint, Microsoft is acknowledging the success of the Android Marketplace and Apple’s App Store, and trying to get developers excited about the prospect of building programs to run in Windows environments. Pinpoint also offers links to consulting services and companies that work with Microsoft.

The Dallas data store is a pretty compelling showcase “application” in the Pinpoint market, as developers could access any manner of data and build an application around it. For example, one could build an Urban Spoon-style application that uses a bunch of the available data sets to offer up evening entertainment options in the user’s local area. As Ozzie said after he emphasized all of the data now available to us in the form of government information, news, sensor networks and even web analytics, “Data does no good unless we turn it from the potential into the kinetic.”

With Dallas and Pinpoint Microsoft wants to become a company that aggregates, stores and serves up information in ways that are accessible to developers and corporate clients. On the consumer front, Microsoft has created agreements with companies like Wolfram Alpha, Facebook and Twitter for its Bing search engine as another way to surface data beyond the mere words listed on a web page. Microsoft isn’t just selling software anymore; it’s selling itself as a clearinghouse for information.

Among the other developments that have come out of the conference so far:

• Seesmic, the popular Twitter client, is building a Windows client that uses Silverlight.
• Matt Mullenweg Mullenwag, CEO of Automattic (Disclaimer: Automattic, maker of WordPress, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True), appeared onstage to say WordPress will offer access to Microsoft Azure for blogs to help handle spikes in traffic.
• Azure nerds will appreciate that Microsoft will support Java, PHP, MySQL, and Eclipse in addition to .Net.
• Those concerned about storing information on Microsoft’s servers after the T-Mobile Sidekick disaster should be relieved to hear that all items stored in Azure will be replicated in two data centers in each geographic region (in case a problem in one data center takes out the information there).
• The Cheezburger Network has launched a new site called Oddly Specific that showcases funny signs and uses the WordPress for Azure platform.

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  9 Comments
Tags: facebook, Microsoft, msft, Twitter

Much of Facebook’s success on the iPhone has come courtesy of Joe Hewitt, an ace programmer who joined the world’s largest social networking site when it acquired Parakey, a company he co-founded with Firefox kid Blake Ross. Hewitt has now decided to shift his focus away from the iPhone. In a tweet sent out earlier today he said, “Time for me to try something new. I’ve handed the Facebook iPhone app off to another engineer, and I’m onto a new project.”

Joe was named to GigaOM’s Top 15 Mobile Influencers list earlier this year for his contributions to the iPhone app ecosystem — in particular, for single-handedly turning Facebook into a major force on the iconic Apple device. I recently gave him a hard time over the delays in launching Facebook 3.0, which prompted Joe to stop by our office and take part in an impromptu video chat. Here are the excerpts from that conversation.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  12 Comments
Tags: facebook, iPhone, iPhone Apps, Joe Hewitt

The instant messaging world should prepare for a major quake — thanks to Facebook, which seems to be all set to launch a new connection interface that would allow Facebook Chat to work with any kind of XMPP client.

The news of this development was first reported by Mickaël Rémond on the company blog of Process One, a Paris-based messaging startup. “It now seems the launch is close as the XMPP software stack has been deployed on chat.facebook.com,” writes Rémond, who is a leading expert on instant messaging and ejabberd and is an active member of the XMPP Standard Foundation.

About a year-and-a-half ago, Facebook had announced that it would build “a Jabber/XMPP interface for Facebook Chat” and that “users will be able to use Jabber/XMPP-based chat applications to connect to Facebook Chat to” communicate, check their friends’ profiles, and set their statuses.

Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, or XMPP, has surely become the de facto standard for messaging and presence. After a big push from Google Talk, XMPP is going to get the next major push from Facebook. The world’s largest social-networking service, with over 350 million subscribers, is about to launch the XMPP connection interface. That will allow users to use Facebook Chat with any XMPP client — whether on the desktop or mobile. A good example of how this works is Adium, a popular open-source IM client that allows you to communicate with disparate IM networks. The latest version of Adium supports Facebook Chat.

Why is this news disruptive? Simple: Until now, in order to use Facebook Chat to communicate, one needed to be logged into the Facebook web site or mobile service. However, if the chat can be accessed on any device regardless of whether you are logged into Facebook’s web site, the usage of that IM is only going to increase. This would, in turn, mean tough times for older IM networks such as AOL’s AIM and Microsoft’s MSN.

To understand why independent Facebook Chat on the web (and on the wireless networks) is disruptive, just take a look at its amazing rise. It was prototyped in January 2007 at a Hackathon and become a real project in the fall of 2007 with four engineers. In April 2008, the service went live for consumers and was available to 70 million Facebook users at the time. As of September, nearly a billion user messages were being exchanged every day with 1GB traffic at its peak, according to a presentation made by the Facebook development team at a conference in Edinburgh in September.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  40 Comments
Tags: facebook, Google Talk, XMPP

BT’s Ribbit is taking on Google Voice with a cloud-based service that combines Internet voice, smart call routing and voicemail transcriptions. Like Google Voice, Ribbit Mobile allows consumers to transfer calls from an existing mobile number to Ribbit’s platform, which includes features such as routing calls to mobile phones and transcribing voicemails. Ribbit Mobile can forward calls to Skype, MSN or Google Talk Accounts, and can alert users to missed calls or new voicemails via e-mail, Skype, Google Talk or text message.

While the offering appears to be a worthy competitor to Google Voice, it also underscores BT’s larger strategy of merging its voice business with the Internet. BT acquired Ribbit in a $105 million deal last year and installed Ribbit founder Ted Griggs as chief technology officer of BT Voice in an attempt to expand beyond traditional cellular telephone service into alternative forms of communication.

BT’s strategy is one that is surely being studied by savvy network operators around the world. Consumers are increasingly turning to web-based services such as Facebook, Twitter and instant messaging to communicate with others, and Skype’s 40 million-plus daily users prove that Internet voice has gained mass-market traction. Voice still accounts for the vast majority of revenues for carriers around the world, but operators will have to embrace alternative forms of communication as the Internet collides with the traditional mobile industry. Whether Ribbit Mobile can overtake Google Voice has yet to be determined, but BT’s strategy of embracing Internet-based communications is refreshingly progressive in the conservative world of mobile telecoms.

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Posted by Colin Gibbs on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  6 Comments
Tags: BT, facebook, Google Voice, Ribbit, Ribbit Mobile, Twitter

Google made a number of announcements last week, including one that will see it partner with San Francisco-based Twitter to get paid access to the micromessaging service’s data feed. The company also said it would launch a social search effort as part of Google Labs. The moves got me thinking about some of the challenges that Google will face in coming years, especially from Facebook. I’ve outlined them for our $79-a-year subscription research service, GigaOM Pro, in Why Google Should Fear the Social Web.

The growing pervasiveness of fixed and wireless broadband will impact how we create and consume information. Thanks to that pervasive connectivity, there will be an explosion of information, which will make it difficult to find the information we actually want. Google, despite its obvious infrastructure advantages, faces a tough job of sifting through these proverbial mountains of data. Unless, of course, the Mountain View, Calif., based search giant starts embracing concepts quite alien to its DNA, such as the social web.

While it may currently be unfashionable to question Google’s long-term chances, the fact is that the growing influence of Facebook will pose a major risk to Google’s 10 blue links-based business model. The social networking site introduced new features today that allow it to extend its influence (or tentacles) even further across the web and in the process, further shift the focus away from search to discovery — discovery that uses your social graph.

The popularity of social media discovery services is reflected in this image, which comes courtesy of Reddit:

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  34 Comments
Tags: facebook, gigaom pro, google

Adweek today released its annual list of the hottest 10 digital media companies, some of which stretch the definition of digital media (iPhone, anyone?). The list shows some interesting bias, dumping Google to the No. 4 slot from last year’s No. 1 position primarily because its search algorithms aren’t people-powered like Facebook (No. 1) or real-time like Twitter (No. 3). The ranking also seems focused on what’s been hot for the last year, but it’s missing some big innovations that are getting hotter, like Google’s Android mobile OS or a company that’s pushing the envelope on offering location. I’d suggest Skyhook.  The complete list, below the fold:

1. Facebook
2. Hulu
3. Twitter
4. Google
5. iPhone
6. Huffington Post
7. Bing
8. WSJ
9. Federated Media
10. Viacom’s AddictingGames.com

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  2 Comments
Tags: Adweek, Digital Hot List, Digital Hotlist, facebook, google, Twitter

Facebook has just rolled out an updated version of its news feed that lets users switch between viewing a live version and an older one, where they can see what’s happened since they last logged in. Screenshots of possible news feeds Facebook was testing out began circulating around the web earlier this month.

The social network overhauled the design of its news feed back in the spring to put the stream of real-time updates down the center of the page — similar to micromessaging site Twitter. It also created a “Highlights” section on the right-hand side of the page that contained select older content about your friends’ activity on the site, such as recently uploaded photo albums and links to articles and videos your friends shared. The new version is moving the “Highlights” section to the middle of the page, where it was located prior to the spring redesign.

When asked if Facebook is rolling out the new version to get away from looking similar to Twitter, Facebook product manager Peter Deng said, “I don’t think we were trying to be like Twitter. Status updates have been on the page since 2006.” He added: “We’re showing you content that’s more popular when you first log in. But when you switch to live feed, it looks how it does today.”

The latest news feed design just went live; it will be gradually rolled out to all of Facebook’s 300 million users throughout the day.

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Posted by Jennifer Martinez on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  8 Comments
Tags: facebook, news feed, Peter Deng, Twitter

MySpace’s recent reorientation to emphasize entertainment over friends makes it more similar to Twitter than Facebook, said News Corp Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. “Twitter is about asymmetrical relationships,” said Miller, while Facebook users have mostly symmetrical friend relationships. “MySpace is in between. One of the things we have to focus on right now is you have to declare a major.”

But ultimately MySpace will end up more like Twitter. “MySpace is more about interests, which is followers and followed, than just the pure friend thing,” said Miller. “But obviously I believe we have the ability to be much richer [than Twitter].”

In some respects this shift is quite obvious, but it’s interesting to hear News Corp spell it out. And Miller is right: Though Twitter is quite the phenomenon right now, MySpace does have more features. Twitter is at its core a broadcast system, whereas MySpace can get a lot deeper into music and other content.

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Posted by Liz Gannes on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  6 Comments
Tags: facebook, MySpace, News Corp, Twitter

If you’re a BlackBerry or iPhone user (see: addict), then you are partly responsible for the great Internet buildout. Those cute apps that look up baseball scores or let you log into Facebook eat up enough bandwidth to put the backend infrastructure of phone companies under pressure, forcing them to upgrade their networks with new and fancy gear. I’ve described this as the great Internet buildout and it’s one of the main reasons we’re seeing a wave of mergers and acquisitions in tech land.

Equinix, a data center provider, on Wednesday said it was going to buy competitor Switch and Data for about $689 million in cash and stock. From the release:

Equinix will integrate Switch and Data’s data center business and operations, including the company’s 34 data centers in 22 markets in the U.S. and Canada. The acquisition will add more than one million gross square feet of data center capacity, bringing Equinix’s total global footprint to 79 data centers in 34 markets and more than six million square feet across the North American, European and Asia-Pacific markets.

And now Tellabs, a Naperville, Ill.-based maker of telecom equipment, says it’s buying WiChorus, a mobile Internet equipment maker based in San Jose, Calif. Tellabs is paying $165 million in cash for the upstart company whose venture backers include Pinnacle Ventures, Accel Partners, Mayfield and Redpoint Ventures and which counts Clearwire among those that uses its products. WiChorus’ SmartCore platform competes with the likes of Starent, which itself is in the process of being acquired by Cisco Systems for $2.9 billion.

What’s really going on is pretty simple: Today’s consumers are increasingly spending more time on the web — and they’re using the mobile web almost constantly. From my post The Great Internet Buildout Continues:

There are 444.3 million broadband subscribers in the world, according to the Broadband Forum, and that number is only going to increase over the next few years as emerging telecom economies such as India, Brazil and Russia ramp up their Internet efforts. A whopping 250 million people are going to connect to the Internet wirelessly by the end of 2009. Just imagine the bandwidth and computing horsepower needed if all of them started streaming movies from Netflix, listening to music by visiting Spotify, and sharing videos and photos via Facebook.

Aa Facebook executive pointed out this week that the company’s users spend a collective 8 billion minutes a day on the site — if my math is right, that’s roughly 25 minutes per user. (Facebook has 330 million users.) Like me, many of them are busy uploading their photos to the unstoppable social network.

As higher speeds become available on our mobile handsets, thanks to 4G wireless technologies such as LTE, we will to be spending even more time on these networks. The carriers need to make sure that these networks perform as per consumer expectations, otherwise they’ll put at risk their fast-growing data revenue stream.

Some say that wireless data is now growing at the rate of 30-50 percent per year. AT&T claims its mobile traffic quadrupled in the past 12 months, with wireless data revenues jumping 33.6 percent year-over-year in its latest quarter and a 3.8 percent increase in post-paid average revenue per user. Given the lack of margins in the cellular voice business, it makes sent that phone companies are doubling down on the wireless business.

Equipment makers see this as an opportunity as well, but they don’t have the in-house abilities to cash in on the trend. As I wrote earlier, many of these companies have been stingy in spending on R&D and now are being forced to look outside to fill the holes. Tellabs and Cisco are doing what the market is telling them to do — ride the great Internet buildout wave.

Photo credit: Barcelona Skyline by David via Flickr.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  1 Comments
Tags: Equinix, facebook, LTE, Switch & Data, Tellabs, WiChorus

Updated with confirmation from Facebook: There’s more than one way to post a song on someone’s Facebook profile — an Imeem link or a YouTube video, to name two. But Lala.com is set to become the first streaming music provider to offer songs as virtual gifts in Facebook’s store, according to a report today on the New York Times’ Bits blog. Several Facebook third-party apps already provide song streams, and the company has toyed with the idea of introducing a music service for some time. (Its most popular music app, iLike, became a MySpace property at a fire-sale price this summer.) Today’s news, however, represents Facebook’s first true foray into music, as well as a vote of confidence in Lala’s paid-streaming model.

Lala typically offers free one-time streams, 10-cent “web songs” that can be streamed an infinite number of times, and paid MP3 downloads at various price points. The virtual gifts can apparently be Web songs that will cost one Facebook credit, an equivalent of 10 cents, or full-song downloads that cost about 10 credits. Neither Lala nor Facebook is providing details on how their model will work yet, including whether the recipient’s friends get to stream the song as well.

Lala already allows a user to push a single-play song stream out to Facebook and Twitter, or to embed a widget elsewhere using a bit of code, for free. Other services that offer embeddable streams can be less reliable, with some songs reduced to 30-second clips and other embeds disabled upon request of the labels. A virtual gift of a song stream is still mostly about making a gesture, especially with free alternatives floating around, but for music fans, a timely stream is at least as good as a picture of a birthday cake. Update: Facebook confirms in a blog post that it will sell the song streams, part of a fully revamped virtual gifts shop featuring non-profit donation gifts and sports-related goods. Recipients of a gift web song will be able to listen as many times as they like, while their friends will get to stream it once, after which they will be replaced with 30-second clips. Downloadable MP3 gift songs will cost 9 credits.

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Posted by Paul Bonanos on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  6 Comments
Tags: facebook, Lala, Lala.com, music

Facebook’s 300 million users collectively spend more than 8 billion minutes on the site each day, according to the social network’s VP of engineering, Mike Schroepfer. He offered up the number onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit Wednesday as proof of the infrastructure challenges the social network faces relative to other web sites. On a busy day, an eye-popping 1.2 million photos are served on Facebook each second, he added.

And the more than 15,000 sites that have integrated Facebook Connect mean the site has API demands it has to address, too. Facebook was accessed via its API 5 billion times yesterday alone, according to Schroepfer.

To accommodate all that data without damaging the user experience and stifling innovation, Schroepfer said Facebook has rewritten its memcache multiple times so that now deploys five times faster than before. But even though Facebook continues to augment its engineering team to keep up with its growing audience, he said there’s 1.2 million users per Facebook engineer. No wonder the company is looking to expand its staff by 40-50 percent this year.

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Posted by Jennifer Martinez on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  12 Comments
Tags: facebook, Mike Schroepfer, Web 2.0 Summit

Updated with detail from the Web 2.0 conference: Microsoft is set to announced this morning during the Web 2.0 Summit separate nonexclusive deals with Twitter and Facebook, deals that were first reported by Kara Swisher over at AllThingsD, which would enable Microsoft to serve real-time status updates from those two social sites within its Bing search engine. This news comes one day after Twitter CEO Evan Williams deferred a question about pending data mining deals with Microsoft and Google.

Financial terms of the deals are unknown. And the implications will be different for Twitter than for Facebook. While most status updates on Twitter are publicly searchable, updates on Facebook are primarily kept private between users and their friends. Not all of Facebook’s status updates will be searchable in Bing’s real-time feed, according to Swisher. Update: Yusef Medhi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online audience business, took the stage at the conference to demo a beta version of its Twitter real-time search feed, which is now live. Medhi identified Twitter as the leader in the real-time space and said its Facebook search feed will be rolled out later.

In the Bing Twitter feed, you can choose to see either the most recent tweets about a search term or the most relevant tweets about that term. To render a list of the most relevant tweets, Bing takes into account the author of the tweet, the quality of the message and how often it’s been retweeted.

Bing also provides a tag cloud of the most popular terms being discussed across the Twitter network and lets you see popular embedded links about a certain topic. For example, you can view a list of NY Yankees articles people are tweeting most about. Another plus is that Bing identifies the source of the article’s shortened URL, which prevents you from unknowingly clicking on a bad link.

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Tags: Bing, facebook, Microsoft, Twitter

Social networking has generally been discouraged in the workplace, with many corporate IT departments blocking access to sites like Facebook and MySpace due to privacy concerns. But these efforts are becoming increasingly futile as our lives continue to converge with social networks, analysts at a Gartner symposium said yesterday. Plus, social networking may even help workers “feel valued, a part of a community, and earn the respect of peers.” Privacy concerns surrounding social networks were brought up at our NewNet Bunker Series, where participants debated whether we should keep our data holed up in walled gardens or leave it open for developers to build upon. (Replay the event and read our live-blogging notes on GigaOM Pro, subscription required.)

While social networking in the office may foster community, there’s also a chance it could lead to better enterprise technology down the road. Investor Dave McClure yesterday declared that he wanted big players like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to take his data and use it to build helpful applications. An example of this concept would be the evolution of the Twitter network. The micromessaging site opens up most of its data to developers, who in turn build applications on top of the platform that offer features not found on Twitter.com.

For $79, get more with Social Media in the Enterprise, by Rachel Happe, along with dozens of other reports.

In the same vein, if tech companies were able to glean data on how workers interact with one another on social networks while in the office, this could spur ideas for future enterprise-focused social-networking applications that aim to facilitate communication and increase productivity and efficacy. Some enterprise social-network applications are already popping up, such as Yammer, an enterprise version of Twitter, and both Oracle and IBM have similar offerings called OraTweet and BlueTwit.

“While a job may be regarded as an economic transaction, the human brain thinks of the workplace as a social system,” Gartner analyst Carol Rozwell said yesterday.

And if corporate IT companies still aren’t convinced of the value of social-networking data, they could take a note from the CIA, which invested in a software firm that monitors social media activity on sites like Twitter and YouTube.

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Europe Struggles With Three Strikes, Fox Exec Wants It Anyway NewTeeVee – by Janko Roettgers "; Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Dealing With the Avalanches In Life and Business WebWorkerDaily – by Amber Riviere ";

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Tags: CIA, Dave McCLure, enterprises, facebook, Gartner, MySpace, social network, Twitter