IBM to launch social networking center

IBM will open a social software center to encourage collaboration among IBM, its partners and its customers in developing Web 2.0 applications.

The Center for Social Software in Cambridge, Mass., will act as a place to research and test social software with the additional help of university faculty and students, according to today’s Interop keynote address by Bob Picciano, the general manager of Lotus Software and WebSphere Portal at IBM.

The goal will be to develop social networking tools for use in businesses, focusing on viral communities, how they form and how they can be useful to meet business objectives, he says.

According to IBM, the center will include a corporate residency program that will link customers directly to IBM’s research teams to accelerate specific projects. Dow Jones and Thomson Reuters’ healthcare arm are already participating.

IBM says it plans to share its results with local universities and to turn the innovations the center comes up with into products. The center will also lay out the road map for IBM’s Web 2.0 collaboration, which will include how to scale social networking for cloud computing. It will also include development of social discovery and social search tools that will be practical for businesses.

The center also plans to tackle the creation of policies about how to control how much or how little social networking is used within businesses. IBM says it wants to quantify use of social networking as a way to better understand and predict its uses.
Researchers from IBM labs around the world may be rotated in and out of the center to work on specific projects, the company says.