Facebook and MySpace are the world’s most popular Social Networking sites, but are they the best model for bringing these web 2.0 concepts into the enterprise?

My view is trustedplaces is perhaps a better model to use as a reference. Its a collaborative site primarily for reviewing restaurants, clubs and pubs. The community effectively has jobs, and their social network forms as a by-product of the work that they do. It can still be a social network on its own, but you probably wouldn’t go there unless you were interested in the outcome.

Building the “bottom up approach”

Trusted Places does some particularly interesting things:

• Featuring contributors on the front page
• Providing “award points” for contributions
• You can interactively build your tastes
• Providing recommendations for new connections based on common interests
  

Combined with a great UI, I’m a big fan of what this team is doing.

Yes, Facebook has Applications

The lines are, of course, a bit greyer than I have painted them. Facebook applications can be used to find other people with common interests and help people build new connections. The Facebook platform can be used to build any functionality that TrustedPlaces has, and more. But since Facebook is so large and completely open in scope, I find it more difficult to relate to a work context. Facebook and MySpace may be more fun, but work, alas, is not always fun. And while there are plenty of focused product review sites, I’ve yet to see any that form social networks better than trustedplaces.

What public site do you think provides a good model for explaining Enterprise 2.0?