Second day of the Social Networking Conference

After a good night sleep, I'm now in the second day of the Social Networking Conference. Met lots of smart people yesterday and last night at Lloyd's Bar and Distillery, and lots of them were very interested with what I am doing in China and my job as researcher in Nokia Research Center. They were very intrigued by the concept of using the mobile phone as an integral part of your social network, true real mobile social networking, recording real social interactions and creating social networks based on that.

Anyways, I'm in the first talk of the second day of the conference on Enterprise Social Networking in France by Andre Dan of Challengy. He helps companies understand enterprise social networking and how to use it. Companies are really opening up and becoming more human to their customers by incorporating enterprise social networking functions. The leading tools in Enterprise Social Networking are Ning, IBM Lotus Connections (as presented by Ian McNairn from IBM yesterday and IBM is a huge advocate of social networking and they extensively use it internally), Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Jive. Two French tools are blueKiwi and Inspheris. The open environments are LinkedIn and Facebook and are also used in enterprise social networking. A French open tool is Viadeo. Boostzone Institute is an enterprise social networking tank in France. BlueKiwi Software is the leading European provider of enterprise social software. A lot of companies are now using enterprise social networking software companies to integrate social networking within their business.