Social Networking Platforms For Business?

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"How many people here are on Facebook?" asked Demo executive producer Chris Shipley at January's showcase of new technology in Palm Desert, Calif. About half of the crowd of several hundred tech-savvy Demo attendees lifted a hand. "And how many of you conduct actual business on Facebook?" Just a few scattered arms shot up throughout the room.

Huddle, the company Shipley was introducing for its six-minute demo, aims to change that.

The London-based social networking company was at Demo to introduce the integration of its hosted work space tool with Facebook. On Huddle, users from disparate locales can build or join workspaces—called huddles—for personal or professional projects. Each huddle gets a project calendar, a filing cabinet for sharing documents and files, a whiteboard for brainstorming and other useful tools. With its Facebook-style interface and now full integration with the social site itself, Huddle is billed by co-founder Alistair Mitchell as the place "where work and play collide."

Huddle offers four tiers of membership. The first gives users three work spaces and 1 Gbyte of storage for free. The next three tiers—marketed at professionals, small businesses and enterprises—cost between $20 and $98 per month and offer up to 50 work spaces, 25 Gbytes of storage, unlimited users, 128-bit SSL encryption for security and a customizable dashboard. An open API is available for developers and Huddle's proto-channel efforts consist of small commissions for resellers.

It's a platform Mitchell insists takes the fun of online social networking and points it in the direction of actually getting some work done. And with big U.K. retailers such as Boots already on board, London-based Huddle has some reason to believe its plan to tart up business communications for the MySpace generation has some legs.

But should IT solution providers care? Absolutely, say the documentarians of Generation Y. Some 70 million or so young Americans born between 1980 and 1995 are entering the workforce with different priorities, social networking needs and relationships with technology than previous generations.

If you're not thinking about meeting these young workers' IT needs, say the Gen Y evangelists, you might be planning for retirement sooner than you'd like.

No Line Between Home and Work

Analyzing the work habits and motivations of "Echo Boomers" has become something of a cottage industry within the business press. From Business Week to Time, there seems to be a constant stream of stories about job-hopping Gen Y workers and how to convince them to stick around at a company for the long haul. Because "the line between work and home doesn't really exist" for 20-something workers, writes Time's Penelope Trunk, "[t]hey just want to spend their time in meaningful and useful ways, no matter where they are."

Prescriptions vary for dealing with what business consultant and author Bruce Tulgan calls "the most highmaintenance workforce in the history of the world." The business decision-makers whom solution providers must please are probably hearing conflicting advice for best managing their Gen Y workers. But in general terms, what most consultants say is that younger people want more flexibility in where and how they work, more collaboration on work projects they are assigned and access to the familiar technological tools they need to make those things happen.

The upshot: Gen Y "will also be the most high-performing workforce in history, for those who know how to manage them properly," said Tulgan, founder of New Haven, Conn.-based consultancy RainmakerThinking. Young workers may not be as willing as their elders to sit in a cubicle for 40 to 60 hours a week, but their own flexible lifestyles and familiarity with remote technology means they can be productive outside the office and beyond the 9-to-5 work day.

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