Just reading about Facebook’s interest in providing the enterprise with enterprise caliber Facebook and FB applications.  Here is the interview as reported by Internetnews.com with Chamath Palihapitiya, vice president of marketing and operations at Facebook and some retort from guys I know and trust - like David Thompson, CEO of Genius.com.

The proverbial “behind the firewall” version - stuff that dreams are made of - for the wildly successful consumer application winners seems so appealing, Siren-like.  I am mixed about the concepts for a mixed up bunch of reasons:

1) I was one of the early employees within Yahoo!’s Corporate Yahoo! division (2001) - selling my.yahoo content as part of the raging early Enterprise Portal software days.  Every F500 thought they had to have a corporate portal akin to Yahoo! or AOL - as that would “get them on the web”.  I was responsible for partnering with the Enterprise software guys to convince them that OEM’ing my.yahoo content would spice up their portal software sales.  CIOs were definitely intrigued by the idea, but I don’t think we made BEA, SAP, Oracle, Sun’s quarterly portal software sales.  Oh, and the first feature we had to turn OFF - ads.

2) A $10 Billion Enterprise software marketing figure was quoted.  That’ a big number.  But I have to agree with David that those Big Dogs spending the Big Bucks - will take a pass on the ad stuff.  They realize that their employees are wasting time on Facebook (at the same pace they started wasting time on my.yahoo seven years ago) and embracing the beast won’t solve much - in the near term.  Not saying it won’t get here in my career-lifetime, but I am pretty close to some very big spenders in the F500 and this is not on their radar.  What the CIO really desires is the mass appeal, rapid adoption, zero training, and no maintenance costs (for us lucky consumer users).  Quick name the fastest adopted enteprise software application on the planet!

3) I do however want (and need) the concepts of Facebook, LinkedIn, Jigsaw and the like to pervade the fabric of those same IT Enterprises as platform concepts - social networking, mass collaboration, prediction markets, rapid application development - to blow open the door on the abject linearity of problem solving within those same Enterprises.   These application platforms are illustrating how to make the process more effective.  The best ideas, the best minds unfortunately don’t work in “your” firm.  It’s a big world; how do you invite the right minds in at the right time, or invite your friend whom you know is the right mind for the problem you just reviewed - and do it productively, securely, (insert CIO buzzword here).

4) Here in Austin we just saw our friends at Austin Ventures make a $50 Million commitment to Jeff Dachis, former CEO of Razorfish - to create social enterprise software and services.  It’s the right trajectory, but the pioneers have it a bit rough; the good ones survive to tell the tales and pave the way.  We need them.

I wish the Facebook PMs well on this one.  Guys, if you want some words of advice (or encouragement) before hitting the CIOs office - I’ll go get my notes.

So what does all this have to do with Fluid Innovation? I’ve got my reason, what do you all think?

Tom