A Reuters blog today likened social networking to Jurassic Park. While this is probably the first time anybody has connected dinosaur-related themes to Web 3.0 technologies like social networking, in this case it was probably accurate.

The premise of the note was that social media sites are like Michael Crichton’s fictional dinosaur park—really, really cool technology, but not much in the way of security and safety precautions. This is a problem that cannot be ignored any longer. Like the elephant in the room—or in this case, the tyrannosaurus in the room—it’s too big to look the other way, and it’s not going away any time soon. Social media is here to stay, and with something on the order of a third of Internet users taking advantage of it, security managers have to get on with the business of creating a workable policy.

Why should businesses be concerned about social networking sites? It is after all, something that people play with on their own time (or at least, should play with on their own time), and doesn’t really have anything to do with the business. Or does it? The fact is, social networking is no longer just social. There are two factors at work here that warrant attention. First, on the other side of the office, mostly unbeknownst to the IT and security people, the marketing department is making very good use of social networking as a corporate marketing and communications tool. Companies use Twitter to keep customers and partners apprised of new releases, updates, special promotions and other information. They use LinkedIn to meeting other people interested in making deals, and they even use Facebook to make corporate pages meant to drive traffic to the main site. Most corporations now also have blogs, and even interactive forums where customers can participate in discussions with company staff and other customers. Yes, all those things were originally designed “just for fun,” and the creators of these social tools very likely had no idea that their creations would wind up in so many corporate toolboxes. Yet, here they are.

The second factor at work is that when employees are using social networking for personal reasons, there is often an unintentional carryover into the corporate realm. People make careless references to their employers in their blogs that may be harmful. They post personal information, and they may post corporate information that ought not be posted. And, there may even be links between personal and corporate documents that can be exploited.

The blogger cites the example of the recent episode when a hacker broke into the Google Mail account of a Twitter executive’s spouse. The account was linked to Google Apps, which gave the hacker access to sensitive company documents. Google Apps isn’t a social networking site, it’s a cloud computing-based group of applications-as-a-service. But the observation is still valid and somewhat scary for security people, and highlights the fact that there is an underlying necessity for employees to be careful in their personal networking, so as not to create a threat to corporate networking. Connecting personal accounts to corporate resources has to be against policy—and as always, use strong passwords, and be cautious about posting personal information on social networking sites.

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Social media security problems

Email not giving up its crown yet.

Email no longer rules, declared a headline in a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal. Email has fallen from its throne as the king of wired communication, the author reasoned, because social media, like Facebook and Twitter, offer communicators a more immediate way to share their thoughts, situations and creative endeavors with others. However, while it’s true that email’s monopoly on communication is no more, that doesn’t mean it has relinquished its crown as the wallah of wired information exchange. In fact, social media, rather than snatching email’s diadem, have actually polished it.

Anyone with a Twitter or Facebook account knows how much “noise” those services generate. The compulsion by many users of those media to gush minutiae can be numbing. When email was the sole source of online communication, complaints abounded about information overload. That has only worsened with the likes of Twitter and Facebook. Email, though, as a mature technology, has developed ways to cope with noise. Filters sort messages as they arrive. Folders segregate items into bins where they can be logically acted on. Tags and categories further slice and dice clutter. Those things add value to email. By comparison, Twitter and Facebook can feel as if the postman drove a dump truck up to your house and jettisoned a year’s worth of mail on your lawn.

According to the WSJ writer, email is a quaint technology that reflects how people used to use the net. It’s made, she argued, for logging on, downloading and logging off. Social media, she continued, is more attuned to the “always on” connections people have today; this is a very peculiar contention. If anything, the spread of “always on” has been a boon for email. Checking email in bursts was never convenient. Now email programs can remain open from boot-up to shutdown and mail automatically gathered and delivered to an inbox. Moreover, many users are more likely to have their email application open all the time than to be camped at a social networking site. That’s why those sites offer the option of sending email notifications to their members when they receive a personal message or when a discussion they’re interested in is updated. Email quaint? Someone should let the folks at Research In Motion, makers of the Blackberry and who continue to make silos of money on that quaint technology, in on that development.

One assertion by the WSJ scribe that’s hard to refute is that the pretenders to email’s lofty status are fun to use. That alone, though, is hardly threatening to email. Fun has entertainment value, but when what a communicator needs conveyed has more than entertainment value, it’s hard to beat email. What would you take more seriously: a 140-character text message written in gibberish or a 200-word email with all the T’s crossed and I’s dotted?

Why wait for email to be delivered when a correspondent can be contacted immediately through Instant Messaging?, asked the WSJ scribbler. That kind of thinking, though, assumes the correspondent wants to drop whatever he or she is doing to instantly respond to you. Instant Messaging can be a meddlesome application. Email, on the other hand, is less intrusive and less likely to irritate than IM. In addition, one has to wonder just how many instant messages require instant responses, or are just sent because a user is more concerned with speed than common sense.

No Wall Street Journal story would be complete without numbers, and this author has some to show email’s decline from favor. She noted that in August 2009, email users climbed 21 percent to 276.9 million users over August a year ago. During the same period, users on social networking and community sites jumped 31 percent to 301.5 million. Do raw numbers translate into increased value?  Most people use email every day for work. So it’s very likely that most of those 276.9 million users are actually using email. On the other hand, how many members of social networks even check out their sites every day? And if they do, how much time do they spend there? If one has an application open on the desktop and is using it all day long, does that application have more or less value than an application that’s used only occasionally? What’s more, a user will have one email program, but may belong to multiple social networks. So while that person counts as a single user of email, he or she could count as multiple users of social networks, thus skewing the growth numbers.

Email no longer rules? Not quite. The new generation of communication services have their place, but it’s mostly removing chaff that detracted from the value of email. Pithy messages that clogged email boxes can be relegated to text messages from mobile phones, a twit or a posting to a Facebook wall. For high value communication, for communication that’s important, email remains king.

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Email still king despite pretenders