There has been a lot of interest in social networking for the enterprise over the past 12 months. Many vendors are now bringing a people-centric view of content and data to previously document-centric apps and the smaller Enterprise 2.0 vendors like Jive, MindTouch, NewsGator, Telligent, and a host of others are making employee social networks their bread and butter. Forrester is bullish on the idea, and cited social networking as one of two Enterprise 2.0 feature that will have a significant impact on the enterprise (wikis were the other — see ZDNet for a thorough writeup).

At the same time though there is reason for caution, and there is no better example why than the “Add to My Colleagues” feature in SharePoint (see screenshot at left). I think I can guess what Microsoft had in mind — allowing employees to declare who they work with and thus keep better track of them through the MOSS 2007 MySites functionality — but the execution is exactly what is wrong with social networking in the enterprise. Look, this is not Facebook or LinkedIn where I need to tell the network who of the millions of users I know. This is a group of employees within in company and, despite the fact that I haven’t hit the link, everyone is my colleague. We already have a damn good reason to talk to each other: we are working for the same company and towards the same goals! I don’t need to gently approach you by “colleaging” you first, I can just pick up the phone or send an IM or email. Declaring this affiliation over and over again just wastes time and hurts the credibility of social networking in general. Facebook is about collecting friends. LinkedIn is about building a professional network. Social networking in the enterprise is about getting work done and features like this give both users and execs the impression that these apps are ab0ut wasting time.

Now maybe I’m being too harsh on Microsoft; other social networking vendors have similar features, and the next rev of SharePoint should (I hope) have this sort of stupidity taken out of the product. But Microsoft, for all its deficiencies in this space, is looked to as a leader by most businesses. The precedent and impression that Microsoft sets is a tough thing to break. And in the meantime “Add to My Colleagues” keeps the focus for social networking in all the wrong places and hurts the credibility of both SharePoint and the enterprise social networking category at large. Frankly if I were an exec presented with the great idea that my employees could create networks of colleagues I would kick both the sponsor and the vendor out of my office, never to return.

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