Thanks to a note from Rob Millard, I learnt that Social Networks have now been patented.

Robert Scoble responded to the Friendster announcement by saying:

The Friendster patent isn’t a reason why I don’t do social networks anymore. I simply find that they are annoying. I get TONS of emails asking me to join things like LinkedIn, Friendster, Orkut, and other social networks. Even Flickr could be seen as a social network of types (I don’t use the messaging or emailing features of Flickr).

I hate these things.

Why? Cause I have a blog. My email address and my cell phone number are always on my blog.

Watching Robert deal with this stuff is like watching the typical knowledge worker of 2011. He is far ahead of the curve.

If you want to figure out what will work for Enterprise 2.0, listen to bloggers like Scoble.

The future is not in closed networks and walled gardens. The future is with standards for connectivity.

Google’s success was to realize that they could leverage value from the existing links between web sites.

Now, imagine that everyone has a blog. In the enterprise case, imagine that every employee has a personal web site. A People Work Site. Now, imagine that, like most bloggers, people start linking to each other, and linking to the Work Sites for their Clients and Projects.

If you trace the links between those People Work Sites, you automatically get an Enterprise Social Network.

Scobel doesn’t want to use these networks because he has his blog. And, my guess is, eventually, most people will end up with a blog, just like this one. Having a blog will be like having an email address. Not everyone will write much on their blog, but they’ll use it to post calendars, or streams of photos, etc.

In an enterprise setting, People Work Sites will be a critical component in over-coming one of traditional knowledge management’s many fatal flaws: motivation.

Technorati is tracking 47.5 million blogs because 47.5 million people have found a personal reason to create a blog.

In the enterprise setting, giving people credit means giving them a byline for every article they create. People are motivated to contribute because they get credit for the work they do.

In the same sense, participating in LinkedIn or any of the other social networks is to contribute.

However, the aggregate value of your contributions in Walled Garden systems like LinkedIn, Tribe, Friendster or MySpace is scattered across the Internet.

If you run a blog, every comment you make, every trackback, all leads directly back to you.

What is Robert trying to tell us?

The new operating system is the blog. If you are building a company, if you are deploying an enterprise solution, build and buy stuff that people can use to enhance their blogs. In the enterprise setting, that means buying widgets (or mashets) that can also enhance work related blogs, such as a project blog.