Facebook as Corporate Intranet -- It's Starting to Happen

A few months ago, Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee applauded the business value of Facebook and similar social networking platforms. What he did not envision, he says today, is that Facebook could be much more: a replacement for the corporate intranet.

But now that developer Serena Software has created an intranet site for its 800 employees using Facebook, and that Avenue A Razorfish has adopted an open-source wiki platform as its intranet, McAfee is admittedly changing his thinking on the value of traditional 1.0 intranets.

"I'll bet than in both cases users were happier with the 2.0 versions than with their predecessors," McAfee writes in a recent blog entry. "And I'd be astonished if the new versions weren't much cheaper than the old."

So maybe it really is time to put these platforms to corporate use, he continues.

He is asking readers to provide reasons why Facebook and its like couldn't work on a business level. Is the issue security? Ability to scale? Limited functionality? McAfee thinks all three of these reasons are not really issues at all.

If you have a reason, share it on his blog or below.

(Facebook image by Jacob Botter, CC 2.0)