While there were many interesting product announcements at Lotusphere, I was intrigued by some of the innovations and experimentation in collaboration. One example is a project that comes out of IBM research. I attended an interesting talk by Irene Greif, IBM Fellow and Director, and Joan DiMicco, Research Staff Member of the Collaborative User Experience Group. Their session focused on the future of gaining business value from social computing. This is a very interesting group within IBM combining software designers, developers, computer and social scientists.

The focus of this talk centered on collaborative visualization. In other words, how do you combine some of the interesting technologies from virtual worlds (like Second Life). This work has been going on within IBM for the past several years. Now, IBM research is working to apply this virtual world technology to social computing and the way people collaborate in the business world. How can you create the same level of collaboration in a virtual world that happens when people are co-located? Indeed with so many companies creating collaborations across the globe.

One of the interesting projects profiled during the session is called Beehive. In essence, this is a social computing system intended to make it fun to keep profiles updated. Rather than focusing on the public facing sites like FaceBook, Beehive is an intranet focused social network. In general, the more you know about people, the more you trust those people. So, if you apply this to the business world, what happens? The theory is that within a safe (i.e., not exposed to the entire Internet) environment the more connected you are with colleagues the more likely you are to trust those people and therefore collaborate more effectively. This is what this group is focused on understanding.

With the Beehive project, the users choose to join. Users establish their own categories for what they want to share with their colleagues—what Irene and Joan call "soft branding". Users might decide to share everything from family photographs, lists of ideas, and comments on technical topics. The goal with Beehive is to create a destination site for conversation and collaboration. So far the experiment has been running for about eight months with very positive results. To date, 6500 people from within IBM have created profiles that are a blend of personal and professional content. Because Beehive is an Intranet based social network, it provides a safe environment for IBMers to share opinions about emerging technologies and product evolution.

It will be interesting to watch the progress of projects like Beehive. Bringing the innovation of the virtual world together with an expert virtual network could have dramatic implications for businesses looking to innovate in tough economic times.