The Social Layer: Good for Google Apps but Not So Much for the Rest of Us

The enterprise community has been talking about the "social layer," for almost a year. It's the SaaS services such as Salesforce.com, Socialtext and Socialcast that have popularized the concept. Now the practice is entering a new phase.

The enterprise activity stream from SaaS services is flowing into consumer services such as Seesmic and Facebook. And now Google is looking at the social layer as the focal component of a service reportedly called Google Me that will surface activity across all Google products, including Google Apps.

The activity streams that surface information in the enterprise create a social layer that is valuable for the purposes of doing business. The activity stream in this context is a social aggregator. It works. In fact it woks far better than engaging in a pure social context.

The enterprise has always been averse to the concept of using social technologies. It stems from a concern that people should be working not using Twitter or other services to chat about the day. But the social aggregator is a different beast. Activity streams that surface information can help people do their work better, be smarter and more engaged.

The inverse is true for consumer grade social platforms. In the consumer world, the concept of the social aggregator has its passionate advocates but mainstream acceptance has been elusive. On the flip side, services such as Twitter do quite well as they provide what Fred Wilson calls "social intent." Twitter offers people a way to engage in a social context.

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