Connected

Making Clearspace look and act a little like Facebook

September 30th, 2008 by Gia Lyons Leave a reply »

So, I wrote about an older Facebook plugin for Clearspace a while ago. This has nothing to do with that. This is new, and I do believe, a wee bit cooler. Oh yeah, baby.

Derek The SuperDude™ spent about four and a half hours writing a plugin and theme that makes Clearspace look and act like this:

You know you want the code.

(Sure, it doesn’t behave completely like Facebook, but really, do you want all that in your enterprise right now? I didn’t think so.)

The configurable widgets in the plugin include:

My Status (use instead of Clearspace’s standard status update widget)
My People Feed (use instead of Clearspace’s Connection Activity widget)
My Content Feed – shows everything anyone does to content you’ve created, edited, or commented on
My Places – shows the top-level communities, a list of common actions, people you are following, groups you belong to, and people you may know (these are people who are connected to the people you follow)

It’s kind of like adding collaboration technology to Facebook, only in reverse. You can make your collaboration and networking software more Facebooky. Stay up-to-date with your peeps, and get work done, too.

Who Cares?

HR departments should, that’s who. All those Gen Y new-hires could join your company, and immediately feel comfy with your social software environment, because their homepage sort of resembles what they’re used to using already. You find recruits on Facebook, right?

But think about it: we all talk about onboarding new employees faster with social software – you know, they can plug into your culture in a heartbeat, get a feel for what the collective “you” is all about, learn important stuff about how to do their job, and so forth. But making it fun, making it feel just a little bit like their personal networking experience, just might accelerate that ever-important time-to-value even more.

Hell, they might even stick around longer than a couple of years.

Of course, maybe you don’t want your workplace to be Facebook-fun. Maybe you just want people to do their Waffle work and go home. That’s cool. You can always change the colors and icons, easy. Actually, that’s probably a good thing to do if you have a culture that prefers a more professional feel.

And if you have folks who just hate Facebook, no problem. They can remove all that Facebookishness from their homepage and add whatever plugins they wish.