IBM Announces Center for Social Software

I'm grateful for people pointing me to IBM's September 17th announcement of its Center for Social Software. The research program looks very exciting. Read more here.

Their goals are to

• Explore, innovate and commercialize best practices in social networking.
• Work with forward-thinking businesses to pilot and customize enterprise social networks unique to their industry profile.
• Create jointly funded research collaborations with government, academia, industry and venture capital participation.
• Design the future of IBM's Web 2.0 collaboration portfolio, including social discovery, social search and new scalable architectures for social software including cloud computing.
• Further social software governance: formal policies encouraging or constraining the uses of social networking in organizations.
• Develop the science of social software: Quantifying social networking.
• Explore cultural differences in the use of social software.

They will offer internships and corporate residencies as well. I did not hesitate to subscribe to their feed, and as they invited, "stay tuned."