Computer-industry giant IBM announced at the Interop conference in New York on Wednesday that it is has established the IBM Center for Social Software (CSS) in Cambridge, Mass. The new facility is part of the company’s ongoing Tomorrow at Work program, an initiative IBM says is designed to “anticipate what the next work world will bring — and prepare for it today.”
Irene Greif, an IBM fellow and the inaugural director of the CSS, said the new facility “is a channel for the social-computing community and our customers to collaborate on the most innovative social technologies being developed today.”
“We view the center,” Greif added, “as a magnet for the top social-computing scientists around the world to visit, share work, and innovate.”
According to the CSS Web site, a primary focus will be on “gathering, analyzing and publishing data on adoption rates and the value of social software to business.”
Two companies, Dow Jones and the health-care division of Thomson Reuters, have announced that they will be the first to participate in the CSS’s corporate residency program. Company representatives will collaborate with IBM researchers from around the world who come to CSS to work on specific social-networking projects.
The goal, Greif said on the Web site, is to “use rapid, large-scale deployments and social-science research to understand the kind of viral adoption common in today’s nonbusiness social software and apply it to create Web 2.0 implementations that are ‘fit for business.'”
In addition to working with the corporate world, CSS will also reach out to academics. Cambridge is popular with technology and biotechnology companies due to the presence of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.
One of the goals for CSS is to “work with forward-thinking businesses to pilot and customize enterprise social networks unique to their industry…