As a user, I worry about Facebook's attitude to my information (it's AOL, all over again - once the ads put the dollar signs in your eyes, the business tends to forget about the users who make the ad numbers work). As an IT professional, I worry about the time Facebook eats up and the wealth of personal information on there to be mined. As someone who networks for a living, I look at the networking tools on Facebook and find them pretty primitive. But Facebook is successful enough to make knowledge professionals think about how sites like Facebook and Linked In and LJ and flickr and the like have generated far more organised content with far less investment and bad-mouthing than any CRM or CMS you've ever seen. Standout quote of 2007 for me is still Anil Dash telling us "If you send people away for a week of training on your CMS, they come back and they still don't use the system but now they hate you". Put it all together and social networking techniques ought to be big business inside business. The tools aren't really ready yet - and neither are many businesses - but I've found a selection you can get started with today, ranging from free-but-in-beta (Xobni, SNARF) to build-it-yourself (C#UNG) to pricey-but-powerful (Trampoline). Get the details in Well Connected over at Server Management.

Along with ClipMate, this is one of my favourite utilities; it files email from the keyboard in Outlook - without the drag of drag and drop - and the new version works out the right folder based on past behaviour, which saves a ton of time. If you're planning to spend the few paltry pennies it costs, pop over to my review at http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/editorial-blogs/simon-bisson-and-mary-branscombe/940749/empty-your-inbox.thtml for a $5 discount coupon (valid till 20th August).

Or how to get a feature into Office.

Beta 2 of Outlook adds a feature to appointments; you can pick the timezone to create the meeting in and you can have a different timezone for the start and end of the meeting. It's very simple, it's very easy to use and it will save travellers a huge amount of grief (and anyone phoning the US from the UK or vice versa). Yes, there was a timezone strip before, but it only did two timezones and it still meant doing sums.

I wasn't expecting to get the timezone feature because it wasn't in the build I saw at the Office Reviewer's Workshop at the beginning of May. So when I started working with beta 2 of Outlook the day before my accident in Seattle and saw it, I did actually sit with my mouth open gaping like a fish for nearly a minute so I took a minute to mail the whole list of thank you’s to everyone who helped me be there that day, clicking the Timezone button in an appointment and setting the start time in Pacific time and the end time in East coast time without a calculator, a headache and a 24-hour miscalculation.

I'll say it again. Thank you! Whether you pointed me at the right person to beg for the feature, put up with me begging for the feature, went back to Redmond and had someone code the feature or actually sat down and did the coding – I thank you! Everyone who doesn’t have to hear me rant thanks you! And probably more importantly, everyone who travels in more than two timezones thanks you too, though you might have to wait until they wake up to hear them ;-)

( Now I can't take credit for this feature. )

I've always been uncomfortable sitting at my desk, talking to my PC via a headset; it just hasn't felt like making a phone call unless I have a phone clutched in my hand or tucked under my jaw. While I'm sitting in the comfy chair with my leg up to rest my knee and working on a laptop (or two - I miss the multiscreen thing), I've found it much easier to use a headset with a mobile phone or the DECT phone from Simon's desk. I'm set up to record from the phone on my desk onto a tablet PC or a digital recorder, which doesn't work from the mobile phone. How could I get the recording and the headset to make it easier to take notes and record the interview I had to do today? Mark Anderson of SNS is one of the smart people I get to enjoy talking to and I didn't want to miss anything I couldn't type fast enough. And how could I keep the cost of a transatlantic call down? Simon suggested Skype, and the Skype voucher we'd picked up at a recent conference and the handy Skylook software he found which records to MP3 and saves the recordings as an Outlook message (and adds all the Skype dialling options to Outlook). At first I thought that was a bit gimicky and wished it recorded into OneNote. I'd still like to record it into OneNote but having it in Outlook and therefore on any PC I use will actually be pretty handy. And I'm very impressed with the sound quality - using the standard microphone socket on a Toshiba Portege R100, it's very clear and there were maybe two three-second sections of the conversation where I heard any distortion. I shall do this again. But I may not hand out my Skype numebr widely; I'd rather have a handset to pick up to see who's calling than a pop-up cluttering my screen.

Microsoft's big slogan for the Dynamics software is 'people-centered software'. I caught the TV ad for it the other night: many different people in different countries all getting up in the morning, grabbing breakfast and heading out for the day and all doing it that little bit differently. In fact I looked at the ad and thought 'this is good; Microsoft should have advertising like this'.

But what I noticed on MapQuest this morning (checking out Leigh on Sea where my mum will probably move to) was what I think of as people-centered data. While the label that comes up when you hover the mouse is Zoom Level 3 the labels at the size of the zoom control show me that's actually the most detailed view I can get of this location as a place within a country, before I go down into region level. For the most detail at street level the icon is a person, for the least level at country view it's mountains (topographic data here I come). The icons get wider from top to bottom - a handy visual cue if I haven't spotted the plus and minus buttons - but it's the labels of Street, City, Region and Country that let me get information the way people think about it, not the way computers do. Like Today/Tomorrow/This Week/Next Week in Outlook 2007 or tags on a blog, it's data aggregated into a fuzzy structure rather than a strictly normalized data slice.

The opening keynote at Convergence (the Microsoft Business Solutions show in Dallas, for those confused by our road trip
from state to state) was - once the drumming stopped - all about how Office is the place where people live at work and how the Dynamics products will increasingly live there too. The Dynamics CRM toolbar in Outlook 2007 isn't a click away the way it might be if Office 2007 had the ribbon interface; I wonder if the ribbon interface makes sense for finding features you expect to have in a product (charts in Excel, animations in PowerPoint) and less sense for features you wouldn't expect (opportunity management and sales reports in with your email).

Outlook is where I live when I'm at my desk (on the move it's OneNote) and the more I can get to from Outlook the better. One of the disappointing moments for me at MIX 06 was when Tim O'Reilly suggested using Outlook at the basis of social networking and Bill Gates looked completely blank; Outlook houses the pieces of my social network and tools like SNARF are starting to expose the interconnections between them. When I look at a new networking site I don't want to recreate that network one contact at a time by hand. I want Outlook and the service I choose to collaborate, finding my connections, looking first for the people I'm most in contact with and pulling the most useful information from Outlook and the service from one to the other. And if it could use InfoCard to both prove who I am and who you are and to pull across my reputation from LiveJournal or Amazon or eBay or the FT so you know I'm *that* Mary on all those services...

Service plus software: another theme from the keynote, although I haven't yet seen a Microsoft Live service that's had be jumping up and down. Perhaps the demo I'm getting here at Convergence will fire me up ;)