No one can deny that Facebook is not only a great social platform that has changed how we interact in our personal lives, by enabling applications and games to be truly engaging and collaborative in new ways. And with access to the activity stream,  applications are given a powerful viral marketing mechanism that  radically lowers the cost of adoption. In addition, Facebook has ridden  the wave of radically reduced cost models for software hosting and Web 2.0 user experience by leveraging the web standards and innovations in  the cloud such as Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine.

It's  tempting to say that all companies need to do is bolt on a new "corporate Facebook” offering to make them current to users. But this ignores the challenges that enterprises face: huge  challenges like security, governance, application integration and  privacy. And it ignores that these solutions need to scale beyond small  work groups to cut across a company's entire ecosystem, including  employees, customers, partners, vendors and the social web.  But most  of all, it ignores the fact that the way people are doing work is changing and they need new, fundamentally different customized tools to support  them.

Taking concepts like the activity  stream, microblogging, groups tagging and sharing, My Sites have has met the problem head on, by taking the most popular  aspects of consumer social networking and combined them with traditional  enterprise collaboration and controls to make a powerful tool to get work done.

What some corporates, particularly large ones, miss out by ignoring My Sites is the ability to ignite the next wave of  innovation from its employees.

It’s not what you expected employee 34323 to complete last week which is important, but what you did not expect him to complete that is just as important.

The My Sites functions are designed to meet the needs of IT, who will be able to control the  distribution, content, as well as empower the user to feel the Facebook experience.