Rules people get more comfortable once they see it. That’s why starting small, going ugly early, etc is important. It’s not so freaking scary once everyone sees it in action. From there, the rules people can work out what’s best for the company’s protection.

For example, I talk to lots of financial institutions about deploying social software inside their enterprise. They want the openness, but must lock it down to comply with U.S. federal regulations that are in place to discourage insider trading, for example - “ethical walls” I believe is what we call these internal firewalls now…

So, how do you balance a ‘cut the crap’, elegant, beautiful user experience with the need for control? I don’t think the answer lies in technology. You can add as many knobs and locks to the software as you need to, but the problem will be that too much gets locked down initially, thus killing any social benefit. The ability to trust one’s employees to “do the right thing” is not a given right now, unfortunately. Perhaps an answer lies in providing guidance about how to govern usage - not an easy undertaking, for sure.

Instead of IT controlling for the potential 10% of worst-case usage, open that sucker up (within compliance policy limitations), and correct behavior when necessary. It turns out that there’s really nothing funny about peace, love and understanding, after all.

The side that I was looking from was that if you strip away all the personality, such as reading a blog through an RSS reader rather than on the site, do you lose your connection with that person?
Does the “clean” approach put the content above the producer, and does that diminish the value of social media?

Now, I should backpedal slightly because I’m not advocating removing control from users. People are considerably more likely to use tools when they feel in control. My concern is that as people spend their time customizing, they’ll overlook the people involved. I’d be interested to get your comments on that aspect.