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Community and Content: Business Week's Business Exchange

Earlier this month, during the MediaBistro Circus, John A Byrne (@johnabyrne on twitter) spoke about how Business Week is transforming itself, engaging with users, and taking advantage of new opportunities to bring community into contact with content.

One of the sites he mentioned was the Business Exchange, a new community (really a set of communities) related to business topics. It's kind of like Digg or Newsvine, but less focused on immediate voting and more focused on enabling people to share reactions with each other.

It's an interesting platform: although BusinessWeek is always just one tab away, and advertising is present through the site, the content is all submitted by users, and comes from a breadth of source types (top 10 mainstream news sites, popular blog networks, but also relatively obscure blogs).

The platform nicely integrates with the social web, though it misses on the opportunity to leverage your existing network, instead expecting you to create a new one on site.

For example, the site enables you to link your profile to LinkedIn, easily the most appropriate social network for a BusinessWeek audience, but one which has historically struggled to keep folks engaged in content-centric discussions even when not job-hunting or lead-seeking:

(It actually pulls content from LinkedIn; it isn't just displaying a link to your profile). But then the site fails to leverage all the work I've done creating a network of current and former business associates and uses LinkedIn as simply a place to point for more information about me. It's very helpful in that it avoids the "now re-enter all the info about your education and places you've worked" kind of dance necessary at other sites, and I assume gets updated as my LinkedIn profile changes, but the missed opportunity (to link to my network) is bigger than the convenience provided. (There's also no corresponding presence on LinkedIn itself, showing my activity to my social graph, as TripIt, SlideShare, and others have done via LinkedIn applications, an OpenSocial implementation).

Similarly, the site links to your Twitter account, enabling you to post your reactions to articles directly to the microblogging network, although unfortunately not using Twitter's OAuth and instead relying on the password anti-pattern:

Given that this is a social, community site, which knows and has specific connections to both my LinkedIn network AND my Twitter network (a much looser graph, but those I follow and those who follow me are both potentially significant, and also both potentially present in the Business Exchange), this is what is so disappointing about what they've done with what they call "your network":

Say again? In order to have meaningful activity show up in the BusinessExchange under "your network," you're not going to use my LinkedIn network or my Twitter network - and make the assumption I might like to see those folks' activity, but I have to rebuild a network from scratch, based on finding users in topical areas who are doing interesting things? Further, if I do find interesting users in those topics, and add them to my network, do they also get added on Twitter or LinkedIn? Optionally?

It's perfectly understandable that users may want differet social graphs in different contexts, but what we know they don't want is to start from scratch. At a minimum, users expect to be able to drawn on their address books, Facebook profiles, or other existing social graphs - with the option to include/exclude as appropriate to the context.

Here's hoping this is just a beta oversight, soon to be rectified, in what's otherwise a very foreward looking business community.