Well-established vendors, meanwhile, offer social networking functions in their enterprise versions of Web 2.0 software. IBM's Lotus Connections has had customers adopt the feature, including Teach For America). And Microsoft says that it has SharePoint Customers using its social networking tools MySites feature, including a cosmetics company featured on its website.

The Value of Automated Data Feeds for Collaborative Applications

Analysts say the social network offerings by Microsoft and IBM—the two vendors Forrester predicts will dominate the software market for collaboration technologies— have good basic functions but need to do a better job at feeding information into them automatically rather than relying on employees to do it themselves.

This would include pushing information into them from systems and applications people are already making heavy use of, including e-mail, blogs and wikis, says Forrester's Young.

If vendors can integrate existing systems and have them fed into the network, Brian Kotlyar, an analyst with the Yankee Group, says that internal social networks will catch on.

"The opportunity becomes clearer when you strip away some of the frivolity of social networking and just look at it from an information management perspective," he says. "Then you see that there are some really valuable mechanisms for sharing content, finding experts and working collaboratively already in place and they just need to be adapted to the workplace."

But AMR's Yarmis notes that end-users will want something that looks pretty, and that blends enterprise and consumer content in one area. One vendor in particular, WorkLight, has worked at pushing corporate data as widgets to users' Facebook and iGoogle home pages while not exposing that information to those people's "friends" outside the corporate firewall.

"Some might find that approach appealing because there's this demand for a blending of the public and private life," Yarmis says. "But we're waiting to see which approach will emerge."