What are you doing right now? It's a straightforward question – and to a huge swathe of people, it takes on significance over and above simple curiosity. Rather, many of us will know this phrase as Facebook's cry for information. What are you doing right now? You are invited to tell your extended network about your inner thoughts, your current activities and your wittiest puns. 'Phil is crossing town', 'John is mostly confused', 'Thom is waiting for his new iMac' – these are comments taken from my own profile, and they're designed, subconsciously, to draw friends and acquaintances in, to interest people in others’ lives. That is the beauty of Facebook – build up momentum and it is a self sustaining ecosystem. People come back to see what other people are doing and to update their own profiles – a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Ok, we all know about Facebook, but what's all this about? This is Jigsaw Networking – hardly within our remit, surely? This is where I crowbar it in: Jigsaw Networking --> social networking! Easy! And, in fact, it just so happens that the Big Blue, IBM, have launched a networking site for business. It's a no-brainer – a lot of businesses already use Facebook, so why not, thought IBM, give companies a substitute; one that provides easy auditing and levels of control over their staff that definitely aren't present on Mark Zuckerberg's brainchild. IBM have coined their ‘business-book’ Bluehouse. Built on the back of IBM’s Lotus suite of products, it provides instant messaging, email, online collaboration tools and file sharing in one online package.

One can look at Bluehouse on two levels – as filling a gap in the market; providing flexibility and security that definitely isn’t present in Facebook – or, if one were more cynical (moi?), as an attempt to cash in on the Web 2.0, cloud computing, software-as-a-service gravy-train. So will it work? It’s a tricky one to call – if businesses respond to IBM, and do use Bluehouse as a productivity tool, then it may well. But it will take a lot of businesses and a lot of time to build up the kind of momentum that has made Facebook’s address one of the most visited (and most blocked, in many corporations) on the web. Only time will tell if IBM are onto a winner…