US launches 'MySpace for spies'
Spies and teenagers normally have little in common but that is about to change as America's intelligence agencies prepare to launch "A-Space", an internal communications tool modelled on the popular social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace.
Context & Ripple Effects
A-Space is the latest move in a pattern the corpus has been tracking since late 2006, when Business 2.0 profiled a MySpace for grown-ups aimed at professional users. Reuters then announced its own financial-sector MySpace in March 2007, and by June MySpace itself was copying rival Facebook's feature set as the consumer platforms matured.
The intelligence community applying the same template matters because it imports a consumer design — profiles, connections, internal messaging — into a domain where information-sharing across agencies has historically been the core failure mode. It also lands amid a burst of Facebook momentum: the f8 developer platform launched in May 2007, Facebook rolled out an iPhone-optimized site on August 15, and unified messaging followed on August 20, making the consumer model the obvious reference architecture.
First-order effects
- US intelligence analysts get a cross-agency profile-and-networking layer modelled on Facebook and MySpace, directly targeting the siloed communication habits the interagency environment is known for.
- Facebook and MySpace gain an unlikely validation: their interface conventions are now considered secure-enough and familiar-enough to serve as the blueprint for classified work.
Second-order effects
- Reuters' financial MySpace and similar vertical networks face a new class of competitor for the idea that every profession gets its own walled social graph — with government now the highest-stakes adopter.
- Vendors of white-label social software gain a reference customer in the intelligence community, lowering the sales barrier for enterprise and government deployments elsewhere.
Third-order effects
- If consumer-style networking becomes the default architecture for institutional communication, the boundary between consumer web innovation and defense/intelligence procurement blurs, with spy agencies adopting features within months of their Silicon Valley debut.
- Security debates will shift from whether social tools belong in sensitive organizations to how graph-level exposure — who can see whom — should be governed inside them.
The trend: Consumer social networking is being cloned into vertical private walled gardens — finance, professions, and now the intelligence community — with each sector adopting the Facebook/MySpace template months after it proves out publicly.