Don Dodge, Microsoft's Director of Business Development for their Emerging Business Team has a great blog called The Next Big Thing.

Don has an interesting article about a new spin out from Microsoft called Wallop.

I don't know much about Wallop, but if they are building a social networking tool, I sure hope they hear my call for an enterprise gateway. Big firms can't embrace social networks until we can easily authenticate the people who claim to work for the firm.

Imagine LinkedIn, but when people claimed to work for Bank X, there was an easy way to work out if they were telling the truth. For example, the network could display Bank X's logo beside that person's name if the Bank had authenticated that person using some kind of gateway tool.

It would be nice if the social network also had two layers of connections: acquaintance and close colleague. Social Networks are a useful way of keeping an address book, so as a user, I don't want to say no to someone asking to be part of my network. However, I also want to be able to signal who my close contacts are and search along that network. A close contact is someone who absolutely will do you a favor. In some business situations, a casual connection is enough. In others, it is more important to be able to ask a favor.

I'm not exactly sure what Wallop is going to be, but GigaOm has some hints about security and social networks.

Right now, they are just a fancy bouncing box.