Jakob Nielsen has issued his annual 10 Best-Designed Intranets list. I guess we’ll have to take his word for it since you have to pay $174 to download the pdf to see the screenshots.  But, his post explaining why he selected these particular intranets is peculiarly unconvincing and in some cases downright scary. He seems to think, for example, that a more “editorial approach,” by which he apparently means more corporate control of both the message and users, is a good thing.  With the future of intranets clearly pointing to Read/Write, Nielsen is promoting the idea of more intermediaries and more control.  This is not a good sign and, I might add, it suggests that he has lost touch with the marketplace.

Mostly, Nielsen seems to have wanted to tell us with his comments how much he detests those ”over-hyped” Web 2.0 technologies.  In a section called Web Trends Without the Hype, he writes:

Intranets tend to avoid the over-hyped fads that wash across the Web. Several winners have weblogs this year, but the blogs are restrained, emphasizing useful information instead of “what I did on my last date.” Microsoft even has a blog for its intranet’s managing editor to discuss features and news coverage. 

Forget that no company blog anywhere has ever been about “what I did on my last date,” Jakob is on a mission to out those new-fangled technologies for the hoola hoops he believes they are.  And isn’t it terrific that a Microsoft editor will condescend to explain to readers why he chooses which news they get to read.

My favorite section is the part where Nielsen badmouths social networking and wikis and then gives examples that demonstrate how well they work:

The employee directory search (the people finder) is a killer app on most intranets. Microsoft uses the over-hyped Internet concepts of social networking and degrees of social distance in a pragmatic manner to make its employee search even better, sorting results by degree of distance from the user. Often, it makes sense that users would want to find people closely related to them; such sorting can be very helpful in a big organization where many people may have similar names or the same job titles.

Is there anything more hyped that wikis? We started to see some wiki use on intranets in 2005, and this year National Geographic Society employs many wikis in a highly useful manner. Is there anything more pragmatic than an acronym explainer? Internet hype meets intranet utility in National Geographic’s NG Lingo wiki, which explains the Society’s many internal acronyms and specialized terminology (”base camp” = the headquarters buildings). Such an intranet feature is especially helpful for new employees; this year’s winners included many more features to facilitate the “onboarding” (new employee) process.

Nothing like squashing your own argument, Jakob.  Nice going.