In my experience MySites in Sharepoint 2010 falls well short of the mark when it comes to social collaboration.
Microsoft have done a good enough job of making it ‘look’ facebook-like, and it turns some heads when demoed on Powerpoint slides at sales events. As soon as you start to use it however, you begin to see its major shortfalls.
Yes you can find and follow colleagues and yes you can submit facebook-like status updates, but that’s really where the good stuff ends. No ability to reply to comments, to answer a question, or even to ‘like’ an existing comment. These are huge discussion killers that for me render the system almost useless as a proper social tool. Yes it does have some other redeeming features, but the reality is that as soon as users see the interface, they expect to able interact with their colleagues and to hold discussions, and the fact is that they cannot.
I have read that Microsoft had planned to incorporate full microblogging functionality into this release but ran out of time, hence the semi-functional mess we have ended up with. Whether or not this is true I don’t know, I am however pretty confident that the next release will have a much greater real time social discussion emphasis.
The next release of course is still a couple of years away at this stage.. so what do we do in the mean time?
I have done some interesting work with Newsgator Social Sites for Sharepoint. This product, while far from being perfect, certainly does fill in a lot of gaps. It does turn MySites into a truly social networking system for your business, and provides the benifit of doing this within the sharepoint ecosystem (meaning so you still get other benefits like native AD integration, native Communicator/Lync integration etc).
Its just a pity that we need to purchase a third party application for this purpose, which comes with its own overheads in terms of licencing, SQl database maintenance, disaster recovery planning etc.