Internet Changes Everything

Not 'networking' as we know it

ITBusiness.ca

by Shane Schick
7/20/2004 5:00:00 PM - Why online tools are making social butterflies in the enterprise.

My colleague Greg Meckbach must occasionally wonder if he should rename his magazine, Communications & Networking. Although it's clear from the moment you thumb through its pages the publication covers everything of interest to systems administrators and Canadian telecom carriers, Greg still gets approached by public relations agencies with story ideas about the other form of networking. This audience for these ideas, which has traditionally conducted their affairs at golf clubs, cocktail parties and gallery openings, might be better served by something called Communications and Hobnobbing.

Over the last year, however, a growing interest around maintaining and expanding personal contacts through the Internet started to keep pace with face-to-face events. "Social networking" according to the online Wiki Encyclopedia, "allows the newly-populous Internet to serve as both a buffer and a safety net for introduction to friends by friends once possible only in person." Friendster is the obvious example, but there are many others, like Meetup or Orkut. There is some really interesting software in this area, particularly the open source Barnraiser.org for creating "digital youth centres" and StumbleUpon.com, a Web discovery service that integrates peer-to-peer and social networking principles with one-click blogging.

The tools behind social networking -- portals, e-mail and instant messaging -- are relatively simple, but the context in which they are used represent a unique style of collaborative content management. This is in part because, like auction sites that depend on reputable buyers and sellers, social networks succeed only by establishing trust relationships among the user base. This is something most business people will be very familiar with, which is why a few services have popped up exclusively for the executive class. As they mature, expect these sites (especially the new entrants) to distinguish themselves by an ever-narrowing set of niches. There will be social networks for accountants, for example, because only one accountant can understand another accountant. IT will be no different.

Vendors must realize this, which may explain part of the reasoning behind Microsoft's recent decision to integrate its Live Communications Server with AOL Instant Messaging, Yahoo! Messenger and its own MSN Messenger. This is a corporate-only play, and reflects an industry-wide expectation that these forms of communication will increasingly take part between offices, not dorm rooms. Researchers at the University of Michigan, meanwhile, are working on Small-World Instant Messaging (SWIM), which builds upon the idea behind social networking by profiling entries in each user's address book according to expertise. SWIM mines users' homepages and browser bookmarks, for example, to construct a keyword vector to represent the user's information identity and then deploys a referral agent that automatically handles the information-querying process. This saves users from asking one friend in their social network a question, only be passed on to someone else.

Enterprises have spent millions of dollars on knowledge management projects to keep their best practices in house, but social networks may take some of the most valuable data to the outside world. Particularly among contract workers and consultants, these networks may represent the only organization to which they feel any real loyalty. It's not just what you know, and it's not just who you know, either. Social networking is proving it's both.

July 20, 2004 at 06:47 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (7) | Top of page | Blog Home