Social Networking

Related Categories	Personal Networking; Communities of Practice
Related Terms	social networks , social network analysis , knowledge network , organizational network analysis , social network , social tools , sna , social software , social media
Related People	Euan Semple, George Pór, Lee Bryant, Patti Anklam, Ross Dawson, Valdis Krebs, Verna Allee
External Links	Wikipedia infoAnarchy Darwin Magazine Article November 2003 http://gates.comm.virginia.edu/rlc3w/ http://www.byeday.net/sna/ http://www.soc.duke.edu/~jcook/networks.html http://www.orgnet.com/sna.html http://www.orgnet.com/IHRIM.html http://www.nelh.nhs.uk/knowledge_management/km2/social_network.asp Ross Dawson on Social Network Technologies
Wikipedia	Social Networking
Technorati Tags	social networking
Yahoo My Web 2.0 Tags	social networking
del.icio.us Tags	social networking
Flickr Photo Tags	social networking

Just as a computer network is a set of machines connected by a set of cables, a social network is a group of people (or organizations or other social entities) connected by a set of social relationships, such as friendship, co-working or information exchange.

As widespread communication via organizational intranets and especially the internet develops, we need to go beyond understanding and supporting single users and small groups to the computer-supported social networks that flourish in the workplace and virtual communities.

Social networks and social network analysis [SNA] have been studied for decades. Social network analysis is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers or other information/knowledge processing entities. The nodes in the network are the people and groups while the links show relationships or flows between the nodes. SNA provides both a visual and a mathematical analysis of human relationships.

Some of this research has made its way into popular culture, such as the notion of "six degrees of separation." This is the premise that there are no more than five intermediates between any two people on earth.

In moving to computer based relationships however, we can now search e-mail folders, CRM databases and instant messaging logs to determine peoples likes, dislikes, expertise, or to discover friends-of-friends. This leads to one of the more obvious applications of social networking - social tools and social software to help find other people with whom we would like to work, share knowledge with, sell to, date or engage with for a host of other reasons.

Social tools/sofware inlclude:

Social Network Analysis Tools and Expert Locators such as Tacit and Metasight.
Social Networking Platforms such as Ryze, LinkedIn or Spoke.
Weblogs and Wikis
Instant Messaging and Presence

It is these sorts of scenarios and new social tools that support them that have led to the emergence of social networking as a hot new phenomenon in the last year or so.

Google Video Search

The pages on this website are categorized into one or more of nearly 100 categories (themes or topics). This page below displays a list of other pages that belong to the Social Networking category. You may view the list of pages belonging to another category by selecting the category in which you are interested from the drop-down 'Categories' menu at the top of this page.

Book