TechNayak

[digg=http://digg.com/software/Benefits_of_Social_Networking]Recently almost everything on the webspace has been moving towards a socionet angle. Sites like Flickr, Gdcos all have a friend concept in place. Social networking as concept has evolved to achieve a more collaborative environment for activities. The seed was already there, your contacts in your email, organiser, office was the essential element, but some person thought why not let those contacts become active, why make them wait lifelessly on the database, and then there was a Social Network. I remember my first Socionet, Hi5, which is now a yahoo company. My perception and reason to be elated was the fact that now I could see and interact with other people’s contact. Gone were those days where I had to mail my friend to get another friends email, all I had to do was navigate and lo! he was there.

As my knowledge about shareable contact books aka socionets grew, i realised there were a slew of activities that could be achieved from this concept. The idea of a message board was still alien as web based communication was supposedly private till that time, it took me some time to get used to. Then came my realisation of power of social networking. It wasn’t long before i realised that almost every web based activity could become more efficient by collaborating , the first proof I got of this was liveJournal and blogger which made sharing, commenting blogs easy. Then came photo sharing, Orkut , digg , video sharing , document sharing , forums and my discoveries kept on increasing.

From the current craze of socionets, we do know that these are here to stay, but how do organisations benefit from it? Socionets lack flavor, sure you have all the sharing and collaborating, but for what cause ? that is not defined. Defining a flavor for social networking centric to a specific group of people will be the next thing. Organisations can use it to promote interaction amongst employees, make people collaborate on solving a common problem, make a knowledge base to which users can contribute to and also to form interest groups and other billion things that you could do with social networks. There is already LinkedIn which is a popular network for working people. Schools and colleges can benefit tremendously from socionets. The living proof to this is facebook which has revolutionized networking amongst college goers. The school and college i studied from, we were not provided emails or forms of communication. Social networking could be the perfect answer to this. You can also have students working together on projects, professors can take online courses, have discussions, have a knowledge base, share informative links, the possibilities are endless. Moodle already exists as a course management system which many schools and colleges are using. It extends the concept of wikis to fit into a course structure but it lacks in Socionet fullness.

The new people or peer 2.0 concept is still to hit the big time. Lets wait for the socionet revolution.