There is a new buzz word that's making its way through the community these days…Social Networking. Im calling this post Part 1 as I plan to from time to time express my thoughts on this and what I am seeing in the community push towards "What's being used" "How are people using it"

So what is Social Networking?

Before we begin lets look at how WikiPedia defines social networking and how it applies to us.

Social networking / Internet social networks

Main article: Social network service

See also: List of social networking websites, Motivations for contributing to online communities

The notion that individual computers linked electronically could form the basis of computer mediated social interaction and networking was suggested early on - for example "The IRG Solution" David Andrews, Souvenir Press 1984 effectively sketched out the Internet and how it should be developed specifically for this purpose.

The first social networking website was Classmates.com, which began in 1995. Other sites followed, including SixDegrees.com, which began in 1997 using the Web of Contacts model. The year 1999 saw the development of two competing models of social networking, the Circle of Trust developed by Epinions and utilised by Ciao.com, Dooyoo and ToLuna and the Circle of Friends developed by Jonathan Bishop, which was utilised on a number of regional UK sites between 1999 and 2001 and flourished with the advent of a website called Friendster in 2002. This is now one of the most dominant methods of social networking in virtual communities, perhaps for the reason that it gives the user control rather than being computer controlled. There were over 50 social networking sites using the Circle of Friends in 2005 when one such online community, MySpace, was getting more page views than Google.^[6] Google has a social network called Orkut, launched in 2004. Social networking began to be seen as a component of internet strategy at around the same time: in March 2005 Yahoo launched Yahoo! 360°, their entry into the field, and in July 2005 News Corporation bought Circle of Friends-based MySpace, followed by ITV buying Old Boy Network-based Friends Reunited in December that year.^[7][8] It is estimated that combined there are now over 200 social networking sites using these existing and emerging social networking models.

In these communities, an initial set of founders sends out messages inviting members of their own personal networks to join the site. New members repeat the process, growing the total number of members and links in the network. Sites then offer features such as automatic address book updates, viewable profiles, the ability to form new links through "introduction services," and other forms of online social connections. Social networks can also be organized around business connections, as in the case of LinkedIn.

Blended networking is an approach to social networking that combines both offline elements (face-to-face events) and online elements. MySpace, for example, builds on independent music and party scenes, and FaceBook was originally designed to mirror a college community, though it has since expanded its scope to include high school, job-related, and regional networks. The newest social networks on the Internet are becoming more focused on niches such as travel, art, tennis, football (soccer), golf, cars, dog owners, and even cosmetic surgery. Other social networking sites focus on local communities, sharing local business and entertainment reviews, news, event calendars and happenings. Some corporations are working to retain customers through social networks by establishing online user communities. See also Social computing.

Most of the social networks on the internet are public, allowing anyone to join. Organizations, such as large companies, also have access to private social networking applications, known as Enterprise Relationship Management. Organizations install these applications on their own servers and enable employees to share their networks of contacts and relationships to outside people and companies.

There are many discussions as to where social networking is headed next. The advent of the Internet has enabled informal social networks to connect with people globally and with time shifting (through email), although in practice, most interactions are with people who live and work nearby.

A new type of social network are links between web pages. These can be studied in their own right (i.e., where are the hubs?) and as links between individual's web pages in social software where individuals begin with their address book, and expand their network by adding friends, "friendster" acquaintances and imaginary friends. This creates connectivity through being discovered through friends of friends, etc. Future applications may allow for discovering the social networks of others by stumbling upon them.

The growth in community adoption is often forecasted (that is, estimating the number of users in the community) by use of the Bass diffusion model, a mathematical formula originally conceived by Frank Bass to describe the process how new products get adopted as an interaction between users and potential users.

So this article above provides us with an understanding of the history of Social Networking and how it applies to us. It also describes some of the sites that provide these services for the communities. I actually have memberships in Linked In (which I have deemed useless) and most recently FaceBook which so far doesn't suck as much as LinkedIn but….. here is one of my issues from spending 2 days on here. It is dangerously close in my eyes to being considered a MySpace (another childish waste of time) and it is for this reason im not going to take it very seriously…. I would assume others are also in this camp. Don't get me wrong the technology is pretty cool and I may not have spent enough time in the app to truly give a proper write up.

As many of you who know me and have read my posts in the past know that I was a huge advocate of a new Microsoft Technology called Knowledge Networks or KN. The application required two components to make it work.. A client application that tied into Outlook and your IM contacts and a Server Application which aggregated information generated from the client profile analysis. Im not going to lament on this application and there is information here in my blog and elsewhere… do a search for John Hand or look at past Channel 9 videos. What I do want to elaborate on is the fact that it gathered information based on its analysis of my Outlook folders and would occasionally re-analyze set on a scheduled time and then present me (before uploading the data) with a list of what is about to be uploaded so I can deselect sensitive information I don't want to be released. Why is this so cool? It takes out the thought process of me manually adding rich information to my profile in order for someone to search on this and get back some useful results. This also will fullfil the need to find experts in your enterprise that have certain skillsets (Who knows what) or find people outside of your organization that you can work with (Who Knows Who) Please don't get all excited just yet and ping me or start looking for the bits. They are no longer available so you have to wait till VNext starts to ramp up to see what is being offered.

So what I just explained above is just a small piece of what Social Networking is. Who knows what… who knows who. To me personally this is one of the greatest things that can come from Social Networking. When we can find that golden application that can provide this on the web without a lot of manual input we will have something special. Face it…. Im lazy and most of you are also when it comes time to listing information about yourself. That is whats lacking in FaceBook and Linked In.

Where do we go from here

This is a tough topic to really give clear answers for. I can assure you that the concept of Social Networking will only increase in the next year and enterprises will start to push for this type of technology. I will be adding posts on this from time to time and you can read Lawrence Liu's posts or Mike Gannoti's posts on this subject just to name a few.

Cheers and stay tuned for more!