Match Maker's Affects The Future Greatly! By Julia Tanner At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

I have learned that while social networking — creation of business, personal, or dual-purpose connections — is ages old, we're in the early, "let 100 flowers bloom" stage of a cultural revolution in which technology is transforming previously informal networks. The times are similar to the early days of the Web. Just as then, interface fights are a diversion: In retrospect, there was less difference between Mosaic/Netscape and Internet Explorer than a Naderite would see between the Democratic and Republican parties. Current social networking systems use a Web browser or Windows desktop interface, with only small functional differences between the two.

The key issue now is the same for social networks as it has always been for the Web at large: how best to discover and organize networked resources. In the case of the Web, the question was search engine (such Alta Vista or Google) vs. directory or portal (such as Yahoo or America Online). But while the two Web-search approaches are merging, for now, social networking is still not standardized.

The chief differentiator of social-network systems is whether they center on intentional construction of networks or on automated discovery. The various leading services — and I'm talking thought leadership because market penetration is still low (but growing rapidly) — take diverging approaches. You construct your network link by link. These intentional connections are meaningful, leading to networks of inherently high quality. Spoke, by contrast, infers a network by mining your email and allows you to manually add to your network. Spoke appears to additionally harvest personal information from the Web and inferring connections, resulting in very broad networks with very significant relevance, accuracy, and timeliness issues similar to those found in Web-search-engine results.

You can send requests to interesting people you find within your network. The requests are transmitted via the intermediate links in the chain, which can choose not to forward the request. My only complaints about this mechanism are that it can be slow and the middle person in a four-link chain serves as a gatekeeper without knowing the request issuer or target.

I also see where decision techniques could be applied to improve both a user's understanding of the network and also the network's behind-the-scenes routing algorithms. For example, while you can "endorse" other members, you can't numerically weight your connections to reflect the closeness of relationships, which must surely vary widely, especially for those users who have hundreds of links. I received several link requests myself from people with whom I have no relationship but I have no way of knowing if others have accepted such low-grade links.

There will inevitably be standardization and a shakeout but also interoperability among the systems, just as email function and content are mostly independent of the mail programs being used, and just as instant-messaging systems should soon inter operate. We should soon see acquisitions as CRM and human resources system vendors begin looking to include social-network hooks directly into their systems. The net result will be a new valuation of relationships in enterprise decision-making.

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