TrendWatcher

Recently I've had a flurry of requests from friends who are in LinkedIn to connect my digital profile to theirs. It does appear that social networking is starting to become more "real."

At AlwaysOn, columnist Christopher Carfi is in the middle of a three part series on separating the hype and the innovation in social networks

Social networking has a Sisyphean hill to climb if people feel that the social networking technology itself can spontaneously "create" community. Rather, what we will see in Stage 3 and future stages is that social networking technology will primarily provide a mechanism to strengthen the weak ties that abound in an extant community.

This quote reminds me of a remarkable (and long) paper published by a British think tank called iSociety, You Don't Know Me, but... Social Capital & Social Software. In they say the really amazing thing about social software is watching it to see how it can enable society to accomplish things we couldn't do before we were electronically connected.

Other than maintaining connection with people over a longer period of time, what new things do you expect to be able to do in the future because of social software?

Discuss