Social networking ideas are exploding in the web space. I thought I am progressive and love to read about new trends. Never had a problem to comprehend novelty technologies and make use of those which applied to my world and work. Recently though this vertical is accelerating so fast, it surpassed 100-fold an industrial revolution of early 20th century.

First email was sent in 1971 and until 1989 not many people used computer. But since mid nineties when web pages started to show up for ordinary companies, it’s been just few years to millions of internet sales transactions.
Now the social networking is taking by an avalanche hiring, sales, research, and … even spy exchanges. You know what I’m talking about?

If last year you proudly created a page on MySpace, this year chatting on the Facebook during business hours you’re not much of an avangarde of a web technology any more. There is bigger, more sophisticated, better… ?Hmm.
What and how fast do you adopt new now? Do you have to? Good question.

It used to be a little bit of a social network, and mostly alumni club to check out who gained weight and who became a millionaire. However, many of these technologies cross to business domain and are used now to enforce and grease the sales power or simply improve communications and efficiency.

If a large company has 2000 people in different departments on many floors, and possibly in many buildings, consultants are not enough now to tell the management who is doing what and why. In-house expertise is missed or resources mismanaged, costing that company lots of money. Until this new software that is, which (can you believe it) analyzes all the emails and network communications flying among the employees and charts out who is most often talking about this or that topic. It locates a real expertise in a snap, and you can image what else it does on the way.

This software is Aptima - it finds connections between people attempting to solve similar problems. It used to be called “organizational network analysis”. It’s just now it’s done quite automatically. This one is not very useful for a small selfemployed entrepreneur, but others are.

You probably know LinkedIn, Spoke, Technorati and Friendster. But did you see SelectMinds, VisiblePath and Tacit Software?
It’s not just who you know. It’s also who they know, and what they know. Online social networks have the potential to connect you to a vast world of people and resources. It will connect your list of personal contacts to the lists and profiles of others, giving you a bigger Rolodex of potential clients and suppliers. Visible Path doesn’t examine the content of messages; it only notes who sends messages to whom, when they send them, and how frequently.

Illumio, a new product from Tacit Software that is available to individuals for free, pores over the information on the PCs of everyone on your virtual network. Using data indexed by Google’s and Microsoft’s desktop search tools it identifies the people most likely to be able to answer a particular question.

Visible Path, which has made its software available to the public, hopes to create a mass cross-organization network, but only if it can get enough individuals to sign up to have their e-mail tracked.

Talk about tracking – I looked at Twitter time and time again, and still can’t figure out how this can be a fascination to anyone but a mother of a teenager… Texting your friends (or a network of customers) what are you doing this minute – who cares? Unless you are going to a cave and might need help any time. But does your cell phone work in a cave?

Have you tried SecondLife yet?

Starting to sound like a lost philosopher among all these new gadgets.

hg