Application in Facebook ...

I came across an interesting application on facebook ... But, more than the application itself, the idea of the application is quite interesting. We all know that facebook, and similar social networking sites are a platform which enables us to get in touch with friends and family, as well as to come in touch with more people with whome we might share some interests.

Interestingly, more and more, there is the need for people to be able to categorize their friends. On social networking sites, we tend to have a large number of friends, and this brings up the requirement of categorizing them, maybe even colour-coding them. This, to my mind, is an interesting phenomenon. Outside these social networking sites, we dont need to colour-code our friends. This raises the question of why. And this is one of the most interesting things about social networking. When it comes to social networking, we are all creating ties which go way beyond the ties outside the circle of social networking. These ties which we end up creating include friends and family, for sure, but at the same time, we are in a position to discover ... discover groups we might want to join, and more importantly, discover people we might want, or need to connect with, for shared interests. These could be people who are experts in a particular subject we are interested in, or they could be people who are also working on a particular topic, which is also of interest to us. And this idea of discovery is the essential value of social networking.



Lets take an example. One of my favourite bands is one by the name Junoon. Well, there is a nice group which is their fan club on facebook, and i was quick to join it. Interestingly, six of my friends from facebook also joined the group. In all probability, they also wanted to, but either they never came round to it, or they werent able to find it. This is the nature of discovery from social networking. And to my mind, this is one of the major issues knowledge managers need to work on, to make sure that we are able to bring about a similar nature of ease of discovery behind the firewall, as there is, outside the firewall.



There is an interesting application i came across the other day. This is a facebook-like application developed by Trampoline Systems. Or, the facebook-like application from Microsoft. The idea is to bring the idea of social networking into the firewall. However, having said that, there is a bit of euphoria which might be a little misplaced. For, the entire motivation for adoption of social networking behind the firewall is quite different from what it is outside the firewall. To that extent, there might need to be a few changes to the approach to social networking which might need to be brought in to bring about this change within the firewall. All ideas on how to do this invited ...