Last month, a senior user experience researcher at Google, Paul Adams, gave a presentation entitled “The Real Life Social Network.” Gina Trapani at Smarterware.org wrote a post on it and it includes the presentation which was given by Paul. The presentation gives an interesting view on what I also experienced when using the various social sites like facebook and twitter. These sites give me a hard time differentiating between my various social groups. Therefore it holds me back to use it freely to share all kinds of information. This I think is a major problem, because the reason I turn to the social media is to share ideas with others. Now some of it can be public, however other ideas I just want to share with a specific social tie. Do I need to use different social sites then, like linkedin for business ties and facebook for other social groups and twitter for the public?  It’s certainly possible, but it doesn’t make it easy for me. I’m doing it now with different ID’s on the various social sites, and I really think it gives me a lot more hassle than I want to handle. So how Paul presents the idea of looking more closely at how social relationships work is a nice refreshing idea and gives me hope that Social Computing on the web will change in the near future in which it finally will help me to enhance my social ties.

For my work I’m exploring the same concept in which I claim that enterprise communications like wiki’s and blogs are not truly the real key to social computing. The benefits start when concepts like personal profiles and group profiles become a centralized component in the social platform which can then be connected with something like workspaces and or various communication services. As an employee I don’t have just one activity. I have various different activities which also creates various relationships. These relationships I want to enhance with social technology so I’m able to perform better. This is only possible when I can create various groups in the most easy way possible.

Well these are just ideas and I still need to explore the various collaboration types I blogged about earlier. But I think this is a key component. Next time I hope to be able to say a little bit more on the subject.