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November 19, 2007

Social Web Taxonomy

This posting is inspired by a posting by Jack Vinson at Knowledge Jolt. The blog is missing today but I'll link to it if it returns. {link working now} The posting was titled "Various social networking and communications technologies by Jack Vinson."

Anyway there are many social technologies and applications. Building on Jack's list, I think they might be thought about in the following buckets:

Social Communication
Social Content
Social Sharing
Social Collaborative Applications
Social Networking
Face to Face

Here's some examples (perhaps an attempt to define by example too):

Social Communication

audio conferencing
e-mail
instant messaging
threaded discussions
discussion lists
presence management (ie. Twitter)
phone
fax
chat (many-to-many)
postal (snail) mail

Social Content

wikis
blogs
tagging
forums
open access model publishing
tag clouds
Connotea
Flickr
Delicious
LibraryThing
sometimes web pages (static / informational)
podcasts
open source software

Social Sharing

communities of practice (CoP) software
groupware / teamspace (asynchronous)
knowledge portal
SharePoint
Lotus Notes
Google Apps or Zoho

Social Collaborative Applications

videoconferencing (WeBex, LiveMeeting)
virtual meeting tool (synchronous)
group decision tools
project management tools
shared calendars
development support tool (IDE)
document versioning tool
file servers / VPN

Social Networking

Facebook
MySpace
Mixi
Bebo
Academici

Face to Face

watercooler
coffee pot! Bar, Starbucks meetings
lunch / dinner
hot dog cart
conferences
meetings
parties
unconferences
hackfests

I don't intend this to ever be final in any way or even remotely comprehensive. I am just trying to find a way to differentiate all of the new social tools we have virtually and physically in order to think about them more clearly - before they all merge like porridge. Right now I am finding it very useful to distinguish social networking from social content in conversations. We also need to separate the emerging demand for metadata about living people in social networks from content metadata (including writings, authors, etc.). I think it helps the discussion to draft a few ideas for comment.

Stephen




Posted by stephen at November 19, 2007 5:18 PM

Comments

Have you try shelfari.com? Cool tools ..

Posted by: Hazman Aziz at November 20, 2007 5:48 AM

Stephen - Thanks for the reference. More importantly, thanks for expanding on that list.

And sorry about my website having hiccups. The link is http://blog.jackvinson.com/archives/2007/11/15/various_social_networking_and_communications_technologies.html

Posted by: jackvinson [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 20, 2007 11:21 PM