Social-networking with a purpose

This is a sign of things to come – purposeful online socializing, or *niche* social-networking. In this case, it's software that looks for expertise within a social group. According to the New York Times, each friend in a group installs the Illumio software on his/her computer. Then, when someone has a question about anything – e.g., "Who knows John Smith?" or "Who know the lyrics to (a particular song)?" – the software searches all the hard drives in the group with either MSN or Google desktop search technology, looking for the person who has the most references to that subject in email, documents, etc. Then it asks the person with the most info on the subject if it's ok to tell the group s/he knows the most. If the person says, yes, the questioner gets the results, if not, the software asks the next most knowledgeable person for permission, and so on down the line in what's called a "reverse auction systems," the Times reports. The other types of niche social-networking already in place revolved more around specific subjects (a genre of music, SN for a particular age groups like teens) rather than specific purposes.

It all seems to be moving toward what the MIT Media Lab and other academics have long called the "constructivist" approach, as in collaborative learning. "Web 2.0" is now making collaborative everything more possible than ever (it's also very quantum – *flat* collaborative – rather than Newtonian / top-down / hierarchical collaborative learning, production, publishing, communicating, etc.). A fascinating shift to be watching.