Recently, I’ve been looking at social networking tools through the lens of the tech community.
Creating Bonding Capital with Raptr
Here’s an example of one social networking tool created specifically for gamers. Raptr allows people within a network to identify which games their friends are currently playing. Here’s how they describe their service

If you’re interested in the [...]

Don Reisinger at TechCrunch wrote yesterday about a social networking study commissioned by European cellphone carrier O2. While the study was informal, it reveals some interesting aha-moments.
The study proposes that within an affinity group, we’re perhaps only three degrees of separation from others within the same affinity group.
Rodrigues finds that we are usually part of [...]

Back in 2001, Thomas Davenport and John Beck released a savvy business book titled The Attention Economy. Some days, I think that marketers learned the wrong lesson from the book. Businesses and advertisers are now encouraging people to monetize their social networks.
Yesterday, Eric Schonfeld, over at TechCrunch, blogged about a new tool called Twittad which [...]

IBM’s clever commercial around social networks left me laughing, because it presents two extreme misunderstandings of social networks and social capital. While IBM wants us to laugh at the young man’s approach to social networking, the executive woman seems equally naive.
Most people, still don’t “get it.” Social networking is only the foundation for social capital. [...]