Facebook and My Space fall far short of knowledge management solutions, but social networking is an ideal platform for developing intellectual capital benefiting from the value of social capital.

When developing a social network consider integrating tools from multiple providers. Social networking sites may host services for sharing of information, blogging and messaging, but consider integrating mechanism for document collaboration using platforms such as Google Apps or ThinkFree. These can be used for collaboration when developing materials for:

Books - Reports - Papers etc

Training courses

Research

and are also used for the publishing of documents to blogs or delivery via RSS feeds, in the case of Google Apps.

Also make the most of the space available with hosted services by storing resources on Google Books, FURL, Picassa and YouTube, all free of cost webspace. Using this space frees space on the corporate website, reduces bandwidth requirements used when visitors access this information, and has the potential to attract an audience which may otherwise not be exposed to the material.

Google Sites provisions for seamless integration with Gmail, Google Apps, GTalk, Picassa and YouTube and additional references can easily be linked with Google books and FURL. It is a powerful tool for social networking and knowledge management.

Online thematic community sites can be used to schedule web based events. OpenACircle, although still in preliminary testing appears to be a feature rich platform to host the processes of an event. It can be used for publishing documents to be used as resource materials for the conference, it can be used for presentations and shared whiteboards or mind mapping software for eBrainstorming through desktop sharing, it supports multiple video links and audio which does not over burden the internet bandwidth, by using traditional phones for conference calls, and after the meeting can be utilized for additional online collaboration for the development of proceedings. Online conferencing can also be recorded and replayed.

A social networking platform based around Google sites could utilize Google Apps for pre-conference collaboration on documents and presentations and for developing proceedings. Collaborators could utilize Google Talk for audio conferencing and instant messaging providing a mechanism for real time cooperation while working on documents.