Exploring the adjacent possible and liquid networks

As I was reading Dr. Brewer's blogpost on Spreading Good Ideas using enterprise microblogging platforms, I started thinking about ways to faciliate and catalyze the exploration of the adjacent possible and creation of liquid networks. I think one way is to abandone the pre-concieved notion of the "groups" and not re-create (or import) the corporate groups in Yammer or Chatter that reflect the corporate heirarchy. Let the users create groups as needed and take them down when no longer needed. There will be Yammer Communities or Chatter Groups that will include employees from an entire organization, but I don't think it is a good idea to create a Yammer Community for each individual group in the company. 

Please, please, please don't call it "Social Networking", unless you wanna appear clueless

These days I am seeing a gross, egregious, and flagrant misuse of the term "Social Network". Every company that implements a micro-blogging solution w/ profiles for their employees wants to call the implementation a "Social Networking" platform. These apps are almost exclusively “social media” platforms. Nothing to do with Social Networking. Social Networking is when you use the transactional data from these Social Media apps to create Social Graphs and perform a Social Network Analysis (SNA).
 
Now anytime, anyone use the term Social Network incorrectly, I send them the following diagram, and hope that they correct themselves:

(The source for this venn-diagram is available as a Google Drawing at  http://bit.ly/SocialMedia_vs_SocialNetwork . Please feel free to send to anyone who misuses the term Social Networking)
 
Some thoughts:
Setting up an internal (contained) social media sites (e.g. yammer, chatter, lotus connections etc) should NOT be the end-goal in itself. The Social Graph generated from the interactions on the site should be used to improve the employee experience e.g. by performing social network analysis or using the Social Graph to add relevancy in the query results on the Enterprise Search Engine etc. Lots of use cases……

Update on Monday, March 28, 2011 at 8:21PM by Saqib Ali

A relevant blogpost by Darin Stewart of Gartner:
http://blogs.gartner.com/darin-stewart/2011/03/28/facebook-is-not-a-social-network/ 

Darin writes:

 Facebook is not in and of itself a social network.  It is a tool that facilitates social networks.  It is a subtle but important distinction.  A social network is a social structure (more anthropological than technological) made up of people, organizations and the interrelationships among them. If we focus purely on the websites, the tools, the games that surround social networks it is easy to lose sight of their purported reason for existing, which is to foster and facilitate these connections and interactions among people.

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