Social Networking Revolution

There was a recent summit on social networking put on by AlwaysOn Stanford that was very productive. I would have liked to have seen Dan Nye (CEO of LinkedIn) on the panel as well but still it was a pretty productive summit.

The panel included:

• Travis Katz (Senior Vice President of MySpace)
• Dustin Moskovitz (co founder of Facebook)
• Rich Rosenblatt (CEO of Demand Media)
• Gina Bianchini (CEO of Ning)
• Karl Jacob (CEO of Wallop)

The panel brought up an interesting point that social networking has already taken hold of the online gaming market, not only from gaming sites that host games like chess but through other more sophisticated teaming environments hosted by valve and the like. Other authors including Stefan Decker and Martin Frank envisioned the Social Semantic Desktop as a result of combining the ideas of Semantic Web, Peer-to-Peer computing and Social networking.

With gaming set aside, the transformation from a hyperlinked web content currently used today to a Semantic Web-based technology is another dimension that Danish Nadeem addresses in his thesis called "Cognitive Aspects of Semantic Desktop to Support Personal Information Management". Nadeem and others suggest that a semantic desktop approach would enable the casual web user to take part by publishing, learning and forming their own social network with relatively little difficulty.