Social Networking closer look

What is Social Networking:

Wiki says - A social network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, idea, financial exchange, friends, kinship, dislike, conflict, trade, web links, sexual relations, disease transmission (epidemiology), or airline routes. The resulting structures are often very complex.

In the recent years, there is an exponential growth in the usage of "social networking" sites. The trend is like, more and more people have started using these social networking sites to be in touch with their friends and family. Also this is a great place to find people with similar interests and people like the idea of going to one place - to communicate with friends, share photos, share videos, thoughts, forums, blogs and any interests. So this is really multi demensional than comparing the mail systems. Every social networking site is very unique and has lot of cool features. Some of the famous sites are myspace.com, facebook, orkut, hi5 etc...

The growth is so rapid that almost everyweek there is one new social networking site and it opens up doors for marketers, because whereever there are people, that is where marketers would be. So lot of industry leading brands are redesigning their site to include this "Social networking" Concept to reach more people in a very short time.

The power of social networking is widely accepted and being quickly adopted by industries.
Lot of potential growth for creative people who can come up with great concepts and ideas to work on some of these new sites.

Also these days, if you want to build your own community sites, there are great products available on market which are "ready to use" products at a very economical cost. You may want to check out "Community server 2007" which is really a cool product. Also there are hundreds of frameworks available in the market. Microsoft had a beta product with the code named "Athens" which they are calling now as "Microsoft.community" (Guess it is a trend to keep changing code names) - But looks like this is still in beta version.

I know that most of you are already a member of one or more of these sites...But if you own a business or want to have your own community site...it will be really cool and send me an invite too.-;)

Re-look at your models...

Lot of companies who are in the software service industry are still following the traditional software life cycle models and in most of the cases, not realizing the client needs, but still want to follow processes they have been following for years. Ultimately the reason to follow a particular proven model is not only for the guaranteed success of the project, but also to produce high quality deliverables. Quality is not just following set of standard procedures and processes. The only way to achieve the quality work is to increase the quality of people who build those. So companies should invest more on cultivating quality in people by more training. Also companies should start looking at different software models like agile development model, Extreme programming model, etc. I am talking about "Cowboy coding" style at the same time. But need to look at breed models to align with client's working models. One approach can never work out for all scenarios and every client is different in the way they operate.

Starting Again…

        It's been years since I blogged and few things are unavoidable in life and blogging one such thing which helps you to be constantly in touch with society who have similar interests like you and world is more and more becoming digitalized and these days mailing means e-mailing. So thought of start my blogging again…I guess, blogging is better than bookmarking bunch of URLs and scribbling down something on a notebook…which I can't read after few days…Anyway thanks for reading my blog !!!

(Note: I have used Word 2007 to publish my blog, really a very cool feature!!! Good luck -J )