The buzz around social networking is definitely growing among discussions - and I personally know of a few notable startups and companies getting on this trend and trying to use it as marketing leverage to break into enterprises in Singapore and Asia. In fact, it’s already attracting big investment money in the US.

I think there are problems around this - the rise of Friendster (MySpace to a much smaller extent - it just isn’t big in Asia even if it might seem to be a giant in the US) has led a lot of companies wanting to jump on a bandwagon.

Personally, I don’t think that the thinking around social networks have evolved or matured enough yet to make a real impact. All efforts I currently see right now involve connections within a social network - explicitly. Friendster maps friends of a friend networks, LinkedIn maps work-based relationships, Facebook maps college relationships. But with such rich meta-data, I don’t feel that its potential is being fully realized.

I believe that the next wave of disruptive innovation will happen in the social networking space - but I also believe that a lot more work needs to be done first before it hits prime time in either the enterprise or the consumer space. And the diagram actually shows my thought process very roughly. What I think:

Networks have to be implicitly taken advantage of to gain mass adoption, and not just within the 53,651 web 2.0 users out there (yes I’m quoting that meme). It has to possess serendipity - the “2.0″ has to be opaque to the ordinary user.

Current models are too simplistic. For instance, people assume different roles for different tasks within a few minutes, and that impacts the importance of relationships (or network importance) - how are we to differentiate? Visible Path is on the right track among all the companies I’ve been reading about IMHO vis a vis the application of networks for the real world. However, I for one am not smart enough to crack this by myself!

The rich social data needed is just too sparse at the moment. The adoption of microformats, and the sharing of social data via services has to move a bit more first.
The social data within an enterprise is rich - but too disorganized and dispersed for it to be useful. Forget about data hygiene - CDR (call data records - i.e. telephone), e-mails, address books don’t reflect relationships as accurately as consumer social networks do. And as anyone who’s worked in a big company knows, there is no replacement for the human “feel good” equity that official communication networks just can’t reflect. Unless we drill down to conversational semantics… but that’s a pandora’s box.

I also have more opinions than this but I’ll end this post here for now. But one thing’s for sure - the hype is there, and I’m fascinated by it!