Think Social Networking is Kid Stuff? Think Again.

If you think the explosion of social networking is relegated to the high school and college crowd, you might be surprised at the results of a recent survey on online social networking. The survey, conducted by the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp – formerly HRI) revealed that 65% of business professionals are clicking and connecting via personal and professional social networking Web sites.


“We expected to see a number of respondents utilizing social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook for personal reasons, but we were intrigued at the high percentage of business professionals that use social networking for professional purposes,” says Jay Jamrog, i4cp’s SVP of Research. “In an age where more and more employees work remotely and people frequently change companies, it makes sense that the business community would turn to the Web to stay connected.”


The most popular sites for professional use? Tops in the survey by far was LinkedIn, a site aimed at the business professional, followed by Yahoo! 360 and MySpace, which is more often associated with a younger generation.


Now Social Networking is facing a new revolution - interconnectivity. Traditional Social Networks live on the Web and are available as a Web Service.

A new Santa Monica Start-Up named eBlizz, is about to change this. eBlizz is a piece of Software that allows you to connect with your various Social Networks and do what you really want to do with your contacts - share and communicate in an easy and enjoyable way.

eBlizz describes itself as a "The personal Scrapbook for your Internet life". As a user, you can "collect, connect and display all your interests in an easy-to-use online tool". Not only do you have all your various contacts from your Social Networks and Email Tool such as Outlook at hand but you can actually move data in "collections" or "Scrapbook pages" from one set of contects to another.

eBlizz is thus combining many activities you today have to exercise in more than one Software Tool. Pieces of information, if pictures, videos, text snippets or documents and files, can be collected and presented in a new form, even from off the Internet and Web Sites without actually downloading, and then shared with your friends and interest groups.

This concept is a new User-Centric approach to what so many Social Networks are trying to achieve in a Web-Centric way today. The advantages with eBlizz is the Peer Network that the multitude of users build together. A swarm of users can share much higher bandwidth than any Web Service might achieve with far less resources and the whole network profits from the information beeing shared.

If eBlizz will be able to stir up the world of Social Networks is yet for the users will decide. It is an exciting new concept which I believe have lots of merit because of the strong interconnectivity component and new ways of communication it allows for.

The Social Network Practitioner Consensus Survey was conducted by i4cp, in conjunction with HR.com, in May 2007. A total of 323 organizations participated.