Social Networking Technologies - Another Point of View

As everybody is talking more and more about social networks and how important they are for the humanity as well as for businesses, it is necessary to keep the need of adapting technologies in your mind, as well.

There are two main possibilities to socialize with each other either on an internet basis or face to face. When doing it the old fashioned way, you don’t rely on technologies. You just meet for a coffee or have a normal business meeting in the office and talk to each other. But nevertheless, the demand of having globalized networks becomes more and more important. You have to have telephone conferences or video meetings with other offices of your company or your customer through the whole world. Hence, you are depending on technologies like the newest telephone system or servers for your company computer network for virtual community.

When searching for information regarding social network technologies, you mostly end up finding interesting things like the article of:

“Social Networking Technologies: A “Poke“ for Campus Services” of Joanne Berg, Lori Berquam, and Kathy Christoph, published in EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 42, no. 2 (March/April 2007). The article deals with social technologies as a new strategy to communication on campus between students and academic services to simplify it and to provide a host for e-learning and campus activities, etc. The authors claim that it is necessary to identify good opportunities and to use them in a high educated world to get things changed. Furthermore, this article describes how they installed the social network technology at their campus in Winsconsin-Madison, USA.

http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume42/SocialNetworkingTechnologiesAP/158119

„Social Networking 3.0“ of Wade Roush, published in Technology Review (November 18, 2005). The second interesting article describes some of the most famous networking technologies like LinkedIn and why they would have won the competition for "Internet Buzzword of the Year," if such a price would be regarded. The authors describe that supplementing one's everyday, real-life interactions with virtual ones through social-networking sites simply adds to the overstimulation. Additionally, they think that a membership in an online social network may replace the traditional belonging to a organization like the Boy Scouts or the local Neighborhood Watch in future.

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/15908/

While still searching through the world wide web, I could not find something about the technology your computer is relying on when talking about latest social network technologies. Maybe it is due to my background that I expected real technology behind the meaning of social networking technologies in the beginning. But you have to dig much deeper into the ground to find information regarding these issues. Never forget that your nice and shiny laptop in front of you consists of the state of the art technology. The reason why you are able to use the normally described social network technologies is this device together with your internet connection. And what is true for the private is valid for the business world as well. The higher the demand of creating knowledge and sharing knowledge for a business is, the more important it is to have fast and safe tool to use for this purpose.

To achieve the necessary data velocity in the internet and to cover the flood of information exchange a further development of the semiconductor industry is unavoidable. According to Moore’s Law the data density doubles every 18 month. Thus, the structure size of the semiconductor chip of your needed networking tools has to get smaller and smaller. To achieve this request, the technology behind this structuring has to work on the edge of technology and to improve further.

Please, have a look on how this is done by reading the following articles of ASML, one of the world's leading providers of lithography systems for the semiconductor industry, manufacturing complex machines that are critical to the production of integrated circuits or microchips:

„EUV Lithography: The next generation” of ASML, published 2005/06/01. With this draft a customer friendly way was chosen to explain how the new lithography technology is working to produce. In addition, it is described what challenges (new light sources, adaption of a whole industry) are still in front of us to meet the demand of us customers.

http://www.asml.com/asml/show.do?ctx=13559&rid=14010

“Enhancing hard disk drives with ASML technology” of ASML, published 2009/06/09. The second article of ASML tells a story about the enhancement of hard disk drives. Here, they explain their progress in developing a niche product in their product portfolio by working close with customers and engineers.

http://www.asml.com/asml/show.do?ctx=13559&rid=38726

By choosing these two articles, I hope that I have not bothered you too much with technology slang. Furthermore, I wanted to give you a start point for further research if you are more interest to know why you are able to social network at all.

In a nutshell: When computer networks link people as well as machines, they become social networks, as already Barry Wellman, Janet Salaff, Dimitrina Dimitrova, Laura Garton, Milena Gulia, and Caroline Haythornthwaite said in their article “Computer Networks as Social Networks: Collaborative Work, Telework, and Virtual Community”.

http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146%2Fannurev.soc.22.1.213

Such computer-supported social networks (CSSNs) are becoming important bases of virtual communities, computer-supported cooperative work, and telework. Thus, if businesses try to be successfully in future social networks are the business drivers as already posted by Lennart Bösch in this blog. But be successfully means also to have access to the newest and best technologies to be time efficient for instant. In my opinion, it is necessary to follow not only the latest trends in social networking but also to consider the latest technology developments behind it. Thus, you already know what to look for when installing a computer-supported social network in your business or organization.

And by the way, forcing a company to develop new technologies means also to install new social networks due to collaborations with research institutes and new suppliers, for example.