Organizations have always looked to their IT departments for the expertise and creativity to develop new products and services. However, the productivity of IT teams varies widely, in part because of the vastly differing access to tools and technologies that organizations provide to these workers to support the way in which they work. This fact has serious implications when we consider three major changes now taking place in the as relates to social computing since these changes are increasingly having an impact to the ways people interact with each other.

Therefore, the concept of social computing is of particular interest to this author because “a large number of new applications and services that facilitate collective action and social interaction online with rich exchange of multimedia information and evolution of aggregate knowledge have come to dominate the Web” (Schneider, 2006, p. 15).

A key feature of the new social computing trends is the use of easy-to-use, lightweight, mostly open-source computing tools. Examples include blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, peer-to-peer networks, open source communities, photo and video sharing communities, and online business networks. Many of the popular online networks have been growing dramatically; with the most spectacular examples being Facebook and YouTube, “each of which have attracted significantly high investments from leading players in the industry; both the growth and the high profile investments resemble events from the dot-com era” (Schneider, 2006, p. 16). It is important to note that despite being lightweight and mostly free, these tools do not compromise quality, and indeed many enterprise computing applications do make use of them in demanding environments.

Turban et al. (2012) define social computing as “computing that is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and information systems” (p. 14). Much of this shift to social computing is due to the wide availability of broadband connectivity and more powerful personal computers that social computing has started growing phenomenally. “Collectively, social computing represents the next step in the evolution of the Web, with great potential for social and business impact” (Schneider, 2006, p. 20). Currently, much of the business interest in social online networks is in the fields of content distribution and advertising; however, the potential impact and opportunities for businesses extend far beyond that.

Social computing shifts computing to the edges of the network, and empower individual users with relatively low technological sophistication in using the Web to manifest their creativity, engage in social interaction, contribute their expertise, share content, collectively build new tools, disseminate information and propaganda, and assimilate collective bargaining power. As Turban et al. (20012) suggest, “ the premise of social computing is to make socially produced information available to all” (p. 14). Thus, many organizations will be faced with a shift of market power to networks of consumers that critique their products and express their preferences for changes. “Lightweight computational tools that can be blended together (mashed up) and open source software will allow grassroots innovation that can threaten existing software and launch new business models” (Schneider, 2006, p. 25). Communities formed around specific products can hold a wealth of finely segmented demand information.

The emphasis on lightweight computing tools may be seen as a shift from servers to the edge. This shift is part of a larger trend of empowerment of the edge consequent to broadband connectivity and cheaper, plentiful computing resources at the edge, which is also demonstrated in the growth of P2P networks and applications like Skype, which not only move the content to the edge, but also move much of the communications to the edge as well. Thus we see content, communications, and computing shifting to the edge. Interestingly, these tools lower the barrier to entry for individual users into application development and participation, as well as for small businesses into markets dominated by large software vendors. They share characteristics such as being easy to learn, access to wide range of functionality with library of modules.

“Taken together, the social computing tools and some of the applications and tools that go under the umbrella term of Web 2.0 allow the user to create an information space around him or her” (Schneider, 2006, p. 34). This information space may include content and applications used by him or her, as well as created by him or her; and may span a wide variety of things: e-mail, pictures, journal entries, music, video, contacts, calendar, spreadsheets, podcasts, bookmarks, chat transcripts, location information, or work-related content.

Therefore, the importance of adapting to these changes can prepare organizations to anticipate new opportunities as well ties into the courses objective of learning to “analyze electronic commerce in business models” (MKT640 Learning Guide, 2006, p. iii). Further, social computing impacts society itself, in various domains: in politics, debates on social issues, globalization, media and censorship, and may be leveraged gainfully.

The value to the user is immediately apparent, and so is the potential to generate value for various collectives. Equally important is the profound implications it holds for businesses in providing value to users. These spaces represent repositories of preference information, consumption patterns, social trends, market segmentation information, and opportunity for customization at very fine granularity, including location, community, and at individual levels.

Organizations that find ways of creatively extracting and leveraging information from these spaces so as to provide enhanced value to the customer using the information gathered can be immensely successful. Examples would be Google’s advertisements in Gmail, and Amazon.com’s recommendation engine. On the other hand, if the intersection of the business with customer information space is intrusive or adds clutter, being exploitative without adding significant value, such efforts can fail and may drain value from the user as well as the online communities. The usage of social software tools by individual participants transforms Web pages from being static documents to front-end interfaces for computing platforms. Thus, from being a global information repository, the Web is in transition to becoming a global computing infrastructure, thereby beginning to realize the vision of a distributed computing platform. The key difference with mainstream distributed computing initiatives would be that they tend to be centralized in allocation of tasks, resources and control of membership, while the current trends are decentralized to an extreme degree, introducing high levels of unpredictability, spontaneity, innovation, and scalability into the system.

In conclusion, social computing platforms have opened an exciting new dimension to the Internet. They take the information infrastructure beyond a channel for communication and commerce to an environment for organizing human endeavor, facilitating social interactions, and empowering creativity. “The new, and increasingly user-friendly tools and applications popularized by social computing reduce technology dependency for the average user in participating in the information revolution, thereby empowering Internet users” (Schneider, 2006, p. 133). Social computing holds promise of significant transformational and disruptive power in business, computing, in realms of collective action like politics, creative enterprise like film-making, and in content and entertainment fields like interactive distribution.

References:

Schneider, G. (2011). Electronic Commerce (9th ed.). Course Technology, Cengage Learning: Boston

Scott, D. M. (2011). The new rules of marketing and PR: How to use social media, online video, mobile applications, blogs, news releases, and viral marketing to reach buyers directly. John Wiley & Sons: Hoboken, New Jersey

Turban, E., King, D., Lee, J., Liang, T., & Turban, D. (2012). Electronic Commerce: A managerial and social networks perspective. Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, New Jersey