Assignment:
As a reply to this post discuss the concept of social computing within the business; some considerations you may want to addresss in your discussion: define social computing, the value of it within the business, how to evaluate and select proper technology to fulfill internal/external requirements, and increasing overall usage (after implementation).
Social computing really describes two separate phenomena within computing technology. One of these probably comes to mind first for most people: technology that facilitates being social online. This includes blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and social search, Foursquare, wikis and any similar Web 2.0 products. These computing solutions allow people to connect more easily, to share more readily and to be social in situations where this would have been difficult or impossible (due to distance, expense, etc.) in the past. The second area of social computing is kind of an extension off the idea of wikis and relates more to businesses: collaboration. New social computing tools make it much easier for groups of people to collaborate on projects, ideas, documents, presentations and more. Email has always been a pretty ineffcient medium for collaboration - say a group is editing a document and then forwarding it to other members on the project, suddenly there are multiple versions of the document floating around, it may be difficult to determine which one is most recent. New edits may be made to an old version, causing things to be disconnected and may lead to challenges for the group. In the past there was often a desire to have people in close proximity to help alleviate these problems, but social computing has made it possible for a group to consist of people from across the country and still be effective. Google Docs provides real time collaboration, numerous open source software projects couldn't exist if it weren't for social computing, and tools like Skype or other video conferencing applications help to make working with others digitally easier and more effective.