Monday, November 3, 2008

Social Networking

We have been repeatedly asked by our clients “Why we are still slow on social applications? “We are supposed to be the first on every aspect of technologies.

True, that we have not yet launched any great social application, but that does not mean we are not doing anything. Extensive research is being done on various social platforms as well as the neural and psychological understanding of social networking at our end.

Let me explain in brief, what we are trying to drive.

Our take on Social Networking

Social Networking has become a hip thing after the advent of Web 2.0.The fact is, in the true sense Social Networking has nothing to do with technology. The Networking and social interaction are intrinsic aspect of human behavior and is been studied for hundreds of years.

What technology brings is ease, reach and speed of communication and interaction. It is just an enabler and catalyst in the existing need of networking in the human behavior and to understand, exploit true potential of the networking and directing the activities towards tangible benefits, one needs to look at the qualitative aspect of communities.

“Is it important to have +500 connections on Linkedin?”

It is not really important to have quantitative connections rather we propose to have qualitative connections.

We divide connections further in three categories (driving the analogy from Human Connections)
The Connections can be broadly defined in three categories.
1. Family Relationships
2. Acquaintances
3. Friends or associates

The first is one which is born with and the network evolves with evolving family ties. We would not consider these connections as topic of this discussion. The later two is where we are working hands-on on establishing the relevance in enterprise space.

Acquaintance is defined as a person whom one knows, but who is not particularly close. I am sure you understand what we are trying to drive at. Having large acquaintances does not necessarily make the network effective.

The last category is of friends, are largely business associates.

In a classroom or in enterprise environment, you may know 100 but you would always have 5 to 10 individuals you consider close or friends. What we are trying to study is how we can understand, in a sample of 100 how brain identifies those critical connections and develop relations.

These matched connections would form the Qualitative Network

The study shows that there are various features and parameters on which the communities are established, and not all of them are objective. This is where the complexity of Quantitative Social networking comes in picture. From the database of 1000s, identifying the quantitative and usable communication is a challenge & we are taking time in exploring this challenge.

Our efforts are directed towards identifying and defining what we call “Atomic Structure of an individual”, which is in the form of objective profiles and subjective inferences. Then forming “Covalent Bonds” between two or more object becomes a rule based automated and self evolving methodology.

Presently the Research & Application team at i.Realities is involved in creating some of the enterprise applications for our clients. Our first application will be rolled out by early next year.
What we have observed is, this framework fits in every aspect of a consumer as well as enterprise applications.

We are sure now one understands why we believe not to get carried with the hype and take our clients for a ride.