Foresights
Social computing
What is it?
Social computing is a collective term encompassing a wide and ever-growing range of applications that allow groups of individuals to connect with each other in different ways. Based around the creation of communities, the sharing of knowledge, and bottom-up collective action, social computing is exemplified by developments such as Wikis (electronic documents developed collaboratively by a community of contributors); social networking Web sites such as Friendster and Dodgeball; applications that enable the sharing, classification, and tagging of photographs and Web pages (such as Flickr and Del.ic.ious respectively); and open source applications that often combine and enhance established software in new and interesting ways.
Driven by the availability of an ever-expanding bubble of cheap or free network connectivity that began with WiFi hot spots, and the willingness of communities of people to tag, classify, and share resources and information so that it can be shared among a group, this new breed of applications is seen by some pundits as the Internet realizing its true potential as an enabler for the exploitation of collective intelligence, co-operation, collaboration, and wider social change.
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