On Leveraging Social Web Sites

Today hundreds of thousands of online communities are flourishing. Hundreds of millions of people all over the world make use of social applications, such social Web sites, Internet portals, blogs, wikis, etc. The mega sites, such as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr have shown the essential features and computing infrastructures necessary to keep gigantic online communities going. Now that we have seen that people accept online communities as a means to extend their personal networks and entertain themselves, it is time to find how other more productive areas of human endeavors, such as businesses and government agencies, may be improved by leveraging the wisdom of the online communities, and the features and computing infrastructures to support online communities. In this paper, we will examine the status of such efforts, and discuss some of the issues to be addressed.