Is Wikipedia getting into social networking?

Whoa – Is Wikipedia getting into social networking? I’m a fan of Wikipedia. I know a lot of people claim it’s useless because the information is not fully vetted, some finer points on entries are debated and any entry might easily be manipulated, but I still find it a useful resource. I trust that the site is going to be around in a year (I hope!) and I always verify the that the info in a given entry is accurate for my needs. But when I read they might be getting into social networking I found myself thinking “huh?”. Thankfully, it looks like more of a teasing headline (which, of course, I used here for the same “sensational” reason). Here’s some detail from download squad’s post:

We’ve been hearing bits and pieces of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ big plans for a search engine for a while now. But it’s never been entirely clear how this human-powered search engine would look. Would it be more like Google or Mahalo?


South African blogger Matthew Buckland raises a third option that we hadn’t considered. It could look a lot like Facebook.


Last night Wales showed a few screenshots of his new search project to a South African audience. Buckland was in attendance, and he says some of the screenshots looked exactly like Facebook profile pages. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that your search results are going to take you to social networking style pages. Honestly, that doesn’t even make much sense. If you’re searching for information on Abraham Lincoln, you probably don’t expect to find his MySpace page.

Read more here: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/11/16/is-wikipedia-getting-into-social-networking/

Whew, my head was spinning in trying to figure out the whole Wikipedia Social hoo-ha, hopefully it stays on track with it’s core model of serving great information on wide-ranging topics, and stay away from Facebook, Friendster, etc. models.

Will The Future Of Social Networking Be Email Based?

Interesting post over at download squad on the future of social networking: Social networks of the future could be email based:

While Facebook, Friendster and MySpace are the big names in social networking these days, tomorrow’s social networking giants could be Yahoo! and Google. And we’re not talking about Google’s OpenSocial platform.


The New York Times’ Saul Hansel suggests that Yahoo! and Google are working on bringing social networking features to your email account. Think about it. What’s the first thing that happens when you sign up for Facebook? The service scans your email address book to find friends who are already members. There’s a lot of valuable information in your inbox. So it makes sense that the companies providing your email service might want to build on that information and give you a few more reasons to stick around their site all day.

Read more here: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/11/13/social-networks-of-the-future-could-be-email-based/

As a lot of the comments from the post suggest, this actually seems like a step back to 1990’s where folks used email forums very effectively, so we know this model will work. I think the question is more who will adopt the email based social networking and give up the more “social” aspects of it. It’s an interesting shift in the industry as folks look for ways to consolidate their social network information & contacts and get the most bang for their buck.