Social software: fun and games, or business tools

This is the era of social networking, collective intelligence, participation, collaborative creation, and bor-derless distribution. Every day we are bombarded with more publicity about collaborative environments, news feeds, blogs, wikis, podcasting, webcasting, folksonomies, social bookmarking, social citations, collab-orative filtering, recommender systems, media sharing, massive multiplayer online games, virtual worlds, and mash-ups. This sort of anarchic environment appeals to the digital natives, but which of these so-called ‘Web 2.0 ’ technologies are going to have a real business impact? This paper addresses the impact that issues such as quality control, security, privacy and bandwidth may have on the implementation of social net-working in hide-bound, large organizations