Sitting in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport this morning, I hear on Headline News: “Social Network” and “Corporate” in the same sentence. Then I hear the goofball reporting asks: “we’re not talking about MySpace and Facebook are we?” - the other lady reporter replies with a quirky smile, and rolling eyes: “um, yeh.”

I cease to be amazed at the relative ignorance our society is still burdened with. Sometimes I even find myself curious with the idea that we are THE technically advanced society - knowing full well that we are not even close.

But, back to the idea of social network in a corporate environment. There’s a fundamental, piercing point here. Knowledge. MySpace is all about the knowledge of friendship. What are my friends doing? What do my friends like and where do we link? A communications platform is just the enabler to this knowledge. Corporate and organizations have the very same needs as teenagers. Enough said.

There’s an obvious distinction between MySpace and Facebook. Facebook has done extremely well to maintain levels of professionalism (covering academia and commercial environments). But, not so obvious is Facebook’s impressive architecture as a development/delivery platform. It is so simple to create extended functionality and make it available to the Facebook masses that the real worry is that the platform will become a dumping ground of useless applications. But, that mess is much easier to deal with - compared to MySpace’s teenorama userbase.

So, to the dumbarse news reporter on Headline News: “um, yeh!”