*goes for coffee*

Can it be that rather than the meaning you cited here, the reason could be the fact that Facebook and MySpace are “kid places” for college students?

Merriam-Webster gives several meanings:

1: involving allies or confederates
2 a: marked by or passed in pleasant companionship with one’s friends or associates
b: sociable
c: of, relating to, or designed for sociability
3: of or relating to human society, the interaction of the individual and the group, or the welfare of human beings as members of society
4 a: tending to form cooperative and interdependent relationships with others of one’s kind : gregarious
b: living and breeding in more or less organized communities
c of a plant : tending to grow in groups or masses so as to form a pure stand
5 a: of, relating to, or based on rank or status in a particular society
b: of, relating to, or characteristic of the upper classes
c: formal
6: being such in social situations

Just my thoughts, it is a good post.

Lisa Katz

The big societal transformation taking place is connecting people to each other for information and knowledge exchange, listening and collaborating, and driving value and outcomes. Effectively, that takes place in networks – open (public networks) closed (working teams) and hybrids (open and closed) where the public and working teams work together.

Every organization of humans is a network. Social networks aggregate people first, who connect to form relationships. Other types of networks connect people for a purpose – usually solving a specific problem. Networks form in all conceivable ways and dimensions. They all look very different depending upon their purpose and the strength of the network.

Some networks form to build commerce through relationships – the Social Web. Some form to achieve continuous business improvement by building collective intelligence (imagine a group of lawyers who collaborative with diverse experience to build a model act – often from different states, some practitioners, some judges, some academics. This is the smart web – also a dimension of using engagement to build value and to drive outcomes.

One of the challenges for the legal profession is that it largely is built on an organizing principle of advocacy – meaning that the best results are achieved through strenuous argument of divergent viewpoints. The world is moving in the opposite direction. Most societal institutions in business and government view collaboration as a way to eliminate the transactional barriers (and costs) that are largely created by the advocacy model.

What the social networking sites have accomplished is that they have shown the world that it is possible to interact as a way of life. You can engage with others geographically dispersed with both similar and different interests. That is the really big deal.

The point is that in law, the engagement can drive value through collective intelligence. But don’t confuse the working tools -peer to peer social networking tools like facebook, myspace, etc., – with the network architecture that is going to best serve working processes (many of which you will find have a social element designed to build peer trust). Those are two very different things.

I practiced law for over 20 years, became very frustrated with the inefficiencies and counter productiveness of many of the legal structures and the business model, and co-founded and built an enterprise social networking company for a period of over 9 years. See http://www.neighborhoodamerica.com/corporate and watch the video for insight. I also have a podcast series on related topics. See web.mac.com/kpkobza for Inflection.

This theme that you are raising is extremely important. Just raise the bar on the discussion and it will elevate the possibilities.