Ten biggest problems with most existing Social Software tools:

1. Inflexible, tedious information architecture ("Why is entering this field mandatory?")
2. Profile poverty ("This tells me absolutely nothing of value about this person")
3. No separation between What I Have and What I Need personas (the information about you I care about depends on whether I am 'buying' or 'selling' -- even classified ads 'get' this)
4. Lack of harvesting capability ("Why do I have to enter this again?")
5. Populated just-in-case instead of canvassed just-in-time ("Oh, sorry, I no longer work there" and "Oops, sorry, I'm married now")
6. The most needed people have the least time and motivation to participate
7. Over-engineered and unintuitive
8. Lack of scalability and resilience: Centralized instead of peer-to-peer (when it gets too big or goes down, you're out of luck)
9. Socially awkward ("I'm not going to tell someone I've never met that!")
10. Low signal-to-noise ratio because of dysfunctional information behaviors (blockages, disconnects, lack of trust) -- these need to be accommodated by Social Software tools, instead of ignored

Once we get these problems solved, Social Networking is poised for tremendous growth, and because its value proposition is so compelling, might just be the application that attracts the 80% of the population still on the other side of the digital divide.

Value Propositions:

• Find, contact & contract with people more effectively,
• Tap the wisdom of crowds (close info gaps, improve quality of decisions and accuracy of predictions, improve business processes, assess causalities),
• Facilitate virtual collaboration,
• Improve the context & understandability of information
• Understand why things are the way they are
• Improve K-worker effectiveness

Strategy:

Stories and conversations automatically canvassed from shared personal repositories for learning and discovery

Content Format:

Graphic & multimedia, organized by application (ontology)

Model:

Connect, canvass, synthesize (Just in Time)

Why did we largely fail to achieve the first-generation KM value propositions?:

• We set unreasonably high expectations
• We over-relied on voluntary user contributions to repositories
• The content we harvested was largely context-poor
• The Tragedy of the Commons (no one took pride of ownership in shared repositories

We allowed technology companies to co-opt the term KM for software, to the point many companies started to think that is all KM was about ("which KM solution software should we buy?")

focusing on aggregating contributed content and 'integrated solutions', instead of on connection to people and on their knowledge in context in simple, intuitive, stand-alone apps.

In our rush to achieve illusory cost savings and productivity improvements from first-generation KM, we failed to take into account very human 'information behaviors' that impede the sharing of knowledge and collaboration.