Social networking seems to get all the buzz lately. I know I've talked about it a lot. Facebook has gotten a huge amount of attention as a social networking portal. I see Facebook quite differently than many people do, and I'm honestly still evaluating its potential. Facebook is maturing beyond it's roots as a college social networking tool, but I think it's still finding its way in the business world. While it may work well for solo entrepreneurs in the tech sector, I don't think we've seen a value proposition for enterprise business with Facebook. That will be harder to build. Since for me, social networks and business networks are one and the same, or overlap almost entirely, I treat them alike.

I've said many times that for me, my social network doesn't live anywhere in an online network, but rather in my mobile phone. I was a very early user of Twitter (back when it was Twttr), long before the adoption flood that came with the SXSW conference. Twitter has suffered some growing pains and service issues, but gained recent funding and is wildly popular.

I was drawn to Jaiku for a number of reasons. For me, it serves as a lifestream aggregator in addition to status. Jaiku allows incorporation of a number of RSS feeds - blogs, Flickr, blit.tv, YouTube and such.  Beyond that, I've been involved in the beta testing of a Symbian client for Jaiku that provides easy, constant contact with my social network and it provides location awareness through naming and tracking of cell phone towers. When I'm at work, it knows I'm at work. If I'm at home, it knows I'm at home. It knows when I'm at the doctor, off to Seattle or camping in my 5th wheel down on the Oregon coast. And it allows me to share that with my friends. I like that a lot myself.

Because these tools involve mobile devices, VoIP solutions, and can be tremendous boosters to productivity, I think they play a role in unified comunications space.

Now we've got a new entrant emerging in the space called Kakiloc. It's in controlled beta at the moment.

Kakiloc is a Location-Based Social Network
With Kakiloc you can :

• Discover where your friends are
• Follow their journey in real-time on Google Maps
• Send messages to them
• Be notified when they physically reach a specific place
• Create reminder for yourself when you are near a specific area
• And even find new friends that are visiting the same spots as you.

It's an interesting approach, and another fresh glimpse of how we might couple tie location, presence and availability together with our social and business networks in new ways.

I'll be watching Kakiloc closely and keep you posted as it unfolds.


Technorati Tags: social networks, Kakiloc, unified communications