Social Networking Moves from the Dorm Room to the Board Room

Update to Socializing for Money

Social networking is evolving into commercial networking for another e-commerce business.  Visible Path is a social networking site where users do not create home pages, profiles, or blogs.  Instead, the site stores information about the people with whom its users communicate and then helps those users discover common contacts which will facilitate business relationships. 

Though it may be unintended, the site seems to be a practical application of the Six Degrees of Separation Theory which states that any person can be connected to any other person through a chain of acquaintances which includes six or fewer people.  At Visible Path, the “acquaintances” are business contacts but the theory and the site seem to share a common conceptual basis:  the number of acquaintances grows exponentially as the number of links in the chain increases, so that only a few links are required to connect any person to another.

For more about Visible Path, see the article at BusinessWeek online:  MySpace for the Office.

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