Yet another business angle to social technology. This time, Business 2.0 magazine votes "Social Networking Applications" as Technology of the Year. The bulk of the short article concerns technology that lets users discover new relationships from exisitng ones - useful for building new business contacts, as the main example highlights.

Current systems are simply huge data mining systems that archives everything about everyone and tries to make connections based on what it finds. In short, it does the spy-work for you and this has privacy implications.

And that's another argument for a decentralised approach to what is becoming a useful and commercially viable technology.

Article: Business 2.0 full article: Best New Technology 2003