The Trend of Social Networking. Isn’t it great?

Saturday night, in the membership meeting reception, Gary introdcued the new INFORMS website, which utilized a ton of social networking functions. Now I am doing this blog thing and I feel it is great. Isn’t the changing technology one of the best things ever happened to us? However, what is really the business value of social networking? Why people want to blog? How does it diffuse? There are so many questions remaining, that prohibit people to take the full advantage of this emerging technology.

CIST presented its best paper awards yesterday. The best student paper award and the best conference paper award winners both provided great insight on this issue.

The best student paper: “Informational Value of Social Networks: An Empirical Study of Online Peer-to-Peer Lending” by Mingfeng Lin address the issue of micro lending via social networks.

The best conference paper “Consumer Choice in an online music community” by Jui Ramaprasad and Sanjeev Dewan addressed how people share musics via social networks.

I am sure there will be many more such topics coming. So exciting and so looking forward. Any comments people? Any OM research on social networking yet? Please feed me in.