Shelly Farnham on Social Computing

How many buddies are on your IM list? Do you use a service like LinkedIn or Ryze to keep track of business relationships? Are you part of one of the many virtual worlds like Second Life or World of Warcraft? All of these semi-social technologies are the domain of Shelly Farnham, a former member of the Social Computing Group at Microsoft Research turned freelance researcher in communication, social networking, social coordination and community development in the online space. In April 2005, Shelly coordinated the Social Computing Symposium with a goal of putting researchers and industry types from the social computing space in a fishbowl to see what might happen. In this post-Search-Champs interview, Chris talked to Shelly about social computing, social experiments and social lubrication.