Once again, Stowe Boyd’s thinking on social networks and social software (in his latest Darwin magazine article on the topic, The Barriers of Content and Context ) resonates.

We have different social networks (personal, family, and even different work contexts) and have yet to see differentiation in the software becoming available that lets us convey the context of a connection. Stowe also argues for a future in which content — content about the nature of connections as well as the content passed among connections — is more easily expressed. He concludes:

Social tools, i.e., software designed to intentionally shape culture, are going to become the cornerstone of a revolution in information technology. Social networking applications, one variant of social tools, will rapidly expand in functionality through the integration of conventional and innovative approaches to counter the context-and-content limitations of today’s applications.