Getting Social?

Social networking is the big hit of the last half decade and - in spite of some skepticism - they are getting a solid part of our life. No wonder that business start to exploit the benefits provided by them; company or product profiles are produced, communities build, companies use social networking for internal communication ... The question is how far we could stretch this paradigm. 

Let think of it. Employees have access to several services, most of them are accessed only (in the near future that will be the standard, in many cases it is already).  However not only employees are using our systems but contractors, partners, vendors and customers (maybe auditors and authorities too).  Login should be single sign on nobody wants to manage different logins for every service. In that sense user gains access not to a service but to the company. If you login to a company you would like to see all services it's provides - a start page. On the start page you see not only the applications but news, the company Internet, financial information, link to the company web shop... What you see depends on which groups you belong too. And naturally you would like to set up your preferences with other words manage your profile. And you also want to collaborate, chat, distribute information, and so on. For me this is a social network. 

Companies are administered hierarchically while social networks not. However the contradiction is small; it's easy to imagine that e.g. the owner of a company has access to every service and she distributes the rights to different people and groups (like if you create a blog and decide who has access to it). She naturally may revoke it as well. It's possible - like in a "real" social network that you cancel or lose access to a group (like a company) but keep your profile.