In the nineties, back when the domain registration system hadn’t been totally gamed and broken, I registered ‘socialcomputing.org.’ The site went through a few iterations and then went dark; I’ll launch a new blog there soon, so the link is live, but don’t bother clicking on it.

No way was I smart enough to think up the phrase ‘social computing’ on my own; instead, I got it from the work of John Seely Brown, then at Xerox PARC. The first reference to the term I can find in his work is a 1995 article he co-wrote with Estee Solomon Gray, which appeared in the kick-off issue of Fastcompany in October 1995. Perhaps he or someone else used “social computing” earlier – if so, please let us know in a comment to this post.

Now, this is before Netscape went public, people, before we were the web. So why do I bring it up?

The term “Enterprise 2.0” – which Andrew McAfee came up with to describe “the use of freeform social software within companies” and which has been extended in common usage to include any way that businesses incorporate “Web 2.0” practices initiated on the WWW – has had many salutary effects. It is a handy moniker; it is simple enough to be flexible and flexible enough to keep things simple; it’s given analyst firms a way to create and fill matrices; heck, it may even have spawned an industry.

Now, names are either ostensive (pointing at something) or descriptive (telling you something about what they point at), and “Enterprise 2.0” hasn’t helped very much on the latter front. In fact, recent posts here and elsewhere about whether and how Enterprise 2.0 will succeed or fail indicate that in some ways this excellent name may be obscuring what it names:

1. If Enterprise 2.0 succeeds, does that mean that enterprises will “change.” I.e., will enterprises be organized differently? Will they become peer-to-peer, the way Skype is? Democratic the way a wiki is? Spelled oddly, the way del.icio.us is? (just joking…) In other words, does “Enterprise 2.0” portend a version 2.0 of the enterprise itself? Joe McKendrick has written about this controversy here.

2. If Enterprise 2.0 succeeds, does that mean that working in an enterprise will change? Will the nature of enterprise work become more creative, more innovative, more collaborative, more… what? Will work become different – and if so, how?

3. If Enterprise 2.0 succeeds, will we all be working in wikis? Or, to invert that question, if many enterprise workers use “freeform social software” ala Andrew McAfee, will that mean Enterprise 2.0 has succeeded?

I want to use my contributions to this blog to discuss these and related issues. I want to use the term “social computing” as a handy, descriptive term to orient my discussion. Now, long ago someone said “to the wise, a hint is sufficient.” So, here is a hint. I think the questions above are mostly false, and I think they may be getting in the way of understanding what’s going on in this new era of computing. I hope you’ll help me figure out what is going on!