Social Web Taxonomy

This posting is inspired by a posting by Jack Vinson at Knowledge Jolt. The blog is missing today but I’ll link to it if it returns. {link working now} The posting was titled “Various social networking and communications technologies by Jack Vinson.”
Anyway there are many social technologies and applications. Building on Jack’s list, I think they might be thought about in the following buckets:
Social Communication
Social Content
Social Sharing
Social Collaborative Applications
Social Networking
Face to Face
Here’s some examples (perhaps an attempt to define by example too):
Social Communication
audio conferencing
e-mail
instant messaging
threaded discussions
discussion lists
presence management (ie. Twitter)
phone
fax
chat (many-to-many)
postal (snail) mail
Social Content
wikis
blogs
tagging
forums
open access model publishing
tag clouds
Connotea
Flickr
Delicious
LibraryThing
sometimes web pages (static / informational)
podcasts
open source software
Social Sharing
communities of practice (CoP) software
groupware / teamspace (asynchronous)
knowledge portal
SharePoint
Lotus Notes
Google Apps or Zoho
Social Collaborative Applications
videoconferencing (WeBex, LiveMeeting)
virtual meeting tool (synchronous)
group decision tools
project management tools
shared calendars
development support tool (IDE)
document versioning tool
file servers / VPN
Social Networking
Facebook
MySpace
Mixi
Bebo
Academici
Face to Face
watercooler
coffee pot! Bar, Starbucks meetings
lunch / dinner
hot dog cart
conferences
meetings
parties
unconferences
hackfests
I don’t intend this to ever be final in any way or even remotely comprehensive. I am just trying to find a way to differentiate all of the new social tools we have virtually and physically in order to think about them more clearly – before they all merge like porridge. Right now I am finding it very useful to distinguish social networking from social content in conversations. We also need to separate the emerging demand for metadata about living people in social networks from content metadata (including writings, authors, etc.). I think it helps the discussion to draft a few ideas for comment.
Stephen