Do you consider your interactions on sites like Facebook and Twitter to be computing? Are you working with someone in tandem in order to accomplish a task ? Or are you just chatting about last weekends BBQ and how burnt the hot dogs were? These interactions have very different contexts, which fundamentally mean different things to people.

In an article Joe Fletcher wrote for Johnny Holland, he talks about the limitations and misconceptions of using popular social sites for social computing. I agree that with many of the online collaborative tools available, not many do a proper job supporting true collaboration. However, how he describes Facebook and Twitter as a social computing environment is inaccurate due to the nature of the interactions that occur there. It can be argued that some of the Facebook application available extend its service to support social computing, but Facebook’s core purpose is to establish relationships.

In my mind, there is a clear difference between working with someone remotely in order to prepare for an important business meeting and sharing pictures of your dog stuck in a box. Concepts like ‘Driver’ and ‘Turn-taking’ just don’t fit into the context that of many social networking offer,  and the need for true synchronous interactions rarely enters the picture. Clearly defining the difference between social computing and social networking is important, and should not get lost just because in a server room somewhere zeros and ones are being passed through a processor.

Do you see a difference between these two concepts? Or should all social networks one day be expected to support ’social computing’?