On the face of it, social software seems an unlikely poster child for enterprise collaboration. Aren’t social networks a fad? What does sharing photos or connecting with college buddies have to do with getting work done?

One answer comes from considering how knowledge work has changed. According to a leading technology industry consultant and blogger, Stowe Boyd knowledge can be divided into three types:

• Impersonal knowledge is those ideas and pieces of information made explicit in documents and files.
• Personal knowledge is the tacit learning locked inside our heads.
• Interpersonal knowledge is implicit between individuals and embedded in our conversations and connections.

Historically, collaborative tools (such as e-mail, document management, and calendaring) have done a good job of supporting the first two types of knowledge. However, they have been poor at enabling the kinds of social artifacts needed to effectively capture and use interpersonal knowledge in a business environment.