Read an article on Social Networking in the Economist. You can read it here .

It is refering to a new IBM tool called Lotus Connections that is to be released soon "that lets company employees post detailed profiles of themselves, team up on projects and share bookmarks. One manufacturer testing the software is using it to put inexperienced members of its customer-services team in touch with the right engineers.".

Certainly looks interesting. I think it also links to the idea of producing innovation hot-spots, see my entry "Hotspots — the way to manufacture genius in the workplace ". If you can create interactions that would not normally occur in the physical world then you create more opportunity for innovative interactions.