The web is becoming an increasingly more interesting place with the technologies behind buzzwords such as social networking, the social graph, user-generated-content creating truly interactive online worlds.
Posts such as Brad Fitz's, Alex Iskold's and Timothy Berner-Lee's are beginning to outline the concepts behind such buzzwords and the relationships between concepts and tools necessary to create applications as well as a possible way forward.
However, we are still very much at the beginning of a very long road. Talking about "owning the social graph" and being able to "take it with us" is all very well but it is still not clear exactly what I am meant to do with it and how I am going to achieve this. There are still no guides on how a creator/owner of a social network is meant to shape that network based on their final goals.
The challenge when it comes to online communities is that it is not purely a technology issue (how do we make better web pages with fancier graphics and let people access them, change them as simply as possible). Online societies are a technical challenge combined with the sociological challenge of managing the tension between structure (the rules of the game so to speak) and the actors (the participants in the game).
The question a community builder needs to ask themselves are questions such as "What do I want my community to achieve? - What tools do they need to achieve that? - What rules (if any?) do I need to impose and how will those rules impact the community?".
Currently the answer is a very vague one about the need to share pictures, videos, messages and buddy lists (and perhaps throw in some voting features for content) and 'hey presto' you have a community, which for these early days is all very well but as we see networks specialising and trying to cater the needs of companies and specific niches something a bit more structured (and justifiable) will need to emerge.
As social networks become more mainstream an "I am sorry" note from the CEOs of Facebook or Digg when things go wrong and users revolt will not be enough to appease an angry crowd of not just users, but other stakeholders in the company. As millions shift away from a network because of a mismanaged feature both the people implementing the features and the people who approve them will need to provide some analysis of what the expected reaction by the community may be.
This means that these are exciting times because a new field is being defined. It is not unreasonable to assume that similarly to the field of bioinformatics, which combines knowledge of biology with computer science, we will need people with knowledge of both the technical tools to shape the infrastructure of social networks as well as the sociological tools to shape the community - a Social Network Engineering degree shouldn't be too far down the line.
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