Abstract:

Social computing is an evolution of the way people compute, communicate, collaborate and do business with each other under the umbrella of web20 Based on computer and network technology, social computing significantly impacts social activities, such as cooperation, content creation, knowledge sharing, and information distribution By looking into several social computing applications, we conclude that there are seven salient characteristics of social computing They are decentralizion, high dynamics, abundant contents with difficult quality control, expanding system edge with unpredictable evolution direction, and so on We illustrate the market and economy shifts brought about by this trend and suggest more issues on social computing should be further studied.

Key words: socialcomputing, web2, thelongtail