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The “what” is creating an interconnected Web of relationships that fosters the sharing of ideas, uncovers expertise, and brings data out of hiding to solve problems or fuel projects.

Corporate users are taking notice, NASA and Booz Allen Hamilton among them, because those are just the results companies coveted but couldn’t get a decade ago when knowledge management was a buzz word and a project failure inside many organizations.

10 gifts from Apollo

“Explore these [social networking] technologies because the Gen Y kids are probably right,” says Chris Howard, vice president and research directory for the Burton Group. If history is any indication, social networking could become the next instant messaging, which grew from a teen-girl chat service into a core element of corporate unified communication systems.“You have to focus on the business value and de-emphasize the cool factor,” Howard said Thursday at the annual Burton Group Catalyst Conference.

That is what NASA is doing both externally – with Web-facing portals, virtual worlds, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – and internally with blogs, wikis, workspaces, and social networks interconnected with content, document and records management systems.

“We want to be where everybody else is, we want to be part of the party, too,” said Jeanne Holm, chief knowledge architect at the NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

"Part of what we are looking at is what are the benefits internally [with social networking],” she said.

Those benefits now include accelerated peer-to-peer communication and problem solving, collective intelligence built by capturing knowledge from individual workers for re-use by others, and providing context to communication to help with decision making.

Holm wants to go from just one person working on a problem to perhaps thousands.

"The way people are sharing information now is through the social connections they are making and there is a lot of tacit knowledge there."

NASA’s internal social network started out with users talking about the network itself, but the chatter soon turned to questions scientists and others were seeking to answer.

They headed to the social network and Holm said the result was that 93% of the answers came from people who were in a different NASA center then the questioners, which was proof that the network was breaking down geographic barriers and unlocking potential.