Web-based social software makes it possible for people to discover connections and stay in touch on a global scale unlike email, face to face meetings, or any other medium in human history. In Who's on Your Team? Enterprise 2.0 and Team Boundaries, Larry Irons discusses a 2002 study on distributed work that's relevant for Enterprise 2.0 collaboration. The study found that members of geographically distributed teams have a fuzzy notion of the team boundaries (who was in, who was out), while collocated teams rarely disagreed. Irons suggests that wiki-style collaboration and social networking will make team boundaries fuzzier-and that's a good thing.
 
Professor Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School-he coined the term Enterprise 2.0-makes a similar point with his bullseye model, which talks about strong, weak, and potential ties connecting knowledge workers and their colleagues in an enterprise. McAfee suggests that one value of social software is making it easier to convert potential ties to strong or weak ties, and stay on top of what's happening in an extended network of connections you otherwise would not have made.
 
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