There are Four Types of Social Communication and Collaboration Products - Gartner

We tend to club all products that enable people to work together into one category called Collaboration.

I believe that products that enable people to people conversation serve a different purpose compare to products that enable document centric collaboration. I recently compared Yammer with Jive to explain my experience with tools that serve different purposes.

Gartner puts Social Communication and Collaboration into four categories

(1) Social networking —social profile management products, such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster as well as social networking analysis (SNA) technologies that employ algorithms to understand and utilize human relationships for the discovery of people and expertise.
(2) Social collaboration —technologies, such as wikis, blogs, instant messaging, collaborative office, and crowdsourcing.
(3) Social publishing —technologies that assist communities in pooling individual content into a usable and community accessible content repository such as YouTube and flickr.
 (4) Social feedback - gaining feedback and opinion from the community on specific items as witnessed on YouTube, flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Amazon.

Gartner predicts that by 2016, social technologies will be integrated with most business applications. This suggests that current collaboration products are not blended into business applications. I believe this will happen sooner then 2016.

Click here to read the other strategic technologies for 2011