Human capital is a property of individuals, and organisations already seek to encourage its development through online training, e-learning and human resource management. Social capital is a property of human networks, and it is built around relationships and networks. When business and government talk about creating knowledge organisations and the knowledge society, they are talking about developing social capital. Online social applications can be used for learning and other purposes that develop human capital, but where they can really make a difference is in developing social capital within networks.

Social capital, like knowledge, is both abstract, intangible and of variable value depending upon context. Consequently, there has been a natural human tendency to try to package up the explicit manifestations of social capital, such as knowledge and contact information, but this has led to approaches such as knowledge management being misunderstood as logistical, technical exercises of data capture. However, the relationship between content, people and systems is not so simple – just storing information does not necessarily create social capital – as Peter Morville points out:

"We use people to find content. We use content to find people.   Success in the former requires we know what other people know and who other people know. Success in the latter demands good search, navigation and content management systems.  We might also think of the documents themselves as "human surrogates," representing the knowledge and interests of authors. And of course, we humans also serve as surrogates for one another."

This is a good expression of some of the original ideas of the knowledge management school , led by pioneers like Karl-Erik Sveiby , who has always emphasised the social and communal aspect of knowledge. These ideas have a lot to contribute towards studying the development of social capital, but as Sveiby himself acknowledges, the knowledge management movement has been hijacked by (mainly US-based) software vendors with the result that much knowledge management IT infrastructure is woefully divorced from anything approaching normal human behaviour and is hardly worthy of the name.

Too many knowledge sharing initiatives focus on making available databases of resources and information in new and clever ways, at the expense of simply connecting people with other people in order to share knowledge. This suggests another goal for online social software, which is to remove friction and break down barriers to interaction so that people can communicate and collaborate more effectively. An often overlooked aspect of this challenge is consideration of issues relating to language, shared meaning, how we deal with communication breakdown and discovery – how we find people who we do not yet know based on shared interests or other characteristics.

As we extend our relationships beyond our families and immediate communities, we face potential problems of trust, credibility and reputation. Online relationships can develop more rapidly than face-to-face interaction, but the way we form trust relationships is still a slower, more cautious process. This poses a huge challenge for online social software, analogous to the issue of trusted domains and security in hardware and software networks. People speak about trust as the currency of online social networks, and in many ways this is true, but it cannot be represented and exchanged like coinage . This is also an area in which different cultures can influence online social networking in different ways, which is something that social software needs to take into account. People from the United States are much more comfortable forming superficial relationships very quickly that have just enough shared trust and values to enable effective dialogue, whereas European cultures are more selective and slower to form new relationships, but these can become much deeper and stronger over time. Cultures also differ in a multitude of other ways , for example, in how explicit they are about the existence of disputes or disagreements or how overt they are about self-promotion. Given the limited bandwidth of online communication techniques compared to the far richer face-to-face mode of interaction, failure to understand these subtleties can lead to communication breakdown, the destruction of social capital and ultimately the degeneration of online social networks.

We can understand and at least partially map online social networks, but we cannot hope to quantify, capture or even reliably predict the content and the outcomes of interactions within them. Technology can only act as an enabler in the process of nurturing online social capital, but the process itself is almost entirely person-to-person. Rather than seek to capture the knowledge that exists within a social network, which is impossible, all we can do is try to support the network with technology and maintain a healthy level of connections between people so that when and where they need to, they can connect effectively with others.