CARING may be sharing, but sharing can be a way of strengthening your business.

Social networking is all about connecting with people and sharing videos, pictures, music, bookmarks and ideas with them and now big business is finally seeing the value of letting people connect and share.

Earlier this month, Cisco Systems bought the technology that ran an online community website called Tribe. net and last month it acquired social networking firm Five Across which creates white-badged versions of social networking sites.

Many were perplexed and wondered why a web infrastructure company was moving into a very chaotic market such as social networking.

Nike and Google created a social networking site called Joga for the World Cup in Germany where people could share pictures and videos about the tournament. Budweiser is now working with a social networking website allowing people who like nightclubbing to meet up online and share their experiences, videos and photos of their nights out. Social networks are certainly in fashion.

Social networks are big business and are big moneyearners. If you look at the traffic patterns worldwide over the past three years you will see that more and more people are visiting websites like MySpace. com and Facebook and spending considerable amounts of time there.

Here in Ireland, a recent ComReg report showed that Bebo seems to be the destination of choice for the young internet population here.

Google paid nearly a billion dollars to MySpace late last year to put its ads on the site and the deal was all the sweeter as MySpace also shared the revenue generated from these ads.

Owning a popular social networking website can earn you money via advertising, but why would an existing business want to start building a social network around its company or products?

Why is IBM now offering products that do this for you?

As the world becomes more connected, borders and even language barriers are becoming less of an problem, but people still have a pack mentality and yearn for a sense of community and a sharing of parts of their lives with friends and colleagues.

Polish people are in net cafes up and down the country using Skype and webcams to talk and interact with their families back home. Call centre workers sneak on to the internet and upload their weekend photos to their MySpace and friendster profiles for friends to see.

Building informal communities around your professional company has been rewarding for both the people and the bottom line.

Some companies started by providing discussion forums on their websites where people would post questions for help with problems they were having with certain products.

They found that other users were able to answer the queries and suggest solutions, lessening the strain on the official technical support line and contributing their own bug fixes and documentation for the products.

Online Irish community Boards. ie, which has over 80,000 members, provides 'Interaction' forums for companies such as Blacknight Solutions and Komplett.

Boards. ie director Dr John Breslin highlights how this benefits the companies without being over-commercial.

"The idea is that companies can use the existing user base of people at boards. ie to get feedback (critical or positive) on their products.

The interaction forums are moderated by a third party outside the company, so that constructive criticism can be received by any companies partaking of the service. It gives the company an opportunity to respond to complaints, to do market research or to gauge reaction to new products and services."

With the web evolving, people are sharing more than just pure knowledge these days.

Unlike the old websites from the days when the web was still a child, with the odd picture stored on the page and some blinking text, new websites are full multimedia experiences with videos, music, large images and all sorts of weird software applications running off the page.

Nowadays people store their mp3s on their Friendster profile pages and they store and share videos and hundreds or even thousands of photos and everything they bookmark can be shared too.

While Microsoft and Apple fight it out to occupy the space under your TV and are still trying to get their home media centres working well, the online world has already achieved this and social networking sites are now online media centres for millions of people.

This is where Cisco comes in. The company is betting that the future will see more and more content scattered across dozens or hundreds of websites and then all merged together on the profile pages of social networking sites and social networking sections of business websites.

The amount of personal digital data owned by everyone drastically increases every year and Cisco's gamble is that we will be sharing more and more of it, something which can benefit businesses, consumers and Cisco itself.