Social computing gets a lot of press these days, and rightfully so. Collaboration in its many forms is vital to wise knowledge sharing, which, after all, is what knowledge management is all about: discovering the best ideas and skillfully integrating them within the business environment to ensure the right information gets to the right people at the right time.

Heck, we’re taught as toddlers how important it is to share. Now, as adults we have the software tools to share not just toys and cookies, but ideas and best practices; impressions and images; knowledge and prejudices. We can find experts and build communities of common expertise and interests. We can even live “virtual lives”–the most notably of which is through Second Life and it’s avatars, a concept, I think, is a phenomenal waste of time and resources in the business environment.

I ran into someone who advocated turning KMWorld into a “virtual” conference. He was a Second Lifer (or maybe a Scientologist) and claimed we were so far behind the times. We were “shameful dinosaurs,” in his words. He even became aggressive in his criticism of the way we produced our conferences. I let him try to make his case, and after 10 minutes of his “pitch” (a term I hate). But then I asked if he enjoyed John Kao’s opening keynote. He informed me he has read everything Kao has written and the only reason he came to the conference was to hear Kao speak in person. He didn’t see the irony.

It seems to me that even the best social, collaborative computing solutions pave the way for deeper professional relationships. They encourage knowledge sharing and facilitate business relationships by identifying areas of common ground and interests and make it so much easier to develop communities of practice. In many cases these online relationships are sufficient–in some, even preferred–for a certain level of business activity.

In the past two days, I have seen and chatted with more than 40 different people whom I haven’t seen in a year–and at least 15 more with whom I hope to stay in touch. Meeting and talking with them paves the way for a deeper professional relationship.

Social computing is here for good (both literally and figuratively), and it will certainly get better and better. The very best tools will be increasingly adopted and help bring a degree of humanity to enterprises that have lost touch with their personal relationship chain. It provides a marvelous opportunity to facilitate conversations but, for me, anyway, it will never match the value of face-to-face interaction. It will never replace the value of a conference such as KMWorld and Intranets.