FOAF

What professional benefits do you see by investing some time in a FOAF-style network?

Many time professional services and businesses rely on connections, especailly small business. Freind of a Friend or FOAF style networking is all about connections. If someone is a friend of mine and they then meet a different friend of mine there is now a connection between them, me. This is what happens with a friend of a fiend network only I do not need to be involved any sort of way. The network makes all the connections for us. In Clay Shirky's book, he speaks about a social network tool called dodgeball. This  tool not only allows you to find connections online but it allows people to physically find someone who is also updating their location. It uses the connection between friends and the information they upload to various social network sites to connect people with each other.
A basic example is the friend wheel on facebook. Here is my friend wheel, it shows how each of my firends connects to other friends that are also on facebook. This is not as complicated as the dodgeball scenario but still shows how many connections can be made throough just one small group of friends.

For a professional organization these connections are important. Any company that I am a part of, now has acess to all of my firneds. From my friends they can get to each of their friend wheels and this can obviously be a huge increase in customers. The expansion is also kept from being random. There is a certain order in which companies can recognize possible customers.
Using FOAF the companies can see the interests of thie current employees and customers and then look and find friends of those people with similar interests. FOAF is a tool that can is complex enough to be benificial to businesses. It is important to keep in mind however that it is just a tool. These networks only go part way. The company would have to put in work to connect the dots and work to gain the customers. It connects people through aspects about their lives but does not physically bring people together.
Small business are always in need of a larger customer base. They could use FOAF to expand. Instead of simply casting a broad net hoping to pull in at least a few customers they can target certian types of people throught this type of network. As small networks are connected through FOAF a larger network is formed. As the network grows so does the businees and so does their business's connections. With the addition of every new customer a new network can be reached. These networks will intermingle and the users of the companies service or product will become a network of their own.