One of the questions being asked about social networking is simply – what’s next. The conversation has been hovering around the idea of mobile social networking and the role of email as the next incarnations of social networks.

The New York Times published an interesting article entitled, Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google to Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network.

Ignore Orkut, OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360. Google and Yahoo have come up with new and very similar plans to respond to the challenge from MySpace and Facebook: They hope to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks.

Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people. That’s why the social networks offer to import the e-mail address books of new users to jump-start their list of friends. Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts.

PC Magazine looks at the same question in its article, A Social Networking River Runs Through Web Mail.

Were either Google or Yahoo to roll its vast network of Web mail users into a social network, allowing users to display personal profiles and connect with others, either could challenge Facebook and MySpace nearly overnight.

Either or both would instantly have a user base more significant than the social networking giants have, and would also, like IBM Lotus Connections, have the advantage of an e-mail platform base.

What does this mean for social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace or what is the commercial impact on organizations only now getting up to speed on how to use such spaces? The pace at which society and technology is changing stresses a new level of urgency for proactive openness in order to fully understand, appreciate and adopt such shifts as they occur.