social R & D

Is it possible to do true Social R&D?

A lot of the Web 2.0 services currently talked about start serendipitously; they are wanderings in the social-systems space, and once they begin to hum they produce a gravity that attracts participants, they distort the opportunity space for later entrants, and then finally they produce an "exhaust" which may or may not be valuable. They are Research in the pure sense not the applied sense; they seek only to prove or falsify the proposition that they are useful. And they are Development only in the sense that some of them stick and then go on to begin to change how society functions; they are not Development in sense of the pragmatic application of research results for commercial gain. They cannot be Development in this sense, purely because they cannot be tested on a closed user group or in controlled environments. They only work on the entire population.

The question I want to ask is; can there be social R & D? Is there any way to do applied social research and then pragmatically develop commercial propositions from it? Or is the combined positive feedback from the waves and waves of cost free collaboration that is currently being implemented too seductive to resist and too transformative to predict?

We are by definition the most reciprocally altruistic organism to evolve. For individual users, the net has moved the cost of minor altruistic behavior near to zero, and the compound benefit that is derived from massive amounts of minor altruism may be the greatest of all transformations of the social space to occur. And it is very likely that it is still in its earliest stages.