Social Networking and Product Development

I recently saw an advertisement article in Design News Magazine that described the value of social networking technologies through the internet in product development.  The article was written by PTC, and described how social networking frameworks such as Linked-In and Facebook could be applicable to the product development process.  Obviously these tools in their current state are not applicable to product development but to personal relationships, but the basic concepts are similar.  If you had a personal network of contacts from within your own industry and across other industries who you could bounce ideas off of, share knowledge, and ask questions it could certainly speed up the design process.  One limitation would be proprietary information that companies would not want to share.  Even within a company, social networking concepts could be invaluable to the development process.  What if the marketing, sales, design, manufacturing test, and manufacturing groups were all interconnected through social networking, sharing all the details of a product as it progressed through its life cycle.  Another advantage listed in the article is concurent engineering.  If design and manufacturing collaborated throughout the design phase through social engineering, more input could be obtained sooner to make the product easier to manufacture and service.

There are many point tools available to allow collaborative engineering such as internal WIKI's, blogging software, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft OneNote, Webex, etc.  None of these is really easy enough to use yet or integrated enough with the tools of product development like Facebook is in the area of personal relationships.  The information in the article and on PTC's web site implies that they are thinking about this concept, but it's not really clear to me which of their products if any implements it.  I know on the Pro-Engineer tool, mechanical engineers can export E-drawing models that anyone can view interactively, but even this seems to be a little too clunky truly enable social engineering.  What other resources area available for social engineering?