The development of social networking will continue to happen until a company or organisation is able to figure out a viable way to earn money from it, an expert has said.

Tim Houghton, the managing director of tailored web monitoring company New Media Intelligence, noted that many have been unable to do this up to now because many attempts have been known to alienate existing individual users.

He said of the current challenge: "It's a difficult challenge and I don't think there's anyone who's yet figured this out and there's going to have to be a lot more experimentation until someone comes up with a really viable model for this."

Mr Houghton compared it to Google's AdSense application, stating that we are now at the same stage with social networking when the internet giant was still unable to make any real revenue from the technology.

According to this month's Global Faces and Networked Places report from Nielsen, member communities online are growing faster than any other internet resource, such as search engines, software and email.

In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were guaranteed response times and allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues.