It is, in its simplest form, the outcome of the application of the Social networking (i.e. Facebook) paradigm to the context of project ecosystems, as a continued response to the movement toward distributed, virtual teams.
Distributed virtual teams lose significant communication value normally present when groups are collocated.
[1] Because of this, social project management is motivated by a philosophy of the maximizing of open, and continuous communication, both inside and outside the team.
This paradigm enables the project work to be published as activity stream and publicized via the integration with the social network of an organization.
Additionally, because of the fragmented nature of the tools used, little visibility existed to any person outside of the project team.
While in the past, this kind of continuous communication might have been posited to create Information Overload, this stream of small bits of information has been shown to create significant alignment between people working together, without overload.