alicia shares my interest in social networks / software, so i started a conversation with her, asking what she thought of the potential for social networks to emerge a killer app.

alicia: I think the current trend in social software right now is definitely to try and harness the power of small world network topology. I don’t think anything related to “friend of a friend” is going to become a killer app though unless:
1. the chains are kept short to the tune of 2-3 hops (we, for example, are separated by 4 or 5 friends on Friendster. This is WAY too long of a chain for either of us to really know anything about the other, despite the fact that we’re “connected”)
gregor: highly agreed. yet on the other hand, it allows for serendipity. in our smaller friends circle, it would be harder to cover as many interesting topics, because it’s much likelier that someone with the same interests is in a larger group.
alicia: yes…absolutely true…the problem is that Friendster is positioning the fact that “we’re all connected by friends” as if that should have reputational currency…as if that makes everyone in your personal network trustworthy. And that is definitely NOT necessarily the case.

alicia: 2. the software needs to include a way for people to gauge the affiliative (social) distance of the other users. So, for example, knowing that your favorite movie is Gremlins doesn’t help me contextualize how close/far you are from me socially as would knowing what schools you’ve gone to, where you grew up, where you’ve worked — the groups and organizations you’ve been affiliated with). Without a gauge of social distance, there’s too high a transaction cost to traversing the network in search of someone specific.

gregor: also very true. as we move to leverage these contacts, and make explicit what was implicit before, we will need new vocabulary and new ways to distinguish various levels of being connected.
alicia: yup. definitely agree. “friend” is being worked to death at the moment…and really, it doesn’t import well from software to software (a Friendster friend is different from a LiveJournal friend is different from a Ryze friend, etc) let alone from the virtual to the real.

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