I’m going to confess, I am a member of Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, Google Base, Tribe, Orkut, Quintessentially, Student.com, Skidnet, and probably a half dozen others that I cannot remember. The first week of joining a social network is probably the most addicting – I call it the “addiction phase.”
Once you realize you have an addiction of looking up all your high school friends, or business school classmates, you realize that it’s more addicting then your Crackberry, oh, wait, I mean Blackberry. By the time you “friend” or “link in” to all of your friends, peers, industry colleagues, people you met for 15 seconds at a mixer, and your grandmother, you’ve built out a network consisting of quite a few people. It’s part of the addiction… to build a bigger network than your coworker or roommate.
Looking at my top 8 on MySpace, I realize that most everyone there is a true friend. However, there are one or two people on my Top 8 that are extremely close to me. I’d consider them tier 1 friends. In this tier, there are only one or two friends that one might have that are truly “best friends.” That leaves 6 other people who are considered “friends” in my Top 8 – and I get the same access to them, as I do to my 2 “best friends.” Why?
In that lies the issue I have with social networks: we are given the same exact access to our “best friends” as we are to our industry peers and once-a-year-tradeshow-friends. This is a flaw in the social networking model… what is a friend and how much access do we allow into this friend. Should there be different levels of a friend?
Now, in order for me to have somewhat of an argument here, I need to provide a rough solution. I haven’t done any social networking consulting for the past 2 years, so I’m a bit out of the loop, but I can say that there are some work arounds. One of these workarounds include having the underlying technology infrastructure decide who your friends are (and categorize them) based on the contacts within your network vs. the universe (universe = size of the social network). If I have a lot of mutual contacts with someone else in the network, we should have tighter relationships than just someone in which we only share one or two contacts. This could be a work around, and stops the ultra-sleezy networkers who build up their contacts to show their popularity.
Would love to hear some feedback on this…
An open invitation to all - I'll be at the Soy Luck Club in the West Village (New York) tomorrow (Saturday) from around 11am-3pm working on future media strategies and helping out other entrepreneurs. Feel free to come on down to the West Village and lets chat! 
