Molecularist

I state the known: The strength of the Web today comes from the aggregate actions of millions of stragers. Google’s impersonal robots have captured a lot of this background noise of activity and made it accessible in agreggate. Del.icio.us’ rise to fame was driven by the users, turning it into the Yahoo directory of the current Web.

But, I’m not so sure if that’s the whole story.

I’m more interested in how we do things and scale things with immediate social networks.

I’m amazed at how many folks are adding me as a fellow traveller in Dopplr. As with any service, I have to ask myself what is the value _to me_ of adding one more person to this network. Where do I draw the line and say that someone is a weak link that will not add value to my activities on a particular service, say Twitter, Dopplr, Flickr, or (gasp) LinkedIn.

I’ve been seeing a lot of studies that show that folks are being more careful when adding folks to their social networks. There are public social networks and private social networks, with different sizes and activities.

My question is not only how to help users manage various degrees of a social network (public, loose, tight), but how do we have public aggregate actions and private connected actions both inform and guide each other.

Yeah, mixed up thoughts, but part of a thread in my head.