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In a lot of cases it's more convenient and easier to make more connections online than it is in meatspace. With the way services are developing to facilitate it, I don't think the evolution of social networking into the state it is in currently is trivial. It will keep increasing in importantance to everyone as it becomes another standard method of communication (mainstream).
"Nothing has changed" can be extended all the way back to why we blog. It's for the same reason that we join clubs or participate in any social gathering. We really want to be heard, and more than that we want to be validated by people who we care about.
I think I disagree about the mainstream thing. From what I've seen, regular people don't "get" the idea of having thousands of friends. They'd much rather have a smaller set of "'real friends" rather than tons of internet buddies.
Maybe that will change, who knows.
Great blog by the way. :)
I put effort in my relationships by taking on only as much as I can handle. I have 1/100th of the number of Scoble does , my goal is to nurture those relationships,not have them to push me up the ladder.
Social networking will evolve the same way the telephone has, the bigger your rolodex the more connected you are. But if you had to flag the ones you have a real friendship with, it will be a very small group. It's the quality of your group, not the quantity that will be important to you.
I think a lot of this is an extension of a common human behavior. Think about how many people you "know" and how many of them you would call friends. I bet it follows a similar pattern.
Great insight as always Ophelia.
I think no matter what you're doing, if the total number of people befriending you is dramatically greater than the total number of people you've befriended, something's not right.
When I see this occurring in my own social networks, it's a signal for me to listen more and talk less.
Maybe it's all the same thing, but I don't know.
It's like PR as soon as it's not really newsworthy it stops having any effect.
From a 'business' point of view, I still rather collect email addresses for a newsletter using eWeber and communicating with them using unique, purely professional content.
Facebook is however a great tool to invite people to my website...
the need to form & be part of large or small groups, the need to form allegiances either strong or weak, close or distant, the need for some groups to have a leader in terms of a powerful or influential person, the tribal wars which break out in the blogosphere eg. Scobie / Winer/ Arrington. On-line friends & followers = traditional human behaviour patterns arrived on the web.
These are not their friends anymore than the bulk of my 500+ followers on twitter are my friends. They are people who are interested in what we as communicators have to say (or in the case of spammers in bots, how many people are listening).
I hate auto-follow, open-networking and random "friending" because it is disingenuous. While I follow all of the people you mentioned on Twitter, it is because I am interested in their point of view (out of all of them Calacanis is the only one that has ever responded to an @.) I make a concerted attempt to respond to every message I receive through socnets, and most of the names you mentioned most certainly don't do that (not that they probably could). What sucks is that by accumulating that size of following, they are inevitably consolidating their own group think.
This is nothing new (as I am sure it's not too often that Dan Rather, Bob Costas, etc... responds to fan letters/emails), but it is certainly unfortunate. SocNets are supposed to increase dialogue; when dialogue becomes an impossibility, group-think becomes a true issue.
I wonder if there is a point where your following becomes so large that this trend reverses on itself.
As I do not pay an incredible amount of attention to my twitter-feed, friendfeed, etc... on a minute by minute basis, I suppose that it doesn't bother me too much. But there are times where I would at least appreciate acknowledgment of a message.
Case in point, I sent a message to Brian Solis via twitter complimenting him on the introduction he wrote for the book PR 2.0. Now Brian has many more followers than I (and rightfully so), but I would expect at least a "Thank You", like the one I got from Geoff Livingston when I sent him a comment on his book Now is Gone (to which Mr. Solis penned the intro.)
I guess what bothers/concerns me is that some of the "social media elite" are becoming unreachable (or at least appearing to be unreachable) to anyone outside of their immediate cadre of influencers. That is exactly what is not supposed to happen, or at least that's what I thought we were trying to prevent with this medium.
Occasionally we wonder why the pundits sometimes feel so disconnected from the nuts and bolts of it all. I think your point is a big part of that.