On social networking..

I've been having an interesting conversation with Laura, and with her
permission, I'm reposting one part of it here, in the hopes that
someone else has some interesting thoughts on the matter.

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>>

>>My dream, insofar as social networking sites like myspace,

>>is to gain a virtual equivalent of shouting out my window

>>"does anybody wanna play tennis?" and everyone who lives

>>within 5 miles, has played tennis in the last month, and isn't

>>busy right now gets to hear the offer. I think it's so badly

>>needed; I see so many kinds of people who aren't finding

>>others of their ilk, for no other reason than a lack of good

>>communication. It's still in it's youthful stages, but sites like

>>this I see to be the genesis of my above-mentioned dream.



> however I think its really people that don't work

>that way, more so than the network. Even if you could

>somehow send a message to everyone searching for a

>common interest, most of the people receiving that

>message wouldn't jump into the activity without

>knowing who you were first.



agreed. but i think the social change towards being open to such
broadcasts can develop in tandem with the technology, as larger social
sites like this invent and tailor features to their users. myspace's
saving grace in that respect is the chaining made by friendslists and
groups. it's reasonable to expect the likeliness of a friend of your
friend's sharing an interest with you is fairly high. that similarity
decreases somewhat slowly the longer the chain of friends, but the
number of potential people increases geometrically (faster than
exponentially). that's just a fact. that fact has impact which we'll
slowly discover and utilize.

slashdot, one of the most popular techgeek news/discussion sites, uses
a different interesting technique. they semi-randomly nominate a small
percentage of readers as moderators. moderators get 5 points they can
use to 1 or -1 somebody's comment (and categorize it as funny,
offtopic, insightful, etc). It's something like a jury or electoral
college for a discussion. the result is authors and readers work
together in a coordinated system that lets a discussion organize itself
such that the most interesting comments are made more obvious while the
least worthwhile are hidden. further, people whose comments often get
moderated up gain 'karma', and are favored even more. i think that's a
brilliant way to separate spam from meat, and i see tons of potential
to get even better.