I participated in an online roundtable over at David Berkowitz’s blog regarding Facebook, and some of the recent posts he made (see David Berkowitz gives Facebook Ads the Smackdown).
A firestorm of explosive debate erupted on this blog recently as a record number of comments were posted to a discussion on new abuses from Facebook relating to its Social Ads and Beacon advertising offerings. There are over 70 comments, and they all add color to the conversation.
In her round up of Social Media moments & milestones to remember from 2007 Susan Mernit finds one really tough problem
Susan Mernit’s Blog
Once we scale beyond the 150 or so people a high schooler might know, technology and standards become essential parts of the tool set and that’s the problem set no one has yet elegantly solved.
Since I couldn’t post the comment on her blog (I’m not sure if it took), I’m responding here:
Susan,
Great post. I’m sure it’s not random that you used “150” as the number
of people a high schooler might know. It’s considered the Dunbar
number, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dun…Dunbar’
s_number a theoretical maximum number of individuals with whom a set of people can maintain a social relationship.
I’ve got 2x Dunbar number in Facebook and it is slowly driving me
insane trying to remember who some of the less-strong contacts are.
I’ve kept LinkedIn down but it’s creeping past 200.
This is a difficult problem in that the systems we have aren’t
providing good tools to create sub-groups. Facebook just came out with
something called “friend lists” http://blog.facebook.com/
blog.ph…post=7831767130
but it’s really just list management.
I hope 2008 sees a way for us to more clearly designate not just lists
of friends, but contexts in which we want to communicate. I know some
party folks I want to see pictures from, but I don’t care what bands
they listen to, etc.
Not a trivial problem.
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