Social Evolution...there are friends and friends....

My late father once told me that anyone who counts his friends on more than one hand is either very lucky or a fool. I recalled this when reading some research posted on Slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2) by Google on the evolution of social networks and media. The deck is 216 slides, but very well worth the time to read it. It points out that we can't all be friends, much as we would like to be.

About 18 months ago I "unfriended" on Facebook a number of people who weren't, well, friends. They were all people I knew through business, people I like, people I like to see and talk to. But just not personal friends. The Google research points out that we have very few close friends, we may have a lot of people who we keep in contact with though. So I adopted a policy of Facebook for personal contacts and friends with LinkedIn for business contacts. Twitter is sort of mixed at the moment, Foursquare too. It's not that I am being anti-social it is just that this mirrors the way we lead our lives.

The problem with most social media is that it assumes our personal relationships are homogenous. They aren't. And for social media to advance it has to take that into account. We partition relationships, we have to. If we told everything we know to everyone we know the world would simply not work. However that is what Facebook assumes. Pretty much there is one channel to communicate with social media sites, you can't partition friends up to different group as we do in real life. We mix our groups of friends in the real world carefully if at all, most social media now assumes they mix easily and freely. In order for sites like Facebook to grow more they have to reflect the real structure of society, which means the way social networks (which have existed for thousands of years) are structured. In a sense location based social media (like Foursquare) is an evolution of this, where we are in the world also partitions our social networks, and adding that locational dimension to online social media is a real advance. Another adage from my past is that we are the company we keep. Well hopefully....