Rajesh Jain at Emergic cites a NYTimes article about the sudden interest in Friendster and other community sites (yes, we’ve been down this road before… anyone remember SixDegrees and TheGlobe?). From the article:
When two people greet each other on the street, neither can see (nor hope to grasp) the range of the other’s social network. For that matter, no individual can see information about his or her own social network: who knows whom, and how. Friendster offers a mix of architecture-changing tools and technologies: e-mail, a profile (which offers a persistent presentation of self) and a coarse representation of a social network.
Jain doesn’t call it out here, but I think the elusive chimera here is how to represent and display depth. For a news website (say, News.com), you view one story at a time, but there are tens of thousands of articles from 1996 through 2003. How, from that one story, do you get a sense of the authority that depth of coverage can convey? (Hint: the NYTimes has the same problem, which explains why brands do matter.) A millisecond glance at a book tells you how deeply it attempts to cover a subject, but a website is worse even than a newspaper or magazine in its difficulty in expressing its place in the tapestry of information. Friendster and LinkedIn and these other social networking sites are trying to draw the (ever-shifting) map of ‘alliances’ between and among people. This depth is false and illusory, but that the space is even being mined is fascinating. Still not a business (despite the influx of funds), but fascinating.