You just better invite all of us to a ginourmous fish-fry when you get back….

:)ave

Come on Pierre, don’ get all intellectual on us.! Dave can do (and will do) whatever he wants to do. So will Auren Hoffman, Reid Hoffman and any other Hoffmans, including Abbey Hoffman. Connections is a good way to think of it, but so are paths, arcs and links.

When it comes to classifying humans, you not only have the top-down versus bottom up taxonomy/folksonomy debate, but you also have a rich ecosystem of entrepreneurs, vendors and users.

Lord knows they ALL think they know what they’re doing and what’s best for them and their constituents. Reminds me of Barak versus Hillary versus John and Michael.

My guess however, is that while Dave wants to define the relationships deeply, most users won’t bother and would simply prefer to move w/defaults. Part of this is the complexity that comes w/such granular classification which can get infinitely complex and becomes nearly useless (ie. friend, business associate, previous business associate, neighbor, former neighbor, classmate, college classmate, high school classmate, step-mother, father-in-law, my wife’s previous mother-in-law, adopted son, etc…). The complexity would make these classifications nearly useless for getting anything meaningful accomplished (ie. let all friends, college classmates, highschool classmates and wife see pics fm New Year’s party…oy-vey). Actually, for every one I’m connected to there are things I might want to share w/them that I wouldn’t share w/any one else. For everything I place on my profile or DLA, would I then need to move through my 50 or 300 contacts and say who can see what? IMHO keeping an abstract term such as “connections” solves the problem of defining the relationship by purposefully not defining it, and degree controls allow users to manage this as they wish, plus having an easy math conventions (ie. , =, between, etc…) for what to display to people.

Thanks for stopping by mycolts.net. As we’ve just opened up our community for Colts fans, and its going well, but I am struck by the challenge / opportunity we have to “create” a culture. We vacilate between myspace and facebook mentalities (are we too open or too closed?) and I wonder why I should look to either for examples. Underneath it all we want an environment that’s fun, safe and attractive for EVERYONE…even though we realize we can’t please all the people all the time. I happen to be reading the book “Change or Die” right now…it stresses the idea that culture is established by the first few people in a community. We’re at this point and already I see the old Colts Forum people setting the tone. Some of that tone is positive and some is petty and negative.

I’d love to chat with you sometime about all of this stuff….perhaps we can have the meeting we never got to have in Hollywood?

Excellent post.

I, myself, have been following these trends and agree that there have to be some standards around social (or relationship) networking.

This past month, I wrote about the need to formalize the relationship networking industry in my publication, The National Networker and point to a relatively new group forming, the Relationship Networking Industry Association (RNIA).

The RNIA is working to bring together seven major stakeholder communities to derive a common body of knowledge from which standards (and eventual accreditation) will be formed.

What I like about this group is that they are a non-profit, neutral third-party group.

All my best,

Adam