The Social Wave Blog by Sheldon Chang

AOL Study: Women over 40 biggest online gamers - Feb. 11, 2004

AOL recently released the results of a study that identified women over the age of 40 as the most avid players of online games. Over 20 percent of these women developed friendships with others that carried over into offline friendships.

There are many people who believe that the only way real lasting communities can be formed is through regular face to face interaction. In fact, even the William Davies paper that I gushed about expresses this leaning, but it's one that I may not agree with and I think some deeper studies like this one need to be done.

While it's likely that the subjects who met their playing partners in-person ended up having more meaningful friendships, it's quite possible that those who only knew each other through playing each other online were also able to form significant interpersonal relationships. I myself have been a part of numerous online communities and one of the ones that I'm very active in right now is an online gaming clan that's been together for over three years. Many of our members have met face to face, but many haven't, yet there is a very real sense of camaderie between us. Most interestingly, it should be noted that unlike most online communities, we are not a homogenous group of like minds clumped together.

Of all the longer lasting online communities that I've been in, there's been one thing in common. In all of them, a group of people have interacted regularly in a real-time environment. Sometimes it was through regular online chatting, sometimes through online fragging (first person shooter multi-player gaming), and sometimes it was through regular face to face meetings.

WIRED - PLAY 12.02: Text Flirting

Here's a case of online dating meeting speed dating. Wired magazine reports of SMS being used in the flesh with cell phone users who attend "Time2Flirt" events at local bars in the UK. The idea is that text is a less intimidating way of making an introduction and Time2Flirt events help singles take the edge off of having to make an opening line.

A friend of mine once told me of an analog equivalent to using SMS as an ice-breaker. He went to a cafe in the Czech Republic where all the tables had pneumatic cannister tubes with numbers next to them. If you saw someone you wanted to send a message to sitting at another table, you wrote your message on a piece of paper, put it in a canister, and put it into the pneumatic tube for delivery to the table number you indicated.

The popular online dating site, Match.com has taken SMS ice-breaking one step further. It allows singles to keep mobile profiles that will allow other singles signed up to the same service know when you're near. The idea's that if two people bump into each other by chance (without actually bumping into each other), it might increase the chances that they'll meet.

I haven't made up my mind on what I think of these sorts of mobile introduction technologies. Howard Rheingold talks about these mobile affiliation tools in action amongst Japanese teenagers and young urbanites in his book, Smart Mobs, and suggests that one of the reasons why SMS and mobile based communication devices are so much more wildly popular there is for reasons of social identity. In a place where the population is so dense that individuals have very little personal space and great difficulty in establishing a personal social identity, tools that transcend the barriers of physical space are a viable solution. Perhaps we could say that the closest thing to Cyberspace in the flesh are the tightly packed cities of Japan.

In the month of March, it appears that two giants of finding stuff on the big global Internet has decided to shrink down and put a lot more emphasis on finding stuff at the local level. Is this a sign that we're starting to see the Internet as just another channel for communication rather than as the big global medium that we've been touting it as? According to one of the two referenced articles, it says that "A lot of times when people are looking for something, they want to do it on a local level...This is a core search promise."

Yahoo puts local content on the map | CNET News.com

Google goes local | CNET News.com

I gave both of these localized search interfaces a spin. Their addresses are http://local.yahoo.com and http://local.google.com. The advantage goes to Google at this early stage even though Yahoo's interface is considerably more developed. That's exactly the problem though. Yahoo's localized search interface is closely tied to CitySearch which I find to be somewhat useful, but it's always been a relevancy challenged tool for me.

I tried looking for coffeeshops in both of the interfaces and got different results in both. The Yahoo/CitySearch results were particularly bizarre. Do a search for Coffee in the town of Campbell, CA and in the top five you get Motel 6 as a coffee spot. Mmmmm, there's nothing that perks you up like really bad tasting burned Motel coffee made with rusty water. A lot of the Yahoo results were irrelevant and looked like there had been some unusual manual categorization work to influenced the results. I did find the two most important results coming up on the first page though.

The Google results were far more interesting. They not only pulled up the two big local coffeehouses that any respectable cafe directory must be able to show, but it also found one not as well known coffeeshop in my town. What was particularly exciting about the Google results was that it also included "related search items" for the business that was found. For the most part, there's not a whole lot of good related content to business listings unless that business has its own website, but in some instances it matched the name of the busines to someone's blog entry or to what would otherwise be a long buried review of the coffeehouse from a small local paper.

Google appears to be on the smarter track. By matching up content to mere business listings, they make the Web work better for people interested in using it for local purposes. As a Web designer, I hope this signals a boom for Web designers working for small local business owners. The way I see this, it could either be a great enabler or a killer for a project that I'm launching called Hometown Merchant Network, which is kinda like online dating for businesses. Loosely put, it's an online mall of local merchants with the purpose to introducing local merchants to their most likely source of sustenance, the local residents.

My problem with CitySearch is that I rarely find enough content that I want about a place even after I find the place that I'm looking for (which is more than a challenge than I want it to be). CitySearch has a built in ratings and reviews module which in theory should provide it with a killer edge against a technology like Google's that merely matches a name with random hit or miss content, but anyone who's tried to make use of the CitySearch reviews has had the experience of being frustrated by the feeling that you just can't count on the reviews. You don't know who the people are and all too often you can smell a vindicative ex-customer or some other bias in the opinions. An unmoderated reviews system in which people are mostly anonymous is trouble.

St. Patrick's day was on a Wednesday night this year and my town of Campbell, CA had a little downtown party. My town has a popular Irish pub downtown, but it's not a particularly Irish town. It just knows a good opportunity to stimulate downtown business when it smells one. St. Patrick's Day parties in Campbell weren't always the norm though, they only recently began to make it a more official event. Before, downtown was festive, but mostly due to the effects of one popular Irish pub.

One of the reasons why I moved to Campbell was because it really seemed like a town that knew how to have a good street party. We're a town of around 40,000 people, who might otherwise seem like a sleepy collection of misplaced Midwesternites. A friend of mine describes Campbell as a weird little community of Mayberry in the heart of Silicon Valley. I judge that she's not that far from the truth.

People come out for the weekend Farmer's Markets and they really came out for the St. Patrick's Day party and it wasn't for the alcohol. Some people just came out to mingle, people watch, meet up with friends, and eat nasty festival food. I noticed one particular merchant who really seemed to take advantage of the extra foot traffic to get people to hang out at her store. The store is Radio Daze Collectables, a throwback novelties and collectables store that eBay couldn't quash right in eBay's backyard.

The owner of the store, Marji Gilmore, had strobelights set up to draw people to her recessed shop at the end of a courtyard of closed shops. Outside she had set up patio chairs and umbrellas especially for the event. She was providing just an alternate social scene for people who wanted to get away from the crowds and the noise. As a special diversion, her store and all its interesting items would provide considerable amusement to any bored companions waiting for people to come on out of the crowd.

With a little more community coordination, these sorts of things could become a culture of events within events. This is like a resturant putting an ad up in a movie theater to encourage patrons to go eat there after the movie's out. The two go hand in hand. A community that has a stable online interface could easily use it to plan alternate social events so that main events truly can cater a little something for everyone.

Not every small business can afford to get enough advertising to benefit from the promotion of big events, but just about all of them should be able to do something to make it more marketable like Marji's store. Add a little Internet word of mouth and those efforts may go a long way.

Social Wave's Merchant Profiles was fully released last month and as I helped a few small businesses online with their very own Merchant Profile, it's dawned on me that an independent website may not be in the best interest of many businesses. First, it's a pricey investment and keeping it current is an ongoing cost that few small businesses are prepared to take on. Second, for many businesses, they amount to little more than a small brochure of what the company does. Third, a freestanding website will fall through the cracks of all search engines if not optimized for Search Engines properly.

A lot of businesses try to steer a middle road and design their own website using one of numerous WYSIWYG online site-builder tools, which sounds like a sensible option, but most of the time, these websites that are supposed to represent their businesses end up looking like their first attempts to cook in the kitchen. There's more to cooking than a recipie.

If online personal profiles similar to the ones that are used in online dating sites have proven to be such an effective way of presenting people online, why has there been no equivalent service for businesses? I kept a personal website for years. Initially it was a a intelligent way of introducing myself to other people to make contact or form new professional relationships, but in more recent years, it became more and more just an expression of vanity. If my need for a personal page is just for the basic purposes of introduction, then I have a multitude of quick and easy services to pick from, even if the product they produce ends up being a bit generic.

A new Japanese restaurnt just opened up in my town. I set up a merchant profile for them and they asked me what I'd charge to do a full website for them. I made a ballpark guess and quoted somewhere in the $1000 range which resulted in very noticable sticker shock. It wasn't something they needed and definitely right now with them strapping for cash, it wasn't in their best interest to blow it on a website that would most likely end up obscurely buried in all the major search engines.

For these guys, a profile worked fine and will likely serve their immediate interests far better than a full blown site. If location is key in business, then search engine visibility is key for a business online. So why would any small business in its right mind decide to build a small stand alone store on a yet to be developed road when there are options to locate inside a well traveled shopping mall?

For small businesses, visibility comes easier as a collective whole and it comes much easier within an already established infrastructure that's proven to work. Some of the businesses that I've done Merchant Profiles for have started getting hits off of Google searchers within a week of their creation and some of the profiles are already ranked higher in searches than their owners' main websites.

I'm not sure how we've come to the point that we just commonly accept that people are more or less just out there for themselves on the Web. It certainly wasn't like this in the early days of the Internet before there were good search engines. Information always came in clusters and searching for information online was more like hunting for it and so it made sense to keep things together. Now there are powerful search engines that promise to make the world of disorganized information available to you and perhaps with that illusion, the drive to organize and cluster into more functional units has faded.

The glory of having your own website is not worth the price of isolation. Social Wave's Merchant Profiles looks to give local businesses a chance for not just online presence, but online relevance through collectivism.

I'm finding that many people in Silicon Valley seem to equate the words "online community" or "community-network" to Craigslist. This is been a minor problem for Social Wave because it's hard to explain what Social Wave is to the general public without being interrupted with questions like, "Is this another Craigslist?" When Social Wave members submit feedback and make suggestions about what they want to see, some of the feedback could be summarized as requests to copy Craigslist.

Any developer of community-networks would be pleased to have his project mentioned in the same breath as Craigslist and I'm no different, but the problem is that Social Wave is fundamentally different from Craigslist and any moves to make it more like Craigslist will essentially signal the end of what I set out to do when I drew the plans for Social Wave.

Craig Newmark cites Usenet and the WELL as philosophical sources for what eventually became Craigslist. From what I can tell, Craigslist appears to have aligned itself more toward Usenet than the WELL and it does such an incredible job of doing what Usenet did well without its associated downsides that I stopped dreaming of having the Usenet of the late 90's back again. Craigslist to me is the Usenet for the rest of us, but it is not the WELL for the rest of us, except perhaps in its spirit of wanting to help locals connect with other locals.

The WELL for the rest of us is still a hole that sorely needs to be filled in the digital community landscapes and Social Wave was launched as an attempt at doing just that, but the people who make up "the rest of us" have no idea what the WELL was (nor do they know Usenet either) and inevitably I find myself having to explain why I'm not just the latest opportunist trying to copy Craigslist. That part isn't very hard to do.

The hard part is getting people to stop trying to use it like Craigslist. I'm finding that for much of the general public, Craigslist is less of a community that they want to engage in more so than it is where they go to address a specific need like buying or selling something. I've also had people say that they're looking for more entertaining things to read like they get on Craigslist. On the other end, there are people who just post and never read. The online social ethic of giving and taking as things that should be done together doesn't appear to be very strong with most people who tell me that they access Craigslist all the time.

Now to be fair, it's not Craigslist's fault that people don't follow the mostly obsolete rules of netiquette anymore. The golden ethics of online social interaction that formed around the glory days of Usenet and local dial-up BBS culture have been slowly eroded by patterns of usage influenced by advanced search engines, improvements in network technology, mass adoption, and the emergence of real-time messaging services among other things.

The only reason why I'm discussing this in the context of Craigslist is because one of my goals with Social Wave is to engage people who aren't already well engaged in any sort of online connection to the community. With these people even using Craigslist can be a challenge and getting them to imagine something beyond Craigslist is very difficult.

I have nothing but admiration and praise for Craigslist, but with its average level of engagement diluted by its now massive size and it's massive activity recently reported at 2 billion page views and 5 million posts per month [source], maybe it's time to find something other than "online community" as a label for Craigslist.

Craigslist is a wonderful resource that helps communities connect, but it no longer seems like the sort of place that is ideal toward fostering a community of its own and I don't think anyone who's fiercely loyal to Craigslist should feel insulted by this view. If Craigslist embraces its evolution toward being some sort of network layer for the general community, it'll far exceed its potential as a community itself and in the process will continue to help projects like my Social Wave project.

Social Wave and I owe a debt of gratitude to Craigslist for helping us attract some great members to build our foundation on, but in the course of reflecting upon how much it has helped my efforts, I came to challenge an idea I always held as fact. "Is Craigslist really a community?"

A key component of Social Wave’s strategy originally centered around working with residentially based organizations such as neighborhood associations and homeowner associations, but after a year observing my own neighborhood association and talking to people about like organizations, I’ve come to the conclusion that organizations associated with residential infrastructures are not ideal partners for creating social connections based on personal affiliations.

This might sound counterintuitive because I’m essentially saying that if you want to help improve a local community, the neighborhood associations and homeowner associations aren’t the best places to go. What else could be more local and more connected to the local residents than a small association defined around their group of streets?

The problem with residential associations is that they tend to have few resources and rely on the dedication of volunteers to operate. Without a consistent staff and steady leadership, it’s very difficult to produce the kind of leadership necessary to effect a socially connected community. Residential associations tend to be most active in times of crisis when suddenly everyone feels like he or she has a stake in the quality of life in the neighborhood. An example would be a group of residents fighting to stop a major highway proposed near their homes for fear that their home values would drop.

Once the crisis is over, the critical mass needed for any meaningful social cohesion between neighbors becomes very difficult to sustain. Granted, skilled leaders can often take advantage of a crisis for its team-building potential as a bonding experience that will open doors in the future, but when an organization has little funding and relies on volunteers, such leadership is difficult to come by in sufficient quantity.

In the San Diego area, 4S Ranch, a large developer of planned communities has included a community intranet called 4s-Connect in with their latest expansions. A corporation with the resources of 4S Ranch may be able to produce a more engaged community that will add to the quality of life for the owners of the houses on their developments and increase home valuations. Although, I’m leery of community-networks initiated by large housing corporations, I have to applaud 4S Ranch for taking the risk of putting resources behind a managed online community to go with their planned communities. It’ll be interesting to see if it manages to elevate the social environment of the neighborhood or if it’ll backfire on them as a collaboration tool that residents may use to organize against the developers.

I’ve noticed some hostility toward online community and social networking services that aren’t totally free, but in the right hands, online communities that charge a fee may provide more value for your time and money. If the 4s-Connect gamble and similar efforts succeed, maybe it’s not such a bad idea to pay people for work that’s often expected to come out of goodwill and generosity alone. Personally speaking, I hope to eventually provide a small salary or at least a stipend for myself and others who are deeply committed to making Social Wave work.

There seems to be a common ethic among people who run or use social networks and community networks. A lot of them believe it should be done out of a general desire to help people lead a more rewarding life with a wider network of friends and an expanded community. Empowering people to take charge of their own social well being is a noble task and I’m all for making sacrifices to help my community and the people in it, but after a year of trying to make my community network (Social Wave) work as a free service, I question the popular belief that these services should not make any money.

Whenever I bring up my doubts with the free usage service model, people are quick to point out the open source movement as a shining example of what loose controls and free usage can do for a person’s creation. I believe in open source, but open source is a model that works well under ideal circumstances when we’re dealing with intellectual property. It’s a much more challenging model to follow when we’re dealing with services because individuals who wish to provide services have a finite ability to provide service to all who wish to support the service by using it or even by promoting it. Remember, open source means loose restrictions on use and the freedom to contribute. It doesn’t mean that everything should be free.

I’m amazed at how some services similar to Social Wave proudly advertise that they’re not out to make money. To the ones that have the financial support to afford such generosity, I applaud and admire their noble intent. To the ones who are idealistic enough to believe that free is the best usage model to go by, I ask them how they’re going to ensure that they have the resources to stay competitive against other services like theirs, some of them run by huge companies who have the ability to make “free service” pay off for their shareholders in the long run.

In one of my previous blogs, I wrote about my experiences in working with organizations run by volunteers. Most of them follow a predictable path. They have a heyday, but once a few of the key volunteers are pulled away by other pressures of life, they start slipping into irrelevance. To all other developers of independent community networks, I advise you to find a revenue model to sustain your service if you want it to be alive and kicking five years from now. We could all be mere speedbumps for the likes of MSN and Yahoo Groups on their way to owning our social lives and online community interaction. Also please please please knock it off with slogans like "We're in this to make friends, not money." It's a little dishonest and it makes life tougher for those of us who need to make sure we can get enough income from our services to pay our expenses.

Class Matters - Social Class in the United States of America - The New York Times

The New York Times published an article on a new sub-class in the American social hierarchy called the "Relo" class. They're a growing segment of the upper middle class who move every few years for career reasons and have no social roots in the towns that they live in.

This article underscores many of the arguments I presented in my last blog entry about the effects that residential mobility has on the quality of community life and how the decreased quality of community life is likely affect locally owned businesses. The "Relo" class is painted as a vagabond, upper-middle class population with a disproportionate share of disposable income. Anyone want to take bets if "Joe's Hardware Store" in Downtown Anywhere USA will get much business out of these families each time they relocate? Compounding the problem even further is the tendency for people in the "Relo" class to move into subdivisions where exposure to the greater community is sacrificed for a homogenized master-planned experience that leads to faster, but more shallow community.

In my Silicon Valley town of Campbell, a local arts organization has been producing Sundown Cinema, a movie series of classic films shown outdoors in a parking lot in Downtown Campbell. Last week's movie, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) was teamed up with Social Wave's one year anniversary party resulting in a record turnout for the weekly Sundown Cinema events.

Over 400 people came out to watch a movie outdoors where they had to bring their own chairs, tough out a gravel parking lot, put up with charging motorbikes every twenty minutes, and deal with numerous other viewing annoyances. There's no actual "screen" for the movie to be shown on. The movie is projected onto the pock marked yellowish wall of a building using a standard laptop video projector connected to a DVD changer owned by the producer of the events.

Needless to say, the excellent viewing experience isn't the reason why this small town movie series with no budget is producing viewership worthy of a small multiplex. Its success is even more surprising in light of a recent poll from the Associated Press showing that the majority of Americans go to the movies once or zero times a year.

What's happening here? Why is this word of mouth affair continuing to grow against reason? I personally believe that it's growing because it's offering a taste of something that's harder and harder to get in American cities. Sundown Cinema is a throwback to the days when movies were a more social experience and single screen theaters were an anchor of community life. As the event has grown in popularity, it is no longer just about the movie, but it's about the communal experience.

Although the communal nature of the Sundown Cinema series have been building with each screening, it really became obvious when we paired it with Social Wave's anniversary party. Before the movie, kids played with other kids, people were talking to the people sitting next to them, and throughout the crowd you could see people sharing candy and snacks with their neighbors. When was the last time you were at a movie and the person next to you asked if you'd like some chocolate? Even more remarkably, the demographics of Sundown Cinema is widely spread across all age ranges capable of enduring an evening sitting outside on lawn chairs.

Despite all the market testing and social engineering that goes into the production of Hollywood blockbusters (and the theaters themselves), American cinema has been in a steady state of decline in the past two years. Could it be that in the age where corporations take no chances and every decision is market researched to death, that we've engineered the soul out of the moviegoing experience?

Of course, I'd be hasty and foolish to say that the reason why Americans are shunning new releases is because they can't meet their neighbors at the movies anymore, but I do want to shine a light on how our highly researched world may be producing experiences in which any single consumer experience is technically flawless, but completely repulsive when considered as a collection of experiences.

Perhaps there's something intangible in the imperfect experience that many of us are secretly after. We may not like noise distractions when we're trying to watch a movie, but against the simple charm of sharing candy with the adult next to you, it's an easily forgiven annoyance. We want cushioned high back chairs, but may be willing to settle for a lawn chair if it means having a more genuine experience in which we go home satisfied even if we didn't like the movie.

Here's to the continued success of Sundown Cinema, a perfectly flawed perfect experience

The Palo Alto Daily News reported today that the city of Mountain View approved a plan to allow Google to provide free city wide Wi Fi access throughout their city. Under the plan, Google will install Wi-Fi antennas on 350 telephone poles throughout Mountain View. There wasn't any mention on timeframe of when this would happen.

A bunch of American cities are on the record with their intentions of going wireless. That list includes Philadelphia and San Francisco. Already there are a lot of smaller neighborhood based efforts, but none of those are purely funded through private means and I don't believe any of those services have materialized yet. Philadelphia was first to announce their plans, but quickly ended up in court when the local Internet ISP sued them to protect their business line.

Personally, I think going completely wireless in a small suburban city is a much more interesting experiment than doing it in a more metropolitan area. There's enough going on and enough channels for word to get around in a major city, but in the smaller cities that have equivalent amenities to a larger counterpart, they can do everything they can to recreate the big city on a more personal scale, but they don't have (and don't want) the population density that's so important in the "vibe" of most cities.

Can widespread wireless access enable a small city to copy not only the structure, but also the "vibe" that creates life in the communities of that city?

Google Base Beta was officially released today. It's stated to be a big public database that's an experiment in enabling the open sourcing of information. I haven't had a chance to take a good look at it, but I think this could be huge huge huge. The open source movement has been a powerful force in creating pieces of public domain intellectual capital for public and private good, but it has always lacked a unified channel to feed information through.

Google Base is expected to eventually feed into the main search engine and also help drive their local search features. THAT is what I find most interesting about this experiment. It would be like unifying the strengths of Craigslist with the Google search engine. As I said before, this could be bad news for Craiglist.

Craigslist has evolved into more of an enormous community information kiosk rather than a community of its own. You want to find out about things going on around the community you won't be able to search for it effectively through Google, but if you're not a daily Craigslist addict, you may have difficulty finding it there. As a community, it would be hard to draw people away from Craigslist, but as a service, you just have to come up with a better service and Google Base may be on its way of subverting Craigslist's core value proposition.

Everyone knows Craigslist, but only a small percentage of those people use it regularly. I've noticed this indirectly in how we've tried to promote Social Wave in our community. We use Craigslist to help us broadcast Social Wave events to a wider audience. This worked amazingly for about a couple of months. Each cross post to Craigslist brought us upwards of a thousand visitors and up to a few dozen new members per week. The pace of this success quickly hit a speed bump and today we're lucky to even get one new member out of cross posting to Craigslist.

What's interesting is that we still get a lot of visitors coming over from Craigslist. This suggests to me that people are still reading what we've posted over there, but either they no longer find it as compelling or we're just reaching the same audience over and over again and many of those people are already Social Wave members.

Even though we've intentionally limited the reach of Social Wave to the Silicon Valley region, there's enough people here (~ 1 million) that effects of broadcasting information to a public backbone shouldn't hit such the dramatic plateau that we've experienced. I'm eager to see what Google Base can do for Social Wave because while only a small percentage of people who know about Craigslist actually uses it with any regularity, just about anyone with an Internet connection uses Google at least a few times a week.

By the way, I'm not rooting against Craigslist. Craigslist is still the incumbent and has a lot going for it, but Craigslist as it exists today is not on as solid of a footing as many people think it is. If Google Base succeeds, I believe we're either going to see Craigslist continue to expand and become more complex than the Craigslist that we've gotten used to, or it could back down to its roots as a service that's more focused and relevant on the local community.

If the majority of would be casual Craigslist posters ended up going to Google Base, it would leave Craigslist with a legion of very devoted users who would be freed from the thousands of short timers who invade their community for a few days and leave only until the next time they have a need to fulfill. The question of "What do I need for myself TODAY" is not a great modus operandi to build a community around. With these people thinned out, it would create a better community experience for people who actually are tapping into Craigslist as their community connection. The growth engine of Craigslist would be stunted, but the qualities that helped its rise to stardom could end up thriving better than before.

It probably comes to no surprise to most people that
a recent study published at the British Association Festival of Science 2007 concludes that people who have many "friends" on a social networking site do not necessarily have any more friends in real life than the average person.

The study concludes that factors outside of the social networking world limit the number of close friends that a person is able to keep to roughly five. It turns out that we're probably hard wired to only be able to keep a limited number of people in our inner circle because of cognitive limits. Although the social networking tools don't seem to affect the number of close relationships that a person has, they do seem to allow people to extend the number of second-tier friends that they have.

After having restated all of the meaty points of the study, it might be a good time to say that one study does not make the truth and our understanding of how social networks affect us in the real world is so young that you can say that it's still in the womb. Undoubtedly, there are "friend-whore" haters out there who are dancing on their chairs upon hearing news of this study, but the study only says that social networks don't allow you to artificially expand the number of your closest relationships. It could very well be that some people could have fewer close and second tier friendships if it weren't for social networking tools. The opposite could be true too. All the time spent keeping up with ten thousand online friends may leave a person unable to maintain as many real relationships as he or she would otherwise have. At the risk of sounding obvious, I'll say that both scenarios are probably true depending on the person and the environment.

I would count myself among the people who get annoyed by "friend-whores." It bugs me so much that I intentionally didn't add in friends list type of features to my site, Social Wave. It's not that I envy these people or find them petty, opportunistic, or fake. I just don't like flaky people and people who have a ridiculous number of online friends just strike me as people that wouldn't be able to depend on. Being aware of this personal bias of mine, I wonder how the number of friends that a person has online can affect their real life perception to other people.

Whenever I gather together with other people who are knowledgeable in online communities and social networks, I frequently hear heavy skepticism of online measures of a person's social relevance or reputation. I repeatedly hear the belief that the most influential people in real life are often off the map online. This is hardly a new phenomenon. It takes a lot more than a secret handshake to exchange a few words with the President of the United States or even just J.D. Salinger.

Sometimes you do run into online profiles for industry giants. Would the number of friends or specific representation of that person's online friends affect how you would perceive this person in real life? If you were to meet with a presidential candidate, how would your perception of this person be affected if you saw his or her profile page with only 5 friends vs. 50,000 friends? Probably, you'd rationalize that you'd be disappointed if this person only had 5 friends because in this scenario, you expect a presidential candidate to have a lot of supporters or friends.

Let's take this down to a more muddy scenario. Suppose we're now talking about a doctor that you're going to see for the first time tomorrow. Are you going to be more critical of this doctor's advice if he/she had 0 friends, 5 friends, or 500+ friends? In what cases do we see it as a positive for people to have 500+ connections and in what cases do we see it as evidence of folly?