How big can your social network be?

The stronger the tie, the greater the latent potential to information to flow through it, the greater the trust between two nodes and the greater the social capital.

Ross Mayfield [Socialtext] | POSTED: 09.09.03 @10:35

Much ado has been made about the phenomenon of fake characters on Friendster (Fakesters). Some users complain that it is an essential earmark of Friendster's emerging culture. But these icons are more than artistic expression they serve as symbolic bridges that connect people. A bridge that is valued within a game that some that perceive is won by having the most connections.

Bottom-up social networking Models like Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribe.net and Ryze grow from strong ties to the weak, and share a predominant risk of devaluing what it means to be a Friend. Iconic Ties effectively create arbitrage paths that devalue the network economy within Friendster and perhaps are not in the long-term interest of the network.

A civil war has emerged between Friendster Founder Jonathan Abrams and some members of the network. Jonathan explains the need for constraining profiles within reality:

"What we're trying to do is create a filter," says Abrams, 33, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. "You don't want to go to a party or a bar where there are three million people. The whole point is to deliberately limit the number and kind of people one individual is linked to."

Robin Dunbar and others have shown that the constraints of our cognitive capabilities limit the number of relationships we can keep track of at 150. Within the Ecoystem of Networks, this constraint guides segmentation at the Social Network level -- in contrast to the Political Network level where relationships are representational affiliations. Iconic Ties within Friendster are representational affiliations. They allow social networks to be bridged through a weak tie that anyone can subscribe to. This is good in that it accelerates network growth, but far worse because it devalues the average strength of a tie.

The stronger the tie, the greater the latent potential to information to flow through it, the greater the trust between two nodes and the greater the social capital.

Activating Weak Ties
As participants in these new social networking models and users of new social networking tools, we are increasingly aware of the weak ties that surround us. Essentially, a weak tie is an option, a real option, we can exercise. Each option has a premium price for maintaining it. Each option has a latent value if exercised.

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If friendster network is all Fakester, then jump on the boat with other sites which is strictly friends network such as Paljunction.com or Ryze. I think paljunction.com has much more features than friendster or anyone else with the same concept.

Good luck to everyone.

Joker