How do I love thee? Let me count the ways

This was post was sort of inspired by 3 things - firstly, a comment by Robert Scoble on a post by Louis Gray where La Scoble noted, re the plethora of SocNets LG is on, that.....

I'm very close to getting off this train. What you are writing here won't be understood by most people for two to five more years. So, adding more things onto the plate won't help unless they add REAL value. So far I'm totally not impressed by many of the things in this genre. Even my wife says she doesn't get FriendFeed (and if she doesn't get THAT she certainly won't get other lifestreamers).

I'm scared that, as a group, these are going after a smaller and smaller audience of weird people (admit it, me and you are weird users and don't represent many real users).

Secondly, an ongoing interest in how filtering would work in a "too much information" world, and also thinking through how you would, in a wisdom of crowds environment, screen out those friends, followers, twerps etc who you do not think have as relevant a voice on problem area X. (For the arcane minded, I was following the arguments last night on relevant performance of the F 22 Raptor vs the Eurofighter Typhoon*. It is actually possible to have a fact based discussion on this subject as most of the data is there - if you know how to interpret it - but if you read the blogosphere on the subject, you will find that fact based discussion is the last thing you will get - and hence god help anyone relying on the quality of socially mediated advice in less data driven areas.).

Lastly, I've been playing with Blip.fm for a week or so, and am of course shocked by the appalling taste in music so many of my friends have . More seriously, I had noted a few weeks ago that I found, in baking off Last.fm vs Pandora over the last year or so, that Last.fm hit a ceiling where eventually it could optimise no further, whereas Pandora - which focusses on the music itself, rather than your friends' music, carries on optimising. A number of others said they had noticed the same - and I wondered if the next stage for Last.fm and other socially mediated filters was to start discarding "weakest link" friends. (For all I know it does this already).

And thus I got to thinking about how one could take a "cross network snapshot" of all my friends, and what I could deduce, and what it may look like. And then I thought about all the things that one could potentially fall out with a friend over, as sources of Friction. Hence the chart above. (Apparently Twitter is now populated by Middle Aged Men, and as you know we are prone to "Grumpy Antisocial Networking - hence the Friction Feeder" chart axes )

Feel free to add "axes of evil" to it....

*Raptor v Typhoon is a cost v quality optimum argument of course!