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"You are who you know"

Andrew Leonard of Salon has written "You Are Who You Know," the first of a series of articles on web software that enables social networks (or it might be better to say enables identification, tracking, and visibility of social networks). Social network web sites like LinkedIn, Orkut, Tribe, and Friendster attract a lot of users and have value that many folks don't seem to get. I've heard complaints that the only real value of these sites if that they make you feel good about all the connections you have, and that there's the down side of making you feel like a schmuck if you can't make a lot of connections or figure out what the connections are good for. I was also in a meeting specifically focused on LinkedIn where the question seemed to be, not whether the sites have personal value, but whether they can monetize the connections they enable and build a "real" business model... you know, the kind where you get rounds of financing, build from round to round, have an IPO, then exit the company with a bundle of money. That's the way entrepreneurs build wealth, one down side being that it's become dang near the only way businesses are built, and it's very a very focused and practical way to operate, doesn't leave a lot of room for experimentation. It could be that we really need experimentation to get our heads around the real value of social network software.

But I digress. Back to Leonard's piece – as usual, he's got his head around his subject and does a good job describing how social networks can be effective:

... the not-so-secret secret of social networking is that flimsy is good! Flimsy is where the action is. Seek out flimsy, and you shall be rewarded. As Mark Granovetter explained, for what must have been the thousandth time this year, the counterintuitive key to social networking is that its value doesn't inhere in linking up to your best friends and soul mates. You are far more likely, argued Granovetter, to find leads on a good job or a prospective date from the networks of people you don't know very well.

You are already probably familiar with the friends of your best friend, or spouse, or close office colleague. There's no fresh territory to plunder there. It's those people with whom you have "weak ties" -- the vague acquaintances, that guy or gal you once kind of knew, a little bit -- who offer a path into possibility that you didn't know was there. The essence of social software networks is that they are a clever way to organize access to the networks of people you aren't actually friends with.

People, especially in the business world, especially salespeople, have been trying to figure out how to do this forever. But it's a tough problem, because once you start dealing with a network that consists of the friends of the friends of your friends, you are confronting big numbers and big complexity. I have 50 "friends" on Orkut -- my resulting network has 410,000 members, and is growing by 20,000 every week!

jon posted this at 11:18 AM
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