By the way

... what is the sodding point in making social software link further than two or (at VERY MOST, for dating or job purposes ONLY) three degrees?

Having a huge social 'circle' ("you are connected to the whole world via 56 friends!") is not cool, unless you're 14. Getting random dating messages from complete strangers is useless. No-one who's a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend is going to give you a job via that connection. The only reason to have more than three degrees is ... to make pretty network pictures or for those "dollhouse pleasures" (you so got it, Clay) in seeing it grow. Initially.
But useful? No.

There, one venti spleen with extra whip.

Comments

[Clay Shirky]

Perfectly put. Time to inscribe this on the inner eyelids of the YASNS development crew.

[nick]

Problem one: a small group of people like reinventing the square wheel.

Problem two: a disturbingly large group of people can't help riding that square-wheeled go-cart down the hill. Just once. But once is too often, because in this climate, it's taken to be a perverse validation.

Anyway, I spent too long last night ranting to people about how the best way to establish the basis for quantitative -- that is, basically (and I mean, basically) programmatical algorithms for personal networks is the edit of noli me tangere, the hind-brain revulsion and embarrassment and the oh-my-god-did-she-just-say-that sensibility. Non-vectored relationship mapping is just shite. But, if you're to start somewhere, it's from a measurement of where you'd least like your best friends to 'go', in the 'don't go there' sense of a conversation. Discipline and Punish, people.