The Jason Salas Experience

I've given up trying to keep track of the number of times I've heard friends, family and colleagues utter this all-too familiar sentiment in recent history.  It's evidently become an acceptable burden that society bears of weeding through what can be miles upon miles of posts from users within one's social network. 

In my own foray with the Social Web, I've deliberately kept my friend/follower lists small.  For me, the true value of my social graph is its brevity - quality content over inundation.  Don't get me wrong, I like discovering new people and what they have to say, but I'll eventually drop someone from my roster if their stuff isn't doing it for me.  Drowning in empty chatter is just pointless to me.  And that's a skewed indictment on how the way we interact with each other has (d)evolved.

The Web is no longer an interconnected network of hypertext-based documents and media files; it's become a subsystem of the digital projections of human beings.  The somewhat spurious utility a user obtains from their social graph - the collection of users within their social network and the connections between them - led me to question a theory I developed earlier this year.

I proposed an extension to Metcalfe's Law - the fundamental principle defining the value of all networks - to incorporate the added utility generated in a social application.  (Do I know how to party or what?)  Essentially, I concluded, the personal value of your social network increases even further not just with the nodes added (your friends/followers), but also with the extension in the outward users that, by association, you become connected to.  This overall value can be quantified by applying a coefficient to the initial formula n(n-1)/2.  

(That is, if you're into that kind of thing.)

So a thought hit me while paging through friend requests on various apps: for me, the aggregate value of my social network actually decays were I to add each and every person that solicits my connectivity.  I don't stay logged in all day reading posts, so I choose to experience my friends' activity in short info-bursts.  Were I to allow everyone, I'd be diluting my lifestream, degrading the overall experience and taking away what little of a life I have now.

As I see it, there are three major classifications of social network user on the Internet at the time of this writing:

1 - The Serial Friend-Adder: someone who prowls the safari that is cyberspace, actively hunting for any and all connections, happily rapidly extending her social graph outwards; she derives primary value from the sheer number of friends/followers she's amassed.  Her main source of pride is being able to say "I have [X]-thousands of friends!", caring less about the quality of the content generated thereby.  Her bragging rights are determined by volume.

2 - The Audience Expander: someone who meticulously increases their friendlist, but only as a means of imposing their own will on the world.  What gets this type of user off isn't so much the volume of users, but the quality of those that will receive their stuff and pass it onto others.  Think of this as the crass capitalist or dictator.

3 - The Pragmatic Pessimist: a reserved, happily sheltered, introverted online user, who cautiously rejects more friend requests than she accepts.  Her major utility is extracted from the efficiency resulting from a reduced number of posts through which to filter, 

In case you haven't figured it out, I fall into the third classification.  My philosophy is that if you're not generating any information that motivates, educates, entertains, inspires, angers, titillates or otherwise makes my life better, you're wasting my damn time.  And to me, this is significant.  But not all social networks are the same.

Let's look at the mothership for the modern social network: Facebook.  The mighty platform/internet within the Internet/online community/online operating system uses a bidirectional model that requires a user allowing a requester to be his friend access to that person's stuff, too.  So for every nth user added, you potentially affect your personal system's value by a factor of 2 (either increasing/decreasing it).

Now consider the model employed by Twitter.  The microblogging platform doesn't require a user to follow those who follow her.  So you have a fragmented system of interconnectedness, wherein a celebrity with 2.5 million devout followers hanging on their every word may realistically only follow 35 people - and not necessarily from that subset.

But of course, interacting with a social network, inline with society in the real world, is completely subjective.  The signal-to-noise ratio of social applications is something everyone determines for themselves.  I know people who are absolutely delighted to sit and read pages upon pages of posts, just for the entertainment value, albeit petty.  Cool.  Whatever floats your boat.

And of course, the converse applies.  Expanding your followerbase logically increases the chance that you can discover some really cool inbound things, or be able to pass on neat things to others.  So it's a sticky wicket to manage.  Go with what model works best for you.

And realistically...who thinks about quantifying the utility of their social graph?  Shut up and read.  ;)