The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog)

The funny thing is, no one’s really hiding the secret of how to make awesome online communities. Give people something cool to do and a way to talk to each other, moderate a little bit, and your job is done. Games like Eve Online or WoW have developed entire economies on top of what’s basically a message board. MetaFilter, Reddit, LiveJournal and SA all started with a couple of buttons and a textfield and have produced some fascinating subcultures. And maybe the purest (!) example is 4chan, a Lord of the Flies community that invents all the stuff you end up sharing elsewhere: image macros, copypasta, rage comics, the lolrus. The data model for 4chan is three fields long - image, timestamp, text.

Now tell me one bit of original culture that’s ever come out of Facebook.

Right now the social networking sites occupy a similar position to CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL in the mid 90’s. At that time each company was trying to figure out how to become a mass-market gateway to the Internet. Looking back now, their early attempts look ridiculous and doomed to failure, for we have seen the Web, and we have tasted of the blogroll and the lolcat and found that they were good.

as jigga said, on to the next.

Dunbar's number

…a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.  These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.  Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group.  No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150.

furthermore.  you’ve got thousands of people who follow you on twitter?  here’s a sticker.

i used to hate math as a kid but i like it a lot more in the business world because i can count on one hand the people who understand the connection between behavior and action.

crying that no one clicked on your link?  well, literally, no one gives a shit.