.Dust

I have been using Twit­ter, Pownce, Ziki, Jaiku for quite a while now.

My pre­ferred appli­ca­tion still remains Jaiku, for a lot of rea­sons but the most impor­tant one is that I can eas­ily track the sta­tus of my friends while I’m hit­ting the road and post updates too. All from one sin­gle appli­ca­tion and with­out hav­ing to wait for my phone Web browser crunch web pages.

I have now 131 con­tacts in my Jaiku friend list.

Sim­ply put: that’s way too much to han­dle, spe­cially when you are in mobility.

For the first time I think I have hit the limit of mobile social net­work­ing. The amount of infor­ma­tion is too great and when you are in mobil­ity you really care about few one contacts.

I think this in an inter­est­ing find­ing. When I’m sit­ting at my desk with my per­sonal com­puter con­nected to the inter­net with a high speed data con­nec­tion I do really read all of Jaiku updates from my con­tacts list and I find myself com­ment­ing quite often.

When I am mov­ing and I can use only my mobile phone as a con­nected device I really do care about a few peo­ple from my Jaiku list. It seems that my social ecosys­tem is some­how reduced.

I do not think I’m the only one on this road.

At the end of the day it may be a dig­i­tal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the dif­fer­ence between the sen­tences : “I (dig­i­tally) know him” and “I am a friend of”.

I am just won­der­ing why any social net­work today is not mak­ing any dif­fer­ence between these two kind of rela­tion­ships. As far as I know in every social net­work you are con­nected with other peo­ple or you are not. The dif­fer­ence degrees of rela­tion­ships are not rep­re­sented there as in real life.

Accord­ing to me this is a lim­i­ta­tion even if I under­stand that this may be a night­mare to imple­ment and may cre­ate con­flicts between users. (I con­nected you as a friend and you con­nected me at a lower degree of social inter­ac­tion, just to say one). Maybe the solu­tion is to let the user decide with­out even notify the other party. That’s what hap­pens in real life.

Why do I blog this? I was read­ing a post from Jason Cala­ca­nis and even if it was not strictly related to the argu­ment of this post it made me think.

Related posts:

1. Addicted to Jaiku
2. My Nabaz­tag Is Yelling Jaiku Updates
3. Is 3G deliv­er­ing on its promise?
4. The quest for Web innovation
5. No Con­nec­tiv­ity And Feel­ing Lost