Social networking is the mainstream today. It seems you can't avoid living without them. But why are they so important? I think the reason is that social networks improve social capital. For me this means that people you have connection with are valuable for you. And if these connections have a value we want to increase this value. This is one of the reasons why people often have so many connections. If you have more connection they your social network is more valuable and you are also more valuable. This is also supported by the social network systems too for obvious reasons. But is this really a good way? Shell I have more connections or rather more valuable connections? Considering that our time and other capabilities are limited we need a smaller but more valuable network. There must be a limit where networking to more people doesn't give you more social value or even decreases it. I assume that psychologists can give a good estimate for the maximum number of social networking connections. I guess it must be a couple of hundred.
It's our interests to be careful what to share with different people. In fact we would like to know as much a possible about the people around us (considering naturally the time and other constraints we have e.g. moral). Companies behave in a similar way. They give a carefully crafted image and good services to their customers, while they share more and/or different information with employees, owner, consultants, authorities... etc. Shell we function like companies? Our profile is the main product we "sell" while more personal information is shared only with an inner circle. Shell we use a CRM -like database on our computer (people with good networking skills have something similar) to store data about our friends and acquaintances? Naturally it has it legal and moral limits, but if a website can do it why couldn't we.
What do you think? Does it make sense? Or is it immoral? Is this the future of social networking?
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