You may try to model me, but you can't define me. I'm larger than a tidy form.

That's why God and evolution gave us the ability to lie. And posture. And pretend. And choose our words and body language.  

I am not my business card. Or my resumé. Or my orkut profile.

They are merely shorthands, placeholders, for the real thing.

And you never get the real thing.

The closest you come is by interacting with me: self as black box. Not by description.

Second best to getting the real thing: ethnographic observation of my real life behavior.

Third best: following my narrative.  

Fourth best: analysis of my online behavior.

That hamstrings YASNs.

The prob, of course is that I am many people in one skin and we all change who's in charge with the ebb and flow of blood sugar, brain chemistry, and the damned cat that peed on the carpet and I'm one way in A's company, another in B's company, and some awkward way when in the company of both A & B since I'm working with B, dating A, but had horribly bad sex with B but I can't remember whose fault it was.

I am complex, not one persona but many, changing over time. 

We become self aware of this in puberty.

And spend adolescence learning to navigate ourselves, to choose, to actively dream versions of ourselves into being. For the objects of our infatuation. For our authority figures. For our parents. For strangers. Hopefully for ourselves.

Then adulthood calls for settling upon an outer persona. We simplify, most of us, at least our outer affect.

But the other me's are still inside.

And each of the million other Ryzers/YASNSers are the same way.  

If I'm that messy and convoluted, can you imagine the relationship complexity? personas*(personas-1).

I have a few broad suggestions for social network improvements.

Model sociology. Not just nice stuff but all the icky horrible interactions we see in the office, in school, in gangs. Rites of passage. Flirting. Insults. Combat. Cliques. Authority. Power.

Model psychology. Squeeze in Maslow's Hierarchy. Piaget or someone else who models childhood development, especially arrested development.

Let me do more. Solve real life problems virtually. Design tools for tasks I really need. Group formation. Group destruction. Group work. Better meetings. Prioritization of communication. Help people be useful to each other.

Do less. Email, texting, http, phone calls are all pretty dumb systems. They just move content, so the human content becomes paramount, richer, engaging. Find your core and strip away the rest.  

Admit your limitations and open up the plumbing. We need APIs so programmers can extend the models and tools. 

I should be able to write an extension that lets you see a combined orkut profile and Google references.

Or find what the people in my virtual sub-community are buying on Amazon.

Or authenticate access to my calendar using friendship degrees.  

Or sync my mobile phone behavior (who I text and who texts me) with my buddy list.

Or turn orkut into my smart phone's Caller ID system.  

Or bounce new friends-of-friends against my interest profiles and nominate a few for acquaintanceship.

Or whatever. The world knows more than you do, so let them in.

If you want social software to endure, ...  

 

A guy asked what it takes to scale your rolodex to 100,000 people. Then built Ryze to find out.

What's your question?

[a klog apart]