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Editor's Blog: The Facebook sweepstake
Place your bets - you know someone's going to say it...

By Tony Hallett

Published: Tuesday 31 July 2007

Heard about the new game? When you meet friends or colleagues and have a few minutes to kill, take a punt on how long it takes for someone to mention Facebook.

I say Facebook as the social networking phenomenon du jour but give yourself points for the mention of Bebo (usually paired with the phrase "my kids... "), LinkedIn, MySpace or others.

It seems this kind of thing is on lots of people's minds. It's certainly taking up a lot of hours each day as individuals are maintaining profiles, adding or batting away 'friends' and so on.

And I'm not sure anyone knows where it's going.

Now quite a few of us like these kind of internet age uber-experiments but at a silicon.com editorial board dinner last night the subject came up of just how useful these networks are or will end up being.

silicon.com columnist and well-known technologist Peter Cochrane talked about the need to be close to a 'super node'. If we are all nodes on these virtual networks then some people, with maybe thousands of connections, are the super nodes, through whom perhaps millions of people are but one introduction away.

Talk soon turned to a VC many of us know who has maybe three to four thousand contacts on LinkedIn. Now it seems to me that for that kind of person, being close to so many people and their professional lives is key.

Yet many of us in the room last night all know each other well, all use more than one of these services, yet don't make all the same connections with each other online.

It seems there are layers of social networking. There are those we know so well we don't even feel the need to interact with over one of these closed networks. Think of all the people you know who would die at the thought of their mother or father - or son or daughter - joining their network.

Then there are those for whom this sort of thing is a godsend - friends or colleagues around the world you'd happily share your life with but are just too far away to see regularly.

I could go on. Right down to the people who simply need to be in the loop for the purposes of their job and have no worries about whether they have actually met someone or could recognise a contact in a crowded room. It's simply about information flow at that level.

As Facebook conversations take all manner of turns - dark secrets being dug up for job interviews, privacy settings, phishing by the bad guys and a whole lot more - let's remember that a person's online profile and set of friends and contacts aren't the totality of that person.

Even if it feels like some people you know spend all their waking hours online.