Seth Godin has an interesting post titles, Who You Know the extent of the message is this:
” One of the mantras of networking (and the many social networking sites that people are flocking to) is that it matters who you know. The goal of having a thousand or more friends online is that you’re well known. Connected. A click away.
I wonder if there’s a more useful measure: who trusts you?”
This is starting to become the trend in socially networking after the myspace phenomenom of “friend bots” (basically bots that added friends for your myspace page) and add trains, where you picked friends at random and added them.
When I first joined the myspace crowd, about 4 years ago, this is what mattered. If you have 20 friends you were the bottom of the barrel. With the introduction of Facebook and the multitude of other social networking sites the view changed from knowing people to only careing about the people who trust you and vice versa.
It is my opinion that this is where social networking should be and needs to evolve from. We are trying to make that happen at Smaller Indiana, with networking online and offline.
In this world trust is really all you have, shouldn’t it be true on the internet too?