The effort, of course, is to find and deliver new forms of relevancy when there's too much data bombarding all of us; these services add a friend filter atop any other relevancy rankings that one individual might use to find useful and interesting information.
The interesting thing, though, is that so many of the active users--the Bay area digerati, for example--add so many people to their feeds --or their friends lists--that the selective filtering device disappears.
And, perhaps more importantly,many of those folks are most interested in having others read THEIR feed, or their notes, or their twitter stream-which means that for 20% of the users, what they're experiencing is a great self marketing vehicle (Yes, I've done this, too.)
So, we could suppose that what we are seeing are two sets of human behaviors--the marketers and promoters who always user relationships to see their ideas/products/values, and the rest of the group, who don't need to reach--or read 600+ people to feel impactful.
I'm thinking that as these services move more into the mainstream--twitter and friendfeed, I mean, we may see the same behaviors replicate--the local thought leaders and the salespeople have big lists, while others have smaller lists.
Either way, it's a fascinating squew of relevancy--that the urge to know, to be current, to hear it first, is one of the biggest torpedos to true social relevancy that we have.
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