Three connected Monday afternoon thoughts:

• JP Rangaswami, Monday morning musing about social networks; Why do the “digital implementations of social networks” get so much attention even though the basic activities have existed for centuries? Three reasons: standardisation, persistence and exposure:

  And finally we have exposure, openness. APIs and their equivalent. What do I mean? It’s about … A way of building things for a community to use, without having to belong to that community in the first place; without having deep knowledge of that community. Most importantly, an ability to build things for a community, things that lower the friction of communication and scheduling and sharing and belonging.

• Hutch Carpenter, Forget Dunbar’s Number, Our Future Is in Scoble’s Number:
  

  Here’s how I differentiate interactions between Dunbar’s Number and Scoble’s Number:

  In the top graph for Dunbar’s Number, you’re aware of a fuller range of what’s happening in someone’s life. … This is the stuff of warm friendships. You internalize a lot more information about someone, and they know a lot more about you. You develop short-hand ways of talking, and can call on older experiences to relate to new information and developments.

  The bottom graph is for Scoble’s Number. Here, you only intersect socially with someone periodically. This happens when the stars align:

  * Someone is talking about a topic of interest to you
  * You happen to see this topic being discussed

  Scoble’s Number is a our new reality. By maintaining a larger number of weaker connections, you can tap a wider range of opinions.

• Tim Leberecht, Generation G: Wired to Care, Wired to Share:
  

  For corporations seeking to engage Generation G two things are key. One is empathy or as Jump Associates’s Dev Patnaik posits in a recent book: Today’s corporations need to be “Wired to Care.” Empathy must not be confused with sympathy: Sympathy is literally “feeling with” – compassion for or commiseration with another person. Empathy, by contrast, is literally “feeling into” – the ability to project one’s personality into another person and more fully understand that person. You feel sympathy when you haven’t been there; empathy is when you have.

  The other critical ability for engaging Generation G is “sharing.” In a digital economy where most of the transactions are for free (or expected to be free), value is mainly created through the act of sharing. This means replacing outdated concepts of ownership, control, and coordination with concepts of open source, open IP, and open innovation. It also means open conversations in the spirit of what Clive Thompson labeled “Radical Transparency.” As they are increasingly replacing traditional media companies, brands’ foremost task is to share information. The message for Generation G is loud and clear: As much as transparency can underscore that you have nothing to hide, it can also highlight that you have a lot to give.