First thought: Will a shift to “realtime” networks mean less “friends”, more groups, more lists and more keyword/tag based searches?

Will realtime networks force us to restructure our usage of the term “friend”, the impact of Dunbar’s number and the convergence of conversations and entertainment”

On realtime, search, tagging and structuring the cacophony:

• Aaron Chua, Twitter as social VRM, a big idea:

  To prove that this is viable, I did a simple experiment on Twitter Search using the phase: I am looking for. The results are pretty interesting. This simple search alone has revealed the intentions of many people that ranges from dating, to products, to jobs etc. The opportunity then is to build tools that allow vendors to respond and for the user to control these responses.

• Alan Patrick, The Future of Twitter: Social VRM, my comment:
  

  Agreed Alan, the opportunity:

  - Isn’t about directly aggregating and controlling but instead facilitating open access
  - Isn’t about creating the applications and monetizing directly but increasing the underlying interactions and monetizing indirectly (by making it easier to app developers to access and use data and then take a share of the value created in the interactions)
  - Isn’t about overtly cataloging, structuring and selling data (interactions = tweets) for companies to mine, which would cause people to change behavior (kind of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of public conversations), but about providing better routing and context behind interactions (tweets, in this platform) so that intent can be easier, more meaningful, less mystical, more direct.

  Companies and people still need a lot of work in structuring and understanding “the flow”; good times ahead…

• Nic Brisbourne, Realtime search and shared data services come together?, my comment:
  

  The interesting bit you point out is the persistence of presence, the ability to link actions together by a specific individual over a period of time to get a more reasonable and true look into their intent. Browsing history and cookies were just a start; Twitter and Facebook (and blogs, and delicious, and any site where we create and curate content) helps to piece together the story, but as Iain points out, the next step will be tools based on the VRM philosophy that will provide the reasons (and incentives) for people to provide a clearer view into their actions. Right now we hide our intent in varying degrees of plain sight, but I’d hazard a guess that we’d change our behavior if we could see the value.

• Aaron Chua, Pull platforms need powerful coordination mechanisms:
  

  Any mechanisms that help us to sort through the proliferation of options and find the resources that are truly useful to us will have great value. Mechanisms that capture and build on the insights and experience of others will be even more valuable because they will create a classic increasing returns opportunity. That’s the potential of tagging – if it can scale.

• Aardvark Blog, Social Search is the New Search:
  

  Just like Web Search provided a revolutionary way to find web pages that have the information you’re looking for, Social Search is a revolutionary way to find people that have the information you’re looking for. In both cases, intelligent search indexing is a vast improvement over the manual process of following links or browsing through directories.

• Michael Lewkowitz, A new foundation for distributed collaboration and collective intelligence:
  

  Twitter has been experiencing extraordinary growth and the the use of #hashtags has enabled a new dimension. As we tag, we build threads. These threads weave throughout the Twittersphere, linking interests, communities and conversations. As we tag we’re collectively weaving a tapestry that both describes our world and crafts the edges of what creates it. Over time I’m fascinated by the potential reach threads can have and see them as a launch-pad for new collaborations. And as these things happen, I can only imagine what these threads will be able to tell us about our selves and where the world is going. Only time will tell.

  [Full disclosure: I'm a bit biased, but I'm really excited about the potential of thread.io and the next iterations of the idea...]

Search, tagging, social search, threads… can we ever solve the problem of overabundance of information and complexity in a rich content world, or is our nature to stress systems to their breaking points simply an intractable human condition?