An Unmanageable Circle of Friends

Not the 3,456, though. "The furthest I'd go with Facebook would be to ask someone to borrow a textbook. I'd want to actually trust the person" for a bigger request. To use a social networking site for actual social networking would be an impertinence. An imposition. A sign -- even a relatively small one -- of vulnerable humanity instead of the casual snarkiness popular on the site's Walls (so named because messages are posted there, but isn't there a sociologist somewhere dissecting the isolation that the name implies?). It would be like actually playing with collectible Luke and Leia dolls instead of lining them up and occasionally vacuuming off their dusty plastic boxes.

It's so1996 to worry about the Internet secluding people from one another (and yeah, some people have found love -- and even apartments -- on Facebook). But the fact that the current popular spaces for social networking come up short means that someone is going to have to find a way for everyone to be real friends again.

One industry response to the issue so far has come in the form of . . . more social networking sites. On Aug. 6, online address book Plaxo introduced Pulse, its solution to the walled garden syndrome (i.e., if you wants to see a pal's Facebook entry, you too must belong to Facebook; to gawk at his Flickr photos, you too must Flick). Pulse users can stream everything from Amazon wish lists to del.icio.us Web markers directly into Pulse accounts. To Wellman's point, they can also separate which groups of people receive which types of information.

Another futurist prediction involves vertical social networking -- think really juiced-up message boards -- in which users meet via genuine common interests rather than simply mass friend-collect.

But that type of "let's nerd out by meeting others on the Thomas Kinkade social network" experience has its own pitfalls. Maybe Thomas Kinkade fans and dog lovers and Beautiful People -- who can join a network where admission is based on looks -- should be forced to occasionally disconnect from each other and meet dog-hating ugly people, just like IRL.

That's how real social networks have prevented us from getting too myopic, from living in apartment buildings where the only permissible artwork is . . . Thomas Kinkade, painter of light.

In some ways, we're dragged back to that Internet-causes-isolation theory again by the very sites that were designed to prove that it didn't. If hours in the day are limited, and we're spending more of them on social networking sites, then are we ultimately losing either breadth or depth in the way we interact with other people?

Or are we just rethinking what it means to be connected, accepting that we'll trade Facebook pokes with 3,456 people but then find our apartments on Craigslist?

Until someone figures all of this out, and discovers how to prevent social networking sites from becoming the death of social networking, what does Jason Calacanis, that exhausted networking guru, plan to do? For starters, this: "If you really want to get in touch with me, give me a call."