I’ve said this many times in my talks, but I just said it to Paul Kedrosky in email, and it bears repeating:
“My communication applications reflect my real social network. They just need to be instrumented.” When is a vendor of email or phone or address book products going to figure this out? Watch who I communicate with, how often, and in what patterns, and give me tools for managing my network better based on that analysis. Use an “opt out” rather than “opt in” architecture to capture enough of the data into the cloud to provide “social networking” functions but not enough to compromise privacy. (Yeah, I know that sounds evil, but so did Napster to a lot of people).
