Stuart Henshall picks up the banner for a social networking manifesto over at Unbound Spiral, along the lines of the "Ten Commandments" gauntlet I threw down the other day. He wants to enlarge the scope of the discussion that has been fulminating over here at Corante (the recent posts by Clay, my response, and his comments back, and the "Ten Commandments" post), and to shift the focus of the discussion toward a user-centric view point and a set of positive organizing principles, as opposed to the proscriptive "shall not's" that I started to enumerate.

I think we are at a paleolithic stage in the ascent of these systems, and a primitive Hammurabi Code -- an eye for an eye, and all that -- is probably a better starting point. Or maybe the two could go on in parallel: the Ten Commandments explicitly spelling out what SNAs must not do, and a "Sermon on the Mount" gospel that points out the direction that the technology should be moving toward.

I agree that we are at a turning point in the possible backlash against mechanistic, mass market, email-biased social networking contraptions. However, I still hold that a short and sweet set of prohibitions need to be articulated to structure the "Common Law" that needs to surround the conceptual architecture and presumed patterns of use for SNAs.

At the same time, I willingly sign up to support longer-range conjectures about the place and purpose of social tools, in general, and explicit software networking technologies, in specific. Press on, Stuart!