On the Web, nothing ever dies, and no good dead goes unpunished. A case in point are the old Social Commentary pieces I wrote for Darwin for a few years a few years ago. Every once in a while I get pinged (in this case via PubSub) that someone has mined something worthwhile out of one of them. Today, I stumbled over a piece (see There is something about social software) by Jack Vinson that builds on this old thing:

It is the customizable flow of information that really highlights the fluid nature of social software and the fluid networks that underlie those interactions. Each person participates in many different networks, and they each have a different set of information flowing through their workspace. And people flow in and out of these networks as well.

I agree. We live in many circles, and that is one of the flaws of most social networking solutions, which flatten everying into one big telephone book. That's why I continuously argue for the buddy list metaphor. We partition the world into various groups, cliques, and worlds. People's relationships with us grow or decrease, friends become colleagues, and colleagues move out of town and out of touch. There is a natural ebb and flow, and most tools do a bad job of flexing with that.

[tags: Social Tools, Darwin, Social+Commentary]