Marc Smith is a pretty smart guy. As Chief Social Scientist at enterprise collaboration and community software company Telligent, that’s part of his job description.
Prior to joining Telligent in 2008 Smith was a senior researcher on Microsoft’s R&D team for more than 10 years, where he was instrumental in defining, understanding, and describing the relationships that people form in online communities.
So it goes without saying that when he talks about something it’s a good idea to pay attention.
I’ve been thinking a lot about something he said earlier this month at a Bay Area CIO IT Executives Meetup Group event in Mountain View, CA about what he believes will represent the next major social networking convergence.
Smith was discussing how social media has directly impacted what is commonly known to sociologists as Dunbar’s number, the theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.
These are social relationships where an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. While no precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, the most commonly cited approximation is 150 and has been for many years.
Smith believes that the exponential power of social media has essentially raised the Dunbar’s number bar significantly, for many of us to around 1,500 and even as high as 15,000 for a select few.
I don’t think that’s unrealistic considering I am linked to 2.1 million contacts via connections on LinkedIn and have 1.3 million second-order followers on Twitter. While I may not know who each person is and how they relate to each other off the top of my head, it only takes me a couple of minutes to find out.
Smith also believes that we are on the verge of this significant social networking convergence and that it will be triggered by our cell phones, which via the web and Bluetooth technologies will broaden our communities to unheard of levels.
Last week Twitter announced a new location-aware API that will allow developers to add latitude and longitude to any tweet, which adds compelling context to each burst of micro-blogging information when you start to leverage individual profile information from other data sources like Facebook, LinkedIn, even contact lists, email and discussion forums.
As Twitter founder Biz Stone put it in his blog entry of Aug. 20, “You could switch from reading the tweets of accounts you follow to reading tweets from anyone in your neighborhood or city – whether you follow them or not. It’s easy to imagine how this might be interesting at an event like a concert or even something more dramatic like an earthquake.”
Think about sitting in a Starbucks in Chicago and receiving an alert on your cell phone that the VP of Marketing for that company you were interested in is sitting at the next table, or your college roommate that you haven’t seen in five years is having lunch down the street.
There will likely be many use cases we haven’t even thought of yet which is part of what makes this so exciting.
There are already a few location-based services available today that leverage Twitter, among them Tweetmondo and Geofollow, but these are based more on an opt-in directory model that requires participants to register and manually fill out keyword profiles.
Twitter may have a head start since it already has a huge user base and depending on how developers use this new API, writes MG Siegler on TechCrunch, “Twitter location could replace or bolster many of them. And that’s good news because the main problem that many of these location-based services have is a lack of users.”
As Siegler notes, Google has already made a series of moves to show its support of location-based computing , such as its Latitude service that shows you where your contacts are. And Google also recently introduced location support for Google Maps and the mobile version of its search engine, so if you search for something like a restaurant on your iPhone, it can know where you are and provide a list of nearby results.
You can be sure that Facebook and its approximately 250 million users is paying close attention, too.
Filed under: Facebook, LinkedIn, Social Media, Twitter
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