From what I can tell, there is a culture of maximizing friends (or at least personal network size) on Friendster that seems absent of Tribe, perhaps because of the weak ties available through the tribes. In fact I find Tribe more valuable as a threaded collection of newsgroups than as a social network in the Friendster sense.

What do you mean by stability? Rapid convergence?

interesting points.

i think with friendster the whole idea of a showing people how many others they are connected to created an element of competition and dicksizing. people started linking with others who werent even their friends just to increase the size of their local graph. i found it amusing that friendster had that little "are you SURE this person is your friend?" verification step. clearly that wasnt taken seriously. so not only do they have the problem of "mere" aquaintances linking to one another (perhaps a good example of a weak link), but also any bogus links to total strangers.

so, in trying to stay on top, i think tribester also suffers from this a little bit, in that there are still some folks with 100+ connections - clearly these links represent something different than "this person is really my friend".

i think its become somewhat ambiguous as to what an edge between two people actually means.

i would propose two things, if anyone asked me, which no one has: first, weighted edges. it seems like the next logical step to provide a mechanism for people to express (perhaps by gradients), exactly how "serious" the edge is between oneself and someone else. secondly, distinct graphs representing different relationships. for example, both tribe.net and friendster describe adjacencies between individuals. there is only one bidirectional type of edge. alternatively, there could be a "friend" graph, a "colleague/contact" professional graph, an "aquaintance" graph, et cetera. the tribes SORTOF accomplish some of this, except they are really just sets, and that isnt the same.

the ideas arent inclusive, but both step towards more accuracy in describing the social network actually being represented.

Here is my personal friend adding algorithm, if you will...

On friendster I add friends willy nilly. I have 170+. Many of these people I have had little meaninful interaction with. Friendster has a one dimensional use, to display social networks.

Tribe.net has message boards on each of the tribes. I find the linkage between a social network, personal information, and message boards to be extremely useful. When having a discussion with someone on a message board I often check out thier personal page and thier social network. The personal page gives me some context on what thier background is, what other related topics they may be knowledgable about, et cetera.

If the person is linked to me through people I respect, then I weight thier opinion favorably. If they are distantly tied to me, I dont necissarily discount thier opinion, but I accept less of thier claims based on trust. Other people do this as well, allocate trust based on how much they trust the social trace. For this reason, I carefully groom my listed friends.

I only 'friend' people who I know fairly well, or have some other method for verifying thier trustworthyness. As an example from my friends list, I do not know James Hughes and we have only exchanged a handful of e mails. However I 'friended' him because we have a half dozen friends in common, all of whom I respect.

It is, however, important to have a large extended personal network. Access to personal and professional information is restricted if you are not connected in some way to someone. To compensate for a picky friends list I have 'friended' several people based on the size of thier friends list. One of my 'friends' is connected to about 300 people. I do not know this person, but through him I am connected within several degrees almost every person I have ever wanted to. This strategy is more important on friendster, where you cannot view the profiles of people not in your network.

My friends and I, who talk a lot about the social physics of the system, refer to this friend list construction type as "hubbing." Keep your friend list tight, but keep a few spokes out to the masses so as not to restrict yourself to local optima.