After hearing a lot about LinkedIn and having a handful of requests over the past year or so, I recently decided to give LinkedIn a try. It is really an interesting experience to see who knows who, and I was immediately struck with the notion of the "mother of all distributed trust solutions" as I am sure many others who think about these things were. And then the requests started coming in. People who I barely knew were asking me to recommend them in a sort of MLM (multi-level marketing) scheme. And people are rewarded heavily (socially, that is) by the number of people they connect with.

As is always the case, a trusted network relies heavily on the weakest link: the least amount of trust between two parties. In this case, it was clear that the links were made via name recognition and number competition alone. There goes my thought of trust.

They can get better, however. I recently came across Christopher Allen’s post on the topic of social networks on his Life With Alacrity blog. Here is a quote:

Ultimately social networking services — be it LinkedIn, Tribe.Net, Orkut, or LiveJournal — are making the problem worse, not solving it. Any engineer or information theorist can tell you that a system that only has amplifiers will be out of balance, and that you need attenuators in the system as well. Our current breed of social networking services have focused on amplifying our contacts not only because it serves us, but because it serves them. The more contacts that you make, the more people they potentially have in their service. However, in the long run this is unsustainable — a social networking service also has to be useful — merely amplifying your contacts isn’t enough.

Interesting stuff. I suggest reading the entire essay.