Eric Reasons

(First, let me apologize if this post is specific to Google+, a service most people aren't even allowed in yet. However, there's already a lot of chatter about what it is and what it is not, and I wanted to collect my thoughts.) It was sheer luck that a conversation I had a month ago led me to pen some thoughts about the qualities that can make or break social media platforms . At the time, I had no idea that Google+ was less than 30 days from launching it's "Field Test". In that post, I cite some literature on the "150-connection gap", which shows that the limit for social circles seems to settle in at about 150 real connections to real people, and that when you start interacting with more than those 150 real connections, you're acting as an Authority does to an Audience, not participating in a community/conversation. I then posit a hypothetical new social media service, and claim that if it can't "cross the 150-connection gap", then...

---150 Connections: The difference between a Community and an Audience--- I found myself in a conversation with friend and sometimes mentor, Nathan Hughes ( @ndh313 ), about the upper bound of one's social connections. Back in the 90's Robin Dunbar proposed an upper limit of around 150 real social connections (knowing who a person is and what their relationship is to you). Scientists have recently used Twitter as a laboratory to confirm that this number holds true , even with all the recent advances in social networking technology. This number has also been confirmed by actual practice throughout the range of human experiences , from hunter-gatherer societies to corporate organizations, to the U.S. military. In our new social media landscape, this limit seems to manifest itself in two interesting effects: Most of you have probably already observed the first effect, and it is unlikely to surprise you: those of us who follow hundreds or thousands on Twitter or Facebook will...

In recent posts, I have: ...Questioned whether Intellectual Property Law spurs innovation or hinders it. ...Suggested that one need not change IP law to have it lose in the long run to the culture of free (or the " culture of participation ", if you prefer Craig Newmark's lingo). ... Claimed that we shouldn't abandon traditional economies in favor of a "knowledge economy" that may not be the panacea that some claim it to be. This comes largely out of Jeff Jarvis' recent thoughts on innovation yielding efficiency more than it yields growth . I argue that this efficiency doesn't just shrink some markets in isolation, but can lead to deflation of the economy as a whole. Innovative deflation. I wanted to dig into this last point a bit more and get a discussion going on how to substantiate or dismiss such a claim: "Is the knowledge economy ripe for growth, or is it the means by which traditional economies are shrunk?" My argument is two-fold. F...