Several issues need to be addressed before social networks and social media portals serve their user base better. One of these issues is better understanding the different relationshis on the social graph.
Currently, everyone is a “friend”, which says nothing about our true relationship with the people we meet on-line. So we need a more fine-grained approach, to discern a true friend from a simple acquaintance. Twitter have begun to address this by allowing you distinguish between people you ‘follow’ and friends. However, one of the biggest issues yet to be tackled is social graph decay. The barrier and social implications of adding friends are lower than removing people you no longer keep-up or fall out with.
In my social network operating system of the future, trust will work a lot like PageRank (and other web ranking algorithms) do today: as a statistical analysis of a variety of factors, including some degree of explicit rating, but not depending on it.
Take the phone and email, for example. There is lots of great metadata to be collected: how often do I communicate with this person? How quickly do I respond when they contact me? How often do I initiate communication, and how quickly do they respond? How long have we been in contact? How many different modalities (phone, email, IM, other) do we use to connect? Add in: are we in the same organization? Do we work together in other ways? Do we appear in pictures together? Do I subscribe to their RSS feed?
There’s a long way to go here, but I think there are breakthroughs to be had. Obviously, the automated trust metrics will get you only so far, but it would seem that they could produce a list for manual review and management.
