In the past few weeks, I've had talked with late 30s-40-something friends who express disdain and frustration with both Facebook and LinkedIn.

These friends feel that Facebook is not really usefully, too diffuse, and most of the applications on it are a waste of time, which means it is great if you want to waste time, but not as a tool. Other friends (and sometimes the same friends) are also not hot on LinkedIn.  They like it better, because it has great critical mass in the job field, but they're frustrated by the clunkiness of the search, the cumbersome communications tools, and what they see as the employment-specific narrowness of the experience.

I'm an active FB and LinkedIn user, and I find them to be invaluable, but that's because I use them as explicit directories. In other words, when I meet people I'd like to stay connected to (and remember how to contact them and who they are) I add them to FB and Linked In.

LinkedIn works as a professional rolodex for me, a list of people I am connected to that allows me to see what they are doing and have done and how to reach them.

FB also keeps me connected, but that's the color wash on the black and white LN listing--if it's someone I've met briefly, FB can bring them to life as a more 3-D person--someone who updates their news feed, likes particular kinds of sports and music, and--often--shares friends with me.

Basically, what this means is that  I use these two services to create explicit social network directories--listings and contact management that provide useful and interesting records of people I meet.

Interestingly, one could argue--and I will--that the biggest wasted effort is email. Your email list--particularly the people you message, as opposed to the people (and spambots) that message you--is a rich contact list, but the data attached to each person is pretty much buried. There's no way to know that smernit@gmail.com is me, and to assemble the meta data about who I am that will provide as rich a picture (and not feel totally stalkerly) as LinkedIn and Facebook can.

(And yes, I know people have been talking--and trying--for years now--to build email out as the basis for a social network, and that *smart* email is one of the so called Next Big Things--just show me the products and the people using them, folks).

"As to the rest of the wannabees, it really is true that if you haven't done it, that is: been intimately involved growing a social web app from prototype to Internet-scale on a UNIX stack, then you really don't know shit. (I know more than my fair share of people that have, and I didn't see any of them posting armchair bs on the comments)."

--Upcoming co-founder Leonard Lin, writing about scaling twitter and the general brouhahaha.

Susan sez: Check out these links as well.

• joestump.net » Blog Archive » It's not the language stupid

• I'm Going To Scale My Foot Up Your Ass - Ted Dziuba

• random($foo): Internet Asshattery, Armchair Scaling Experts Edition

• Liminal Existence: Scalability

• Scaling Twitter » SlideShare

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If you're interested in local, community, identity, of course you are thinking about location-based services.

Chris Messina's post on location and development gives me alot to think about and is worth a close read. Here's one snippet and then some ideas it's prompted:

"Put still another way, how would a universal "location layer for the social web" change the design and implementation of existing applications? Would it give rise to a class of applications that take advantage of and thrive on knowing where their members live, work and play, and tailor their services accordingly? Or would all services eventually make use of location information? Or will it depend on each service's unique offering and membership, and why people signed up in the first place? Just because you can integrate with Twitter or Facebook, must you? If the "location layer" were made available, must you take advantage of it? What criteria or metrics would you use to decide?"

Susan sez: Coming from an online dating service, where we did large quantities of research into safety and security, among both men and women, I'm interested in how the value of location will actually play out. 

I'd posit that there is very little need to actually tell your closest circle where you are via a device because they know anyway (let's assume you communicate multiple times a day via various channels

So then it's the second degree circle and beyond you're able to broadcast or alert where you are--a person is going to want to share that data with specific people or sorts of people at specific times (EX: I am at my kids' game, all parent friends and members of the soccer team; NOT my boss and co-workers, perhaps.)

And then there's the amazing marketing that location can drive--Example: Headed to the movie? Here's a special offer to come have pizza with us before or after! (Ugh).

I am completely interested in location awareness, but also trying to think out best fit use cases so this stuff isn't stalkery or just more annoying intrusions.

I'm still waking up, but this is a great post by one Hank Williams, whydoeseveryhingsuck?:

"It is entirely possible that before Twitter makes its first penny, it will become too important to exist in its current form, and the community will feel it has to be replaced by an open source distributed framework. This should strike fear into the hearts of anyone who decides open their API. While the Open API strategy has clearly worked in terms of adoption, it may have worked too well. In fact it may have worked so well that Twitter may be killed before it has even really made it out of the womb, by people that find it so important that they can't afford to really have it be a company."

I don't think this is going to happen to twitter, but like the concept of Open API perhaps not being enough as a big worrier for any developer.

Also think this is a good articulation of a higher-order problem.