At least in so far as its positioning is concerned, LinkedIn ignores the fact that real people have virtual worlds – it does not let you buy chicken feed using some LinkedIn $$ or suggest that you try finding people based on their A/S/L/I. LinkedIn should continue to ignore it simply because it focuses on the notion of business networking – a rather real world need!

Real World is different! The Real Real World of today includes the real world and the virtual world. In the Real Real World, people distinguish between the people they would want to ‘groom’ – my brother, my sister, one of my many cousins I am particularly fond of and so on, my bar-hopping buddy, and the people that they would not mind being an acquaintance of, and the people with whom they would only have a business-like relationship, and including but not limited to the people they would want to avoid at all cost – I confess that I sometimes add a contact to my phonebook just to be sure that I do not pick up the phone the next time I receive a call from that number!

That is one part of the real world ‘connections’. Real people’s need to escape their real world and engage in the non-real world is as real as those people themselves.

Jack will, at times, want to be a fighter pilot chasing the bad guys! This is his virtual world. And I believe, that Jack’s want is as real as Jack, the CEO himself! So, Jack will have in his list of the people he knows, his employee Alice, his daughter Emma, and his “co-pilot” Maverick. Of course, all but Maverick are real people in Jack’s lives. Maverick is a fantasized entity, who is Jack’s co-pilot in a virtual world, and is a role that is probably being played by another John, who is as real as Jack.

In the above context, these all-encompassing terms such as ‘connections’ or ‘friends’ or ‘buddies’, in my opinion, are probably incorrect terms in the real world!! I would say that the ‘list of names’ that I see there are not my connections, they are the ‘people I know’ to a lesser or greater degree. Some of them I know well, some of them are my close friends, some are my relatives, some close, some distant. I have some relationships with each of them. Some relationships I value more, some others less. In certain contexts, my fantasized relationships may become more important to me than my real ones!

One could say, that the relationships I value are my connections. Alternatively, some of the people I know, I consider them as my connections, and hence value them more – “I know the Mayor!”.

As the CEO of the 5000 people company, the 45-something Jack will not think of the 18-year old Alice (the trainee engineer) as one of his connections. He will not care whether Alice is having shushi or rajmaa-chaawal tonight, or whether she likes rock or jazz. Unless of course, Jack has begun to like the witty notes that Alice leaves once in a while for others to read.

But what about Alice? Alice would probably give herself and her entire neighborhood a treat, on the day she receives a hello from Jack!

And if instead of Alice, we were talking about Emma, Jack’s 14 year old daughter, Jack would probably want to be the first to know when she has a running nose!

What should change?

People I know and my Connections should be distinguished and differentiated from each other. Connections are people I groom and it is an asymmetrical kind of relationship. By accepting an add request, I am only agreeing that I somehow know the other. I get all these requests on LinkedIn or on FB. I accept them or ignore them because rejecting them I consider as rather un-social. Sometimes, I accept them because I see no harm. Most of the times these people just occupy the space on my ‘friend list’ and I do little with them. When I send a request however, it is mostly when I consider connecting with the other worth it. I perceive such people to be somehow important to me today, or someone who may become important tomorrow.

My network (as a noun) may be large – all the people in my friend list and then their friends and so on. But I network (as a verb) with only a few of them. These few, I would refer to as my connections. The other larger set is the set of people I only know, somehow. This distinction is important to me. When I look at the friend list screen, rather than seeing the list of 350 odd people, I would rather first see the 37 I consider as my connections. Rather than seeing the events and updates from all these 350 on my lifestream, I would rather see those from my 37 connections, instead. To the world, I would rather talk about the 37 important people in my life, rather than the 350, and so on.

I want my social network to help me maintain these distinctions.

One of the core, and in all probability, the most significant game changing value proposition from digital representations of the Real Real World and its network in times to come will probably be their ability to perform these high fidelity tasks. In this digitized representation, call it simulation if you like, real people will want to be able to first distinguish and keep separate their not-so-disjointed real worlds and virtual worlds. And within each of time, be able to do the high fidelity task of qualitatively distinguishing one person from the other based on the nature of relationship they share. As I read somewhere, someone noted that Web 2.0 (whatever that means) was and is a lot about creating a lot of noise. Web 3.0 (and whatever it would come to mean) would be much about filtering much of that noise. This is a tall ask. It is not just a challenging concept – it has all the ingredients of a best seller thriller!!!!!