I owe you all a part 2 on this whole Open Social thing, and then a Part 3 that covers Facebook’s new advertising strategy, but I’m obsessing over a problem at work and haven’t spent much time thinking about anything else (I haven’t bathed in several days, but my co-workers haven’t seemed to notice).  That said, I know you all are desperate for me to talk about social networking stuff, so imagine how happy I was when I came across a little post by Krish linking to Fred, talking about the weak link in ego-centric social networks like Facebook.

The idea is that the primary activity in ego-centric networks is connecting to other people, as opposed to object-centric networks like Flickr, where the photo storage/tagging is useful to you on a personal level as well as a social level.  When you’ve run out of people to connect to, one of the major pleasures of the social networking experience is over.

So what do you do?  You add Applications.  And now, you add Products and Bands.  It simulates the feeling of adding new friends, but you don’t really get the same payoff– it’s not like this stuff can compete with the feeling of reconnecting with an old friend.  I wonder if Facebook (and all ego-centric social networks) aren’t in an endless chase to give their users more and more things (of lower and lower value) to connect with in an attempt to keep them engaged.  Fred argues that all ego-centric networks have a fixed lifespan; it’ll be interesting to see what impact this has on Facebook’s.

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