A subset implies a superset

Chris Brogan asks the following question:

But do you see why the village becomes important, even if I’m mostly interacting with a smaller subset?

In my mind the key to this being true is an expansive village: a superset that includes people you know of and people you know well. A lot of my friends question the protocol, of friending on Facebook. At what point is it kosher to include someone in your network? Do you have to know them at all? I think that is a matter of individual discretion, and the system you are using.

I had been signed up for Twitter for some time, and saw little value in it. I would tweet a bit here and there, but never saw anyone I knew adopting it, and since the only ones I followed were BarCamp and uF, it seemed very unidirectional.

My breakthrough on Twitter was to start following the thought leaders I looked up to. Actually, I developed a strategy: I knew that Jason Kottke was bound to have an interesting set of people he was interacting with. So I followed him and then looked at who he was following. Then I saw Jesse James Garrett and realized that meant there was at most two degrees of separation between Jason and me; I followed @jjg, and then my list of people to follow exploded, growing organically based on the people I respected or knew personally. Somewhere in that period, I noticed someone giving a provocative tweetback to Chris Brogan, which I followed, at which point, I started following Chris which turned me on to his blog which later resulted in me friending him on Facebook.

When I friended Chris on Facebook, I had exchanged a couple of tweetbacks with him, so I felt like it might be OK to friendup. I was pensive, but using my standard damn the torpedoes attitude, I hit "Add" and just figured whatever happened would happen. He approved the add, and since then I have had three channels of input from Chris which have made my life better.

The thing is: one connector friend on one service is not sufficient to build out a real ambient information-base. You need a bunch of people that cross all the segments of important people in your life, otherwise your conversations are siloed and services diminish in value.