What’s the “Thread Count” of Your Friend Count?
I had coffee with a longtime investor colleague who threw a nice metaphor in my direction: “thread count” as it related to the depth of your friendships. As we all initiate, accept or add new digital relationships into our lives (yes, I did get ‘social’ with LinkedIn back in its early years with 1,500 linkedins; more recently with ~650 Facebook friends), how do we measure the relative quality of the quantity of friends we connect to? Do we connect to add relative quality value to our own persona, or is it done merely to create a personal, i.e., quantitative, fan club of sorts?
From Discovery’s How Stuff Works‘ site, substitute “friend count” for “thread count”:
So how are counts such as 800 or 1,200 even possible? How could you fit that many threads into a single inch? The short answer is you can’t. “Some manufacturers use creative math to boost thread count,” explains Consumer Reports.
In the spirit of free enterprise and competition, manufacturers battle to calculate their tread counts high, higher and highest. They count not just each thread, but each fiber (called plies) that make up each thread. So a single thread might be four plies twisted together; one manufacturer will call that one thread, while another manufacturer will call that four threads.
Scary metaphor, huh? But real enough as you watch (and aggregate) all those random Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Friendfeed and every other social attachment, as does everyone else around you who has converted the seemingly social experience online into a business relationship tool.
Digging deeper into a theoretical thread count, how can you “go Egyptian Cotton” with your top-tier friends while keeping the remainder happy? I’ve been threatening to write the opposite of the earn-out post – on “Earn-Ins,” i.e., cashing back into relationships in 2009 that will help you weather the current storms.
Best “Egyptian Cotton” practices would include ignoring all but the most valuable threads/friends that you’ll really reach out to in a given month or two. There’s been many complaints over Facebook’s inability to allow users to limit their status updates to close friends or business colleagues or any directed niche.
For the Facebook friend-amassers – examples being Ted Leonsis, Arianna Huffington, Jason Calacanis, Harry Knowles, Gary Vaynerchuk – who reached the 5k friends’ cap, the only extension available to them is to create an official “fan” page, then message out to them via fan-link messages.
Calcanis, over one of his now infamous email blasts suggested he’d could even charge $1 per email registrant and bank $10k per month in email monetization. For those in LinkedIn, way back when, Reid Hoffman turned off allowing uses to announce they had over 500 friends – as I think he believed it watered down the usefulness of the contacts. So now, if you’re over 500 linkedins, you’re “500+”
I’ll also share a simple hack on Facebook, allowing you to create a visual grid of your friends: a ‘social graph’ wallpaper for Twitter, blog templates or (god forbid) social media powerpoint backgrounds: Open Facebook, go to “Friends” -> click on “Everyone,” then select “– – -” from the “Show” drop down.
From Techcrunch’s interview at Davos with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg:
Sandberg also promised that users would be able to add more than 5,000 friends sometime soon (something we first wrote about last year). She said “I’m not going to give you a specific date, but I will reinforce the message that this is coming, and more importantly tell you why we think it’s important. Because you have these friend requests because people genuinely want to hear from you and genuinely want to connect with you. We’re not providing that functionality and we think that’s important so we are working on this and we’re working on it currently. We look forward to your having 80,000 friends… 100,000 friends.”
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/02/techcrunch-interviews-facebook-coo-sheryl-sandberg-at-davos/
Excellent site http://www.newmedici.com and I am really pleased to see you have what I am actually looking for here and this this post is exactly what I am interested in. It’s taken me literally 3 hours and 50 minutes of searching the web to find you (just kidding!) so I shall be pleased to become a regular visitor
[...] farming around social media relationships. This would, of course, be the polar opposite of “What is the ‘Thread Count’ of Your Friend Count?” thinking. Wonka with his candy farming [...]
This look interesting,so far.
If it’s not just all bots here, let me know. I’m looking to network
Oh, and yes I’m a real person LOL.
Peace,
Truly enjoy the thread count idea. Work it!