I've spent a good deal of time studying online social networking. Most every social website has a thing called 'groups' to organize folks into rooms based on a common interest. The vast majority of them are based on lists of members and they are mostly all seriously flawed. Don't get me wrong. The logic works. It is the social aspect that is flawed. The groups tend to decay over time. 

The reason has to do with the dynamics of group membership. It takes a bit of effort to belong to a group. Once you're in it, there is no certainty that you will continue having common interests with the group members. Successful groups with lots of members are doomed to failure as the noise level increases. In other words the more people in a common group - the less likelihood of interacting with folks you share commonality with. This is a known paradox of group theory. For example - where are you more likely to find a sexual partner? A dinner party or a rock concert? You'll encounter more people at the rock concert. But the noise level is (literally) too high to discuss commonality with potential sex partners. The dinner party in fact offers you more opportunities, despite the smaller number of members.

Likewise, the smaller or more limited a group, the higher the probability that it will stagnate, or fail to generate new social opportunities.  Private groups usually stagnate for precisely the reason that they are private. There are significant barriers to creating new social opportunities. It involves a political process to invite new members so as not to jeapordize the privacy of the existing members. 

As I've pondered these failures I think I've come up with an alternative architecture with a bit more promise (perhaps...). Let's say you join a website like this one. On the personal profile page you list some interests. In my case I'd start with guitar, music, software. Now here's the magic part... These interests automatically become groups with a unique forum page. If there are other folks on the site with the same interests, they all show the same forum pages. I'm automatically linked up with them. 

So once I join the site, I'm shown the guitar, music, and software forums. These were created automatically. It takes no effort to join except to list my interests somewhere. It takes no effort to belong, as I can engage or ignore the group as desired. It's just another forum. If it turns out there are too many people talking about guitar and it's too noisy, I can always fine tune my interests. 'electric-guitar', 'shred-guitar'. Given enough users, they will tend to gravitate toward forums containing just the right number of folks with whom they share interests. That's what social networking is all about. Instead of trying to prevent a group from decaying, we embrace it. Communities/friendships will decay. New ones will form. It is the cycle of life. The goal is to automate the process to whatever extent possible.

Maintaining lists of members is the wrong way to go about this. Instead let's look at what makes membership desirable in the first place. It is to enable relationships of people and information based on personal interests. So that's where the focus should be. Everything revolves around personal interests. Forget about lists of people. They are irrelevant.

The hard part is never the concept - it's making it all work. Now to see if I can make it work.