But while we’re on the topic, social technology often does one thing well – extract value from thin relationships. But let’s be clear, there isn’t much gold in those hills to begin with, they are indeed thin relationships, but the internet is an excellent extruder of say, the gold dust, that does exist. Google is a clear example of this: they were able to harness the value of thin relationships to improve search. And Amazon crunches thin relationships to offer better product recommendations. But both examples are applications of technology (algorithms, databases, etc) and not applications of a single person’s attention to extract value from thin relationships – which is what I think many of us are trying to reproduce with our behaviors, and we’re failing.

We, as in those of us with one foot or another in social media, can’t escape the inevitability of Dunbar’s number – after we pass around 150 relationships we need things like databases and algorithms to extract value from our social graph, and it won’t be the same kind of value we had before. And both Facebook and Twitter do an extremely poor job on their own of extracting value from thin relationships. In fact, things we typically call social networks are the worst at extracting value from thin relationships so far. We should fix that or fix our behaviors.

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— From just a fantastic piece from What Consumes Me that responds to Umar Haque’s “Social Media Bubble”