The behind-the-scenes friends networks
: Many of us have said that the real future of friend networks is not built by artificial and annoying invitations but instead of capturing and canning what is already happening in the very social software of the Web and weblogs.
Today Anil writes about such an application built on the friend-of-friend lists that are created automatically when you build blogrolls using TypePad. Here’s a search engine built on that and here’s Anil’s own page describing his connections.
This is, of course, just a start. Enough would have to use this standard to make this work. But what I really lust after is what comes next: a search engine that looks just in the content created by my friends and their friends (what are my friends saying? or I know I heard somebody say this, who was it?); analyses of what these natural networks care about (so you can find the hub of influencers on, say, music and see what they’re saying or say something to them)…
