Danah Boyd seems to be doing interesting things in online social networking. Have to add her work to my Bibliography.

Bret Taylor's presentation on The Future of your Online Presence is worth analysing. He talks about Filters (Group friends so you don't miss updates - your friends select items interesting to them but your social network would have different groups such as relatives or work mates);Clustering (Cluster related entries to highlight important topics and reduce volume); and Ranking (Automagically pick the "best" entries). Ranking is done using explicit signals (user action), implicit signals (social graph, topic or content of entries), and external signals (global importance or general interest). The way signals are used at FriendFeed reminds me of Neural Networks.