Personally, I am currently waking up at 5.30am and over breakfast with my daughter, using Tweetie's "Nearby" feature and friending every single person on Twitter within a 5 mile radius of my home. As far as I'm concerned I'm interested in what happens when you are in direct personal contact with 2000 people in your immediate vicinity (or as close to that number as Twitter will allow).
But as Pete says, Social Media doesn't scale. Beyond that number Twitter does not allow. That's it - you can _only_ have a reciprocal relationship with that number of people. But more importantly than that (and this is arguable with some tools like TweetDeck) to have meaningful relationships with more than 150 people (according to Gladwell in The Tipping Point) is more or less impossible. Anything past that is just a partial brushing up against each other type interaction in an online train carriage.
To me, there are a four words that are going to be important over the next few years: Trust, Filter, Local, Family.
I see the little scene we have going on here as just the first bubble in what will become an overlapping bubblebath of social media use in the city.
We trust other people to tell us things and we value their opinions. You don't need to be connected to thousands of people - you just need to be connected to a few hundred that you trust. These people you trust, filter the outside world and you pick things up from them. Usually those people are local to you because there are things about where you live that have an immediate bearing on your life and also affect the likelihood of you experiencing similar things in your everyday life. But by far the strongest connections are with your family and they are your most trusted local filters.
A 'clique' is an important social device to enable people to share things with eachother and 'cut the cruft'- it reinforces thinking, enables people to talk at the same level as others and to learn based on what has been said before.
So I think the premise that a 'clique' is a bad thing is fine to consider but let's not gloss over the fact that we do have a small, strongly connected group of people who are unusually public and well connected online in this city. To be honest it still surprises me that there aren't more hyperconnector (Pete, Bounder) types around. And then as if by magic yesterday I stumbled across someone who lives two miles away from me that I had never heard of online, whose name had never come up in conversation, and he had about 1500 followers on Twitter.
I thought that was great. And we're going to see a lot more of that happening this year. It's a good thing. Yes - there's a little clique of geeky blogger types around, myself included, but 2009 is the year that this stuff is going to go mainstream. I've seen Emily's reaction to Twitter and the iphone and once I'd explained a little about how I use it, she was away and really enjoying using these tools we've all explored around and used so heavily, but with fresh eyes, and applied to her own personal niche that I know absolutely nothing about!
The exact same thing happened two years ago with Flickr when we all kicked off on how amazing it was to take photos of the city and put them on a map and connect and chat to eachother. I've kind of dropped off Flickr recently, and I'm expecting the same thing to happen with lots of stuff I still use now (email anyone?)
Fiona raised a good point about people feeling excluded and I've felt this myself - I've ranted online about how if 'you're' (apparently there is no 'you') organising a meetup for blogger or socially medially people that it needs to bear in mind that people like me, Emily, Dave, Charlotte all have kids nowadays, and 6pm just doesn't work. 8am - sure, no problem. Lunch - ace. 8pm, possibly, if the baby's gone to sleep okay.
It's the details, it's the invitations to join the conversations, and I guess I just have to spend a little more time considering what people might think when I put out blog posts about this. Seriously, that 50+ People you need to follow on Twitter post came out of frustration of people saying to me 'I tried out Twitter but didn't know what to do after I signed up', and the number of people that have told me it was useful far outweighs the ones that have said it felt elitist. TBH - I had trouble making up that list of 50 of people I was following and that were actually using every day.
It was the same urge for connectivity that a lot of us feel, the thing that spawned Flickrmeets, Created in Birmingham and a bunch of other stuff we've done - connect to others, then let it go... as Pete says, build yourself out of whatever you're doing.
The result of the 50+ thing was that it worked, and loads more links were formed between people - yes it was a device, but it did the job I wanted it to do.
As Dubber said to me (in jest) afterwards "Damn. Now I'm going to have to follow all these people instead of just you." Exactly.
