Rescuing Social Networking

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Rescuing Social Networking
This link is here mostly for the graphic at the top, a nice conceptual vision of conferencing. But also for this sharp analysis of where social networks have been failing: "existing SNAs offer the user little to do, take too much time, don't provide a customized audience, are socially awkward, and don't provide much that other features of the Internet don't do as well or better." And for the advice near the end suggesting that "what would really make SVP cool would be if we could meter it... [and] automatically bill them and pay us for our time at an agreed-upon rate." Which left me wondering what my market rate would be billed per minute. More...