danah boyd: “From an autistic perspective, social life can and must be programmatically and algorithmically processed and understood on simplistic categorizable levels. The nuanced relationships that people regularly manage in everyday life are boiled down to segmented possibilities. When we teach autistic children to engage in social life, we teach them things like facial expressions. We tell them that a smile means goodness; that a frown should be concerning. Step by step, we dissect social affect and try to formalize it so that these kids can understand the world. This is also what we do with computers. How different is this from asking "Are you my friend, yes or no?"”

The above comes from a selection in The Best Software Writing I by Joel Spolsky, which I picked up at OSCON. It's a really great essay that talks about computer engineers programming in their ineptitude to social networking software, that is, they tend to think algorithmically while interacting with humans has far more nuance and unpredictability than software can ever hope to encapsulate.

Bob Rosner has some...advice...for people who are shy but want to start networking to get their dream vocation. I have the same problem with networking that I do with phone calls: I hate initiating because I think not only that I'm interrupting people, but that they care that I'm interrupting them. With social network software, it becomes less of an interruption because notifications or messages generally happen either by email (which people have to check to receive) or on the websites. If they get the notification on the website, then it's not interrupting anything, since that's what they're there for. I've been sticking with Orkut because it puts a face to people I know in an online context and because I have more friends on it than on the previous social software apps I've tried.

I'm still skeptical about the ability of social software to promote actual socializing, since it doesn't really encourage people to get out of the house or office and meet up for an event. I have more faith in websites like Meetup and Upcoming, which are designed specifically to help organize people to meet physically because of similar interests.

On another note: I found that networking for shy people article quite by accident while looking at job postings. Remember when the web was about finding interesting things by accident, rather than having them delivered to you through syndicated feeds?

Lilia Efimova has a dissenting opinion in the "my weblog is my social software" meme: “Learning about someone from a weblog takes time. Personality appears in a context and through time to read many lines of weblog posts and to participate in conversations. And it's even more difficult to learn about someone's network: linking, blogrolls and RSS subscription lists tell a bit, but you never know if linking or blogrolling means regular reading and how many e-mails/IMs/calls were exchanged next to blogging.”

Social network software, Lilia argues on the other hand, shows fuzzy relationships to people, but at least it shows them now.