Wired on Friday/Mike Butcher: The email came out of the blue. At the beginning of the year, I'd joined a new type of community website that purported to work out the connections between people, following the well-known "six degrees of separation" idea. And it seemed to be working.
I received an email from Xeni Jardin, a US journalist I'd met during the dotcom boom with whom, I now realised, I shared a mutual friend. We'd been put back in contact by "social software", the latest craze to sweep the online world.
It's a concept that's been around for many years in varying forms. But unlike the purely online communities most of us are familiar with (chat rooms and bulletin boards), social software is designed to link people in real life.
Perhaps the most obvious application is online dating. Sophisticated software engines look for similarities between people's profiles to find their perfect match. If the people literally and figuratively "click", a meeting might follow.
Another example is FriendsReunited.com. It has more than two million members and is now so ubiquitous that journalists and police allegedly use the site for research on celebrities and criminals.
But own my encounter with "social software" began with Ryze.com.
In October 2000, during the dotcom meltdown, San Francisco-based entrepreneur Adrian Scott realised he needed a way of maintaining his network of friends as they quickly changed jobs. Starting as Ryze.org, he simple allowed people to put up their "profile" and also post a list of their friends on the site. Without any sophisticated software it was now possible to start "surfing" the networks of one's friends and work out the connections between people.
This was a taste of the true "social" aspect of online networking.
As people worked out their geographical relationships, Ryze drinks parties sprung up in most major US cities.
Of course, sites where people "network" online are not new. PlanetAll.com and Sixdegrees.com emerged in the mid 1990s with limited success. PlanetAll was bought by Amazon and Sixdegrees was sold in 1999 - before the crash - for $125 million (€107 million). The latter's software tools were primitive but close to the six degrees ideal, but the real-world element was still missing.
In Britain, Ecademy.com, a monthly networking group for e-businesspeople, last year morphed into an online community to augment its offline activities. It claims to have around 22,000 members worldwide, in part because it has built an open system where people can look at each others profiles. This is online networking in its rawest, most hard-selling form.
In the US, Meetup.com was founded in New York, in part to install a greater sense of community after the September 11th attacks and to literally "meet up". The site takes revenue from the bars and cafes it brokers with to bring hordes of sci-fi, U2 or Macintosh enthusiasts together over a drink in 525 cities around the world.
But the most exciting of all the social software projects has been Friendster.com. Set up in May and already hosting almost two million users, Friendster allows true "six degrees" surfing. Crucially members have to already know each other, otherwise they will not "green light" a request to be linked. Thus only real relationships are forged and mapped, rather than "virtual only" ones. It's this network of trust which is crucial to online networking.
However, new takes on social software are emerging as other sites take the idea of trust into a business environment. On LinkedIn.com, it's not possible to aimlessly surf other people's contact books - and requests to people you don't know need to be handed on by the people through who you're connected. For instance, Joichi Ito, a venture capitalist in Tokyo, has 444 direct connections on Linkedin.com. Allowing him indirect personal access to 10,100 people on the site needs the trust of his friends in between.
Other firms such as Contact Network, Socialtext and Spoke Software have spotted that there is money in digitally mapping the relationships inside and outside corporations. They are selling social-networking software to businesses as a way of enhancing sales, often by mining employees' contact lists and e-mail traffic patterns.
RealContacts.com is a New Zealand-based company focused purely on allowing people to pass around information about jobs through friends of friends. It's model could have implications for recruitment advertising publishers such as newspapers and magazine.
All this linking up sounds wonderful, but what does it achieve? For 20 and 30 year olds, it seems to be largely a bit of diversionary fun.
Surfing Friendster I come across a guy with 311 friends, mostly women. Is this social software or just publishing your little black book?
What social software may be doing is preparing us for something bigger and more revolutionary.
Next week the BBC will launch iCan, a new service that will aim to help people connect with each other at the local level (down to postcode) in order to promote local activism.
It looks like there may turn out to be such a thing as society after-all, albeit augmented by software.
Mike Butcher edits mbites.com
