Joi's at the edge

<![CDATA[So, Joi Ito has reached the edge of Orkut and cannot add anymore friends unless he starts deleting some first. What are they supposed to do, die? Is he supposed to offend someone by saying “No, you’re not really a friend.” What does “friend” mean? I get Orkut and LinkedIn friend requests that are from total strangers and are written like we know one another (e.g. “I was searching my contacts on LinkedIn and found you”). Joi says it reminds him of real life, but it seems to me like we’re compounding the worst features of real life, such as our poor memories for names and faces, by piling on myriad anonymous friends.
I was recently at a meeting with Joi, where I met someone whom I’ve known through email and blog postings for years. I think we’re even connected on Orkut and LinkedIn, but that’s a genuine augmentation of real life to be familiar with someone when you first meet physically. Never meeting and never learning about one another while being friends, though, seems more like a bad flashback, where you wonder if something really happened and there’s some free-floating anxiety associated with the uncertainty.
What should Joi do now that he’s at the edge? I’d jump off and see what catches me or if I even miss the terra firma of the Orkut network such as it is.]]>