Not my social network

Wanted to add to the clutter of debates on social networking and here is my point of view.

I have limited experience with social networking sites save a little bit of Orkut and a little more of facebook. But overall I realize that what they have is totally in adequate. What I have on both these websites no reflection of what my social network really is (don't be surprised that we had social networks even before these websites showed up). This is again not limited by the folks hooked up to the iternet but the way the elements in the network interact.

Most of these sites represent the network like a traditional filesystem, with me at the root node and everybody I know as a first level of "friend". Now if I add somone my "friend" knows to my friend list (this is how we typically make new accquaintances) and they become peers. This not what happens in reality. There is a distance element to the relationship which seems to be completely missing from all these websites.

In the Indian context, there is extra complications of relatives. There are relatives who are a part of the network, but not all relatives are friends. Again all relatives are not at the same distance.

All these fact greatly determine how we interact with the nodes in the network and what we share. In the current format, as a lowest common denominator you interact with only the most impersonal information, resulting in the experience being very impersonal, of the type like forwarding junk mails on mailing lists just to remind each other we exist. All the intimate information is still close to to my heart, for that phone call. So call me :-)