Why will you know more the 150 people?

Robin Dunar's rule of most humans having a capcity to maintain nomore then 150 relationships due to physical limitiation of the neocortex has been talked about a number of times in the social networking field.

I've always said that this was tied to technology as well. That if there is technology to help faciliate and persit relationships, humans can go well beyond that number and still maintain stable relationships. I belive in the realtivly near future, we'll each have hundreds if not thousands well mainted relationships.

Christopher Alacrity has an excellent write up that all of these social networking services "are making the problem worse, not solving it." I agree, the bombardment of these networks is creating massive unstructed networks. I would make the analogy of trying to keep up with the internet by reading everypage that comes online each morning. Not only is it impossible, but it is unconstructive as well. That's why we have portals such as Google and the BBC. Google acts to filter all information on demand, BBC acts to aggregate information around perspectives. Social Networking tools should act in the same way. I'm fine with having 1000+ contacts in Friendster, LinkedIn, or my IM Buddylist, however I need some way to oranize, search, and filter these connections based on metadata about the relationship. Right now in Friendster, everybody is a 'friend.' There is no differenation between college buddies and work colleagues. There is no temporal data about how often I contact them or when the last time I made contact with them. This data needs to be captured in order to use a overabunding social network in a useable way.