And…

(Not sure my precious comment went through, but…)

The other hidden, conflated issue has to do with identity. Your identity is as much your interest (potential connections with communities) as it is your connections.

I think the real question behind PSNs is how do you make digital representations of your identities — your interests and connections — portable.

For the bizarre with only one identity, it’s the same problem, but for most people, it’s a huge problem. In fact, I bet research would show that most people take advantage of the walled gardens to help segment their different identities.

In this light, controlling your connections’s connections is just as important as controlling your connections. If you don’t want anyone to know you like knitting, you have to be reasonably sure that when you connect with Bob that he won’t then tell other people about your dirty secret, or that the people he would tell would be cool enough to understand how yarn makes you feel.

This is what we’re talking about when we talk about wicked problems. It’s taken the human organism thousands of years to evolve a tool to manage multiple identities across multiple social networks across multiple communities. It’s called the brain.

I would love to see that replicated in two dimensions.