There are many people (quite a few researchers are finding that it is a majority) who feel their platform for social interaction on the web is not serving themselves well and the biggest thing holding them back is not having ease to find and reconnect with those whom they have already connected.

Which researchers? What research?

but the social interaction with social software researchers was my sole reason for joining Facebook.

I think that here you get closer to the core of what’s actually going on than you realize. In your use of these services, you’re dealing almost exclusively with people self-consciously being “social,” which strikes me as a practice bound to produce bizarre and statistically aberrant artifacts. (As Rem Koolhaas once said – and it was clearly one of his more coherent days: “If you want spontaneity or everyday life, you should keep architects as far away as possible.”)

But everything is social, really. Most all of our artifacts are, in the end, social performances of one kind or another. The truly bizarre thing to me is somehow demarcating some subset of the things we do and calling that social-with-a-capital-S.