When I join an online community, how should I manage my network to make it work best for me? Do I want as many contacts as possible, or should I have a smaller network, composed only of people I know well and trust? It’s a fundamental argument about the merits of quality vs. quantity. The right answer depends on how deeply your computer usage is ingrained into your lifestyle.

Some people networ intimately. They share their schedules, their tastes in music, their pictures, and their profiles, and that’s also how they keep up with their friends.  These people may need to keep their online circle of friends in check. Others use the computer to communicate in a more superficial way. Even if they’re sending hundreds of e-mails and texts a day, they don’t reveal much. For these people, their network gets more effective as it gets larger.

Reihan Salam makes a case for “Quality” in an interesting piece he wrote for Slate on Facebook Etiquette called The Facebook Commandments. 

What should you do when someone you don’t like or don’t know sends you a friend request?

Most of you will hold your nose and accept the request. But why? This is like allowing a corsair-wielding pirate to board your vessel without a fight. Once you’ve accepted too many faux friends, Facebook becomes a real slog.

Reihan views Facebook as a vibrant online community, and not just a network. But I’m not a Facebook user. (More on that later.) I use LinkedIn, and I use it as a career resource to help me find people and be found. LinkedIn shows profile information on contacts within three degrees of separation, so having well-connected connections quickly broadens my world. I pretty much think that by now I’m three degrees away from everyone in Austin I’d want to meet. Zale Tabakman is a hardcore LinkedIn user, and he makes the case for “Quantity.” He should know; he himself has an extended LinkedIn network of 9 Million people.

Where’s The Middle Ground? 

I find myself somewhere in between. Quality is still an important consideration. Within LinkedIn, “Second Degree” connections provide the most value for me. In those cases I can ask the person I know for an introduction. If I wanted to, I could easily connect to Zale, but if I find that I want to meet one of the 6,800 people he directly “knows” I don’t think he’d be able to make a quality introduction. With that many friends, he might not even have the time to answer my e-mail! But so long as I’m not getting bothered by spammers, there’s little harm in my being overnetworked on LinkedIn. 

[Editor's note - Zale definitely does check his e-mail, and he commented on this very post. Kudos to you Zale!]

The problem Reihan faces is that Facebook has become a central touchstone to his social existence. He’s not alone there; that’s what Facebook is famous for. When he becomes overnetworked it’s worse than spam. It’s like the whole world has his personal phone number, and it interferes with his ability to use Facebook productively. As he says:

There’s … an information overload problem. When your friends update their profiles, the new info filters out to you via the News Feed, a constantly updated digest of seemingly mundane facts that can, over time, give you a neat, evolving portrait of your friends’ outer lives. … The further your online social graph veers from your real social life, the less useful your News Feed becomes. Soon you’ll find that most of the headlines are about people you barely know. And who wants that?

Most of my friends are on LinkedIn, but few are on Facebook. If my online social graph is going to mirror my real social life, Facebook won’t help me. There’s no point in joining an online community your friends aren’t using, unless you want to make a whole new set of friends. I’ve tried Twitter, but it feels like shouting into a void. I found MySpace so useless that I’m hesitant to even bother with Facebook.

Why aren’t my friends involved in online communities? Because we’re in Generation X (born 1966-1976), not Gen Y (born 1977-1994), and the two generations network differently. In November, Chad Lorenz wrote an eye-opening piece (also in Slate) about the way different age groups communicate online, called The Death of E-Mail.

There’s now a generation gap between first-generation and second-generation Internet users. Colleges are finding that students increasingly ignore or never receive campus-wide e-mail announcements. All those clever forwards from Grandpa are going unread. And no matter what dominates in the dorm room, e-mail still rules in the workplace. Office-bound graduates will be forced to make Microsoft Outlook—not AIM or Facebook—their first sign-on of the day. Some may find it a vexing challenge to remediate their sloppy IM habits into professional-sounding e-mail prose.

 

So, is the solution to browbeat these little rebels back in line and enforce mandatory e-mail usage? Good luck. Chances are, as usual, that the grown-ups will be the ones who are forced to adapt.

Ain’t that the truth? Look at this:

Source: ThinkEquity Partners, Census Data 

41 Million Gen Xers, 71 Million in Gen Y. We are the yellow band in the middle, who until now have been overwhelmed by the Boomers, and are soon to be overwhelmed by the Ys. I’d better create a task in Outlook telling me to clean up my network before the workplace forces Facebook upon me!