VentureBlog: Conserving Social Capital

The article talks about guarding our time and relationships as social networking sites grow.

This neatly parallels some recent experiences of mine with LinkedIn. Scott Loftesness (which is where I saw the pointer to the article) echoes thoughts I had on LinkedIn a while back:

I'm finding there's just not much of a "there there" for me. Nothing that draws me back to regular usage. Somehow expanding LinkedIn's view of my network just doesn't get me excited -- like they think it should! There's certainly nothing there I'd be willing to actually pay LinkedIn for!

Tribe.net and the Vancouver-based Zerendipity are much more interesting to spend time at. Perhaps in part because I've limited connections there to "people I've met in person"?