Tom Coates writes about an article on how string quartets stay together and talks about the lessons it teaches to social software architects.#

In the Guardian article Four's a crowd, cellist David Waterman talks about how to keep a string quartet together over many years without the interpersonal relationships forcing the group apart. I love articles like this - articles that don't seem to have an overt relationship to how we build social software but nonetheless remind us of core lessons about the nature of groups. Lesson one: the thing that keeps groups together can be a mutual passion, but a mutual activity will bring them together even more strongly. Lesson two: that intensively creative groups seem to be necessarily relatively small. And that's because - lesson three - there will always be tensions and forces within groups that will try to push them apart from one another. And here's where social software comes in to the fore - because lesson four is that those tensions can almost always be ameliorated or even totally removed by the careful implementation of mechanisms that institute some form of process, some kind of system - or even some kind of politics. That's how we can operate in a macro-social way, because we have instituted a system / structure within which we all operate.

Julie Leung has a great idea about how to get home-schooled kids to socialize as much.#

And I thought to myself - hey, this would solve the classic homeschooling socialization dilemma - let's put Elisabeth and all our kids on Orkut! I can see it already, her cute baby face in a square there with the others..."female, single.." :-)

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And as I've experienced this week from joining some homeschooling yahoogroups, many moms out there are seeking friends for their kids via on-line communities and relationships. Plus our kids are already wanting to write emails to people, and blog too: it seems second nature to them, 'cause they see mommy and daddy do it all the time. Through blogging I've met a few others with children, and it'd be fun to arrange on-line playdates of sorts for our little geeks oops, ones :-) Kids also socialize on-line and an Orkut for Children could facilitate more connections .

Nova Spivack writes about "social overload."#

The premise of many social networking systems is that they inject added trust to interactions -- the concept being that a message that comes to me via someone I know is somehow more worth my time and more reliable. But in fact, in practice I find that I have not once denied someone's request to forward a message on their behalf in LinkedIn for example. Why should I deny someone whom I don't know the right to contact someone else whom I don't know? Since I really don't know the originator or recipient of the message, how am I able to judge the appropriateness and relevance of that message? Therefore I just always say "yes" and forward the message along. I think many other people do this as well. There is an unwritten social code that it is simply "rude" to not forward a message. Because of this, social networking services actually result in the opposite of what they set out to do -- they increase the number of irrelevant messages that their participants receive.