[...] space of people that don’t follow you back, and sadly the spammers are still causing their fair share of genuine concerns, but there are literally thousands of connections out there to be made — the network is built [...]

On one hand, I get the marketing spam perspective of accumulating a massive audience for your said product. In some cases, the miniscule conversion rate makes the time spent worthwhile.

What I find baffling is the sad, neurotic, socially dysfuntional addiction that the nonmarketing perpetrators have towards acquiring as many virtual friends possible. Just because you have a gazillion MySpace friends doesn’t actually mean you are not a loser or your death metal band rocks.

For example, I keep picking up Twitter followers and I really don’t Twitter all that much, nor am I a notable tech authority. Why are you following me? I get the chills.

I believe that stalker underside of social networks is a mere reflection of existing social angst of lonely souls seeking a doorway out of their social isolation. Social networks can be great enhancements to one’s social life and staying in touch with people you already know, or meeting new people with strong shared interests – but it shouldn’t be a replacement for getting out the door.

I think if we take a deeper look at public communications such as blogs and forums and their tools that are used to help “moderate” interaction, we can adapt similar concepts that are quite effective for social networking.

There are pros and cons to the whole “open communication networking” concept — as Bryce said, many people we’d not otherwise run across are now mere clicks away — so if we can focus on finding effective ways to filter the spammers, I think the value of the networking far outweighs the annoyances of the virtual “door-to-door magazine sales folk”.

If only flagging systems were cheat proof we could red flag them all away in one big joint effort. – idea. have a flag system on the flaggers?

Thanks again for the great thought provoking.. um, thoughts.