The compulsion to add too many people as your friend early on in a new social network will be known from now on as Friendive-Compulsive disorder.

The list is as follows:

* Declaring email bankruptcy. First known cases: 2002. There has recently been a resurgence in the financial and startup blogging worlds. “I have 500 unread emails. I am declaring email bankruptcy”

* Maintaining an Orkut, Friendster or Vox account and publicly claiming to actually log-in to these services

* Deleting your Facebook account. This one is growing in popularity and is most certainly already cliché, but we are not near the end of this.

* Having both a Myspace page and a Linkedin account. I am sorry, opposite worlds. You may implode or spontaneously ignite due to the fact that on one of them you are living a lie.

* The latest is Twittercide. The act of publicly announcing the killing of your oversubscribed twitter account.

Wikis have a well earned reputation of being a quick-deployment option that is easy enough to explain to your colleagues: “It sits there, and I can edit it, and you can edit it,. and it will always be there when you need it”.

Wikis are not social tools however. They are collaborative tools. This is an important distinction, mainly because the value that social tools create comes from their inherent social components: Sharing, currency, relevance and the filters that can be built from social network data.

(Good) Social Software on the other hand will focus on the personality above all else. Who is creating this? Why did they create it? Who else should know?

The obvious killer app, on first blush at least, is to combine these two things. The truth is: many have tried and they have all more or less failed. I think the killer app is probably a lot more subtle.

I have been playing with most of the new lifestreaming applications. SocialThing, FriendFeed and a few others.

This big deal about these applications is that they take activity information from a slew of social sites, such as Facebook, Flickr, upcoming, etc, and they bring that information all in to one place.

The image on the right is an example of my FriendFeed.com stream. You can see that it includes updates from Blogs, Twitter. If you could see the whole page, you would see images, bookmarks, messages and more.

I really liked the idea of a combined lifestream at first. The name “lifestream” describes the fact that these apps are all creating a stream of information about our online lives, and there is power in sharing what we are creating, curating and synthesizing.

The problem that is cropping up however is that these apps are probably better called “noise aggregators” or “NoiseStreamr”s than anything else. By the time I had friended a few dozen people on FriendFeed and started trying to keep up with their blog posts, twitters, del.icio.us bookmarks, Jaiku status and more, I start to feel like I am experiencing more of a info-avalanche than I am floating down a lazy river of socially relevant news.

I don’t think that this problem is inherent to information streams, but it is pretty obvious that these tools are in their infancy and a lot of art and science is going to have to go in to improving the information flow.

The most immediate thing they could do would be to provide a way for the user to offer feedback on what feed items are actually interesting to them and which ones are not. ie: If I give someone’s del.icio.us bookmarks a thumbs down every time I see it, then you should stop showing it to me. If I give a thumbs down on ever single del.icio.us bookmark I see, then make sure you never show me one again.

There is a clear trend toward data streams built out of my social network, but the focus has to be on reducing noise, not adding to it.

While ITs demise won’t happen overnight, the trend is clear.

Companies often say they want to promote “risk taking” and “innovation” but we don’t reward them for that. The truth is that we ask for this, but when we take a risk and it doesn’t pay-off, the company often comes down hard on those people. Actions speak louder then corporate messaging. Over time, we train people to be risk averse. You won’t get fired for NOT adopting social media in the company.” - Rex Lee