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More evidence from Linton Weeks at NPR that our characterization of the Internet as some sort of virtual world is crumbling (via Racine Punk who struggles with her own pre-teen on Facebook).

Buzz, and by now many others, have linked to a really neat article on Internet-based attempts to characterize our social networks: Can We Ever Digitally Organize Our Friends? by Kevin Cheng:

The maintenance required for grouping our friends is too high and too vague. We simply don’t have the rules as clearly defined as programs require and even if we did, the parameters change. Your personal tastes change. The influential people change. Even your friends change. Keeping the groups accurate and remembering its members is a challenge.

I see this as technological pessimism. Of course we’re going to develop ways to manage our friendships online. And of course sometimes it will be hard and icky. But that’s life. Ask anyone who has tried to come up with a wedding or Bar Mitzvah invitation list. Ask someone who makes a dinner reservation for 6 while attending a conference and then has to apologize to several folks for whom there was no space. But we manage. And we’ll manage these new things too. People figured out how to maintain email lists. They still do. When was the last time you sent your grandmother a link to a video or goatse pic that would curl her toes?

Google just introduced a cool new way to create social spaces for sharing with Circles. They still have plenty of time to figure out a way to manage them and grow them over time. No one really knows what they’ll become. I’m shocked how much punditry I see on this question and how little data. Only Google really knows what is going on with Circles. We only know what Robert Scoble is doing. And he is an edge case. What he is doing is irrelevant to how nearly everyone else on the planet interacts with each other through social networking services. And relatively few normal people have been using these services for long enough to talk about what’s going to happen to our social patterns over the long haul. Guessing is fine. But that’s all we’re doing here. Guessing.

We are going to figure out how to digitally manage our social lives because the distinction between the Internet and the physical world is collapsing into just one thing if it wasn’t already. We are going to have to digitally organize our lives because our lives are increasingly digital. Every time I send a paper and ink letter it seems like a quaint pastoral nod and with each note I can see my handwriting which was never good deteriorate further.

Derek Powazek who wants to make the Internet a lowercased word, wrote recently: “All reality is virtual. Thought is and has always been virtual. The internet enables us to think together.” Powazek’s whole Network Manifesto is worth reading. Abstracting our friends into classifications is human even if it is malleable and dynamic.

There are a bunch of ways this could play out. I don’t have much in the way of tech vision, but even I can see a few paths forward:

1. Facebook or Google or Twitter or Franken YahFriendsterSpace or someone entirely new wins the whole market. Clearly this is the scenario that will keep Google trying to make a social networking service that works every year until they succeed or go busted. To the extent that our network-effects buffered monopoly makes crappy tools for organizing our friendships they will be increasingly vulnerable to an upstart challenger overtime because the service they provide will be less valuable overtime. Email doesn’t go away because it’s much easier to use than the social networking service for many things.

2. People use different apps and services for different needs or cliques and reject the all-encompassing monolithic length of visit maximizing VC-fueled Facebook model of socializing. LinkedIn becomes a winner instead of an afterthought. Maybe you’ll use Flickr for food pics, Instagram for bizarre shots of doors at night, street cones, etc. Twitter for sharing links and jokes and realtime commentary of elections, baseball games. Ping might mean something. There’s no need for a single method or organizing our social networks. We each do it across networks. We abandon services and start using new ones all the time.

3. An email-like future where RSS or similar wins. Everyone has one of many service providers and we trade links to feeds which are whatever things that we post. Some will require authentication. We choose services based in part on which ones make it easy to manage authentication tokens and in part on which ones have shiny templates. Facebook could be one of these providers. Google another and Tumblr and so on. The web regains its status as the one true social network and Dave Winer is celebrated as a great American many many years from now. We manage our social networks like we do our address book. There is a tendency to have some small groupings of friends and family, but it is easy enough to make other groups as necessary (ad hoc groups for semi-private sharing of projects with colleagues and neighbors). Most people become more comfortable posting many things online in the open. Not everyone needs to be sorted and organized we just post. There is so much being posted that cognitive limits and social needs constrain how many people we actually follow to a number much smaller than the numbers that some people accumulate today. Reader-side filtering software is a competitive advantage for some services.

Gosh, I hope it’s (3).

Thanks to Ari who made one of his famous mid-day calls to me earlier today, making me think about all this stuff and (unknowingly to him) encouraged me to drag it out onto the web for all of you.