There's no question but that the past three months have seen the acceleration of social network driven information services and info feeds--twitter's accelerated its growth much like Facebook did last May, and now friendfeed's received enough funding to scale up, meaning many more users.

The effort, of course, is to find and deliver new forms of relevancy when there's too much data bombarding all of us; these services add a friend filter atop any other relevancy rankings that one individual might use to find useful and interesting information.

The interesting thing, though, is that so many of the active users--the Bay area digerati, for example--add so many people to their feeds --or their friends lists--that the selective filtering device disappears.

And, perhaps more importantly,many of those folks are most interested in having others read THEIR feed, or their notes, or their twitter stream-which means that for 20% of the users, what they're experiencing is a great self marketing vehicle (Yes, I've done this, too.)

So, we could suppose that what we are seeing are two sets of human behaviors--the marketers and promoters who always user relationships to see their ideas/products/values, and the rest of the group, who don't need to reach--or read 600+ people to feel impactful.

I'm thinking that as these services move more into the mainstream--twitter and friendfeed, I mean, we may see the same behaviors replicate--the local thought leaders and the salespeople have big lists, while others have smaller lists.

Either way, it's a fascinating squew of relevancy--that the urge to know, to be current, to hear it first, is one of the biggest torpedos to true social relevancy that we have.
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