NP: party shuffle

I'm guessing it's because I was surfing MySpace before I went to sleep, but I had really odd dreams last night. Outside of the one where I was in a five-car accident -- no question where that one came from -- the thing that stuck with me was some bizarre real-world application of rating people by the "quality" of their friends. At some point, and I'm not sure when it was while I was still in deep sleep or when I was starting to wake up, I realized what was happening.

MySpace and Friendster thrive on effectively "scoring" people by the sheer number of their friends. Maybe it's because I've never been one to amass lots of friends, but my subconcious mind seemed to be rejecting this. Or it was just synthesizing other stuff in my brain, because what I was coming up with was somehow judging the qualities of the friends you're linked to, and creating some score based on that. Basically, it's PageRank for social networking. Google moved from sheer volume on search results to appropriateness. Is there a social networking analogue?

Two things came to mind pretty quickly. First, it's not clear how you would "rate" a friend as being of high-quality. Common interests? Isn't that just rewarding people for not expanding their horizons? Maybe activity among the network? I don't know. The second thing was the actual bizarre part of the dream -- if you don't count dreaming about Google and MySpace, that is -- and that was some sort of visual representation of both the number of linked friends and the quality of those links in the actual, physical world.

Reading Wired on the train last week, I had one of those rare moments when I thought about all these Internet entrepreneurs who had that momentary flash of insight that generated the multi-million dollar idea and wondered why some people could do that and some people, myself included, couldn't. I mean, I see gaps in coverage or function here and there, but never on that kind of grand scale. I'm not saying this is one of those insights, but for whatever reason, my brain seems to maybe taking on that challenge on its own in its more preferred fashion of taking an existing thing and tweaking it. Weird.

Of course, it may have just been a dream.