Nice simple piece about the past, present and future of social networking, Rory Cellan-Jones interviews John Perry Barlow, Howard Rheingold, Biz Stone and Dave Morin of the sweet-sounding Path.com. 

Path is about what I personally consider a more realistic reflection of your physical life online than is currently fashionable… “his idea is a social network that connects you more intimately with far fewer people, than Facebook or Twitter. At the moment, Path is just an iPhone app that encourages users to share their “paths” through life with a maximum of 50 people. You take a picture on your phone, tag people and places in it, and then share it just with close friends and family rather than the world.  Dave Morin makes great play of research by an Oxford academic which concludes that nobody can really have more than 150 friends. Professor Robin Dunbar says our brains just can’t cope with more than that number, and in fact we struggle to interact really intimately with more than a couple of dozen people.” 

I take Rory’s point that “Surely anyone using it would also need to persuade their close friends to move to Path from other networks before it became valuable? And to me at least that seems quite a stretch.”  For me, the further reaches of the social universe do seem to be inhabited by a specific set of my friends and contacts, so you see the same faces in Betas and newly launched offerings (not that that’s a bad thing, it just implies that the mainstream aren’t interested at the moment). But I think it’s far to say that if something was really good and resonated with, let’s say it, the Facebook hardcore, then maybe we’d see a more diverse use of the social universe online.  Here’s hoping anyway!