Many-to-Many: From Personalization to Socialization:
Replace the word information with relationship, and you get how people want to use the net, with other people. What is shared through filters is very different from a blogger saying, “hey, my group of readers would be interested in this,” or “Doc makes a fine point, but when you consider what Jon says it really changes things,” or “everybody I know is talking about this.” When my network socializes information for me as a natural byproduct of interaction, while respecting my privacy (an important aspect of keeping things personal), I discover relationships that make my life convenient and empowered.
It's not entirely clear to me that people want to use the net for relationships. They want to use it as a medium for communication and information search. Relationships are an overlay on top of that. If you give people the means to easily communicate and find information, they will form relationships.
Community is a nexus of relationships. An important point is that interactive media like blogs, discussion boards, Intertnet telephones are just tools that allow people to communicate. To some degree, the tool may shape the way relationships are formed, but people are also remarkably resourceful in repurposing tools and getting around their limitations. Taking blogs as an example, one might consider that they are highly indiviudal. However, via mechanisms like interlinking between blog posts and open formats that allow many individual blogs to be aggregated, communities form composed of people blogging on their own personal space. Ross Mayfield seems to think that people are enslaved to their social relationships and not actively working to alter and modify them over time. In some important sense people's networks are personal, not community property, and the individuals add and drop parts of them all of the time. In this context, relationships might be viewed as a constraint, not an asset, since dropping one relationship might negatively impact a more valued relationship.
The real asset the online community has is the aggregated archive of their interaction. That is their place. Many people making online communities today attempt to own the place of interaction (e.g., Socialtext). A community's place is an invaluable asset and is worth paying a bit of money to maintain yourself if you want to be the focal point of the community.
Content can come before connection and connection can come before content. Relationships are substrate, not an overlay.
I am not saying relationships are property and Socialtext certainly doesn't seek to own them as such.
I think we probably agree that relationships certainly impact a lot of how we communicate. Echoing Fredrik Wacka's trackback, my observation comes more from practical experience where people do not immediately leap on the notion of relationship but do want to facilitate communication and search.
As regards, owning relationships, I don't expect you want that at SocialText. I expect you do want to own the space where the relationships occur. Sort of like cafe owners who want to own the venue. In the virtual world, I think that means owning the archive, the URL, and providing various nifty, proprietary (but open-standard based) interfaces for interacting.