Lisa Kimball asked the OSN05 group to identify the key challenges for social networks. The ensuing discussion (which is still going on) honed in first on time and energy, then on trust. The trust issue manifested itself as identity (are you who you say you are?) and source validity and value (it wasn’t even a librarian who said that, but there were librarians who commented later).

There seems to be a certain glamour attached to communicating globally — it’s cool to network with people in other countries, on other continents, even if you’ve never been there. However, localization and actual f2f meetings have practical value.

The time issue has two components. One is “getting sucked into a rathole,” as Howard Rheingold put it — basically just spending way too much time online unproductively. The other revolves around how long it takes to learn new social networking tools. They need to be easier to use with a shorter learning curve. I loved Charles Cameron’s idea of doing “by mind” (rather than by hand) to discover what software should be doing. The discussion then went into some music analogies that essentially went over my head.