I must admit – this comment was deliberately so brief – that is a cheap trick, I appologize. But Umair does have quite substantial arguments for the evilness of Facebook – if you grep his blog just for Facebook you’ll find them. I will not repeat them here – because I cannot say I get them in their entirety. But I do think Facebook changes the sides at the point when they constraint user autonomy in the name of revenue.

I tend to agree with Umair that the only firms that will succeed are those who want to make a positive change to the world. The problem begins with defining what a positive change is.

You can see what I stand for. All you need to do is to read The Kernel for This Blog or About This Blog, right at the top of this blog. Not everyone agrees with me.

I believe that artificial scarcity is an abomination, and I’m doing everything I can to counter it wherever I see it.

I think that the pushback against Facebook is overdone. In a strange variant-of-Moore’s-Law way, some people would have me believe that Microsoft took 20 years to “become evil”, Google took 10 and Facebook took 4.

I don’t buy those arguments. Where do you put Apple in that sequence? What do you say about iTunes or iPod or iPhone?

That’s why I said I like Facebook in the same way as I like the iPod. Doesn’t mean it can’t get better.

As you can see, I’m intrigued by your brief comment. Tell me more. What am I missing in the BGSL stuff?

I think the Dunbar number may be shifting, but not by much. My sense is that it is gently heading upwards as a result of our having technical help with our connections, as a result of there being more ways to connect, and as a result of people travelling more often. I believe research is being conducted into this. In any case the number is not going up greatly, the current value could be anything between 200 and maybe 300, against the original 150.

On the subject of scaling we need to bear something in mind. Each subcommunity by itself scales, to the extent that it seems to behave as if it has a Dunbar number for the subcommunity. Each subcommunity has its requirements as well; the work subcommunity requires certain outputs; the home subcommunity requires certain outputs as well; as long as these output levels are met, all this will scale.

So maybe the key shift as we move into a multiple parallel subcommunity world is a concentration on outputs. Not an expectation on minimum levels of inputs.

If majority of the 7500 of your org are there in the hangout will you( meaning anyone, not just you JP – with you I smell a gogly ) still embrace it with so much enthusiasm? Will you extend your Dunbar limit or will you complain about overload as in Inbox peeves?

The work life balance argument is similar to (work)telephone helping better relationship with relatives afar, email as source of serendipity. In other words, will the balance scale? No pun intended.