Creating sociability and the importance of tracking and linking

Sociability works in a slightly different way online than in real life. Of course there's a greater focus on textuality and online features ( images, personal information and a particular presentation). Right now I'm referring to sociability as a process of 'getting to know someone'.

Let me give you an example. Facebook does a great job with this. It offers the possibility to track people. Not only is it a great feature for you to get into contact with old buddies, but it's also a very important feature for people to track you (where did you work, for how long, who do you know who works there as well?). Facebook is also a great networking tool to link yourself to interesting parties. These appealing features assure the networks growth and the constant flow of personal information added.

Furthermore the status-feature in Facebook can be used a s a personal diary. You can basically track the status-changes of a contact to see what he or she's been up to the last few days (even if you weren't online during that period). Facebook provides outside parties with a particular narrative of an user, with the story of a particular period in time.

The more I think of it, the more I agree with what already has been said about online interaction. To form a trustworthy personality online, a person needs to interact online. Only by linking yourself with different projects, jobs, people, etc.. and by having interaction with those things, will it give your interaction online a real, a human feel. This is probably why online social networking is so fun to do in the first place. Interaction online thus requires easy tools for linking yourself to others and expressing enough to have a human and real feel to it. Within the Travel Project these communication tools for interaction are even more important since the whole reliability/personality of the guides depends on their personal presentation online.

Needless to say, we need more interaction features. But what kind? I think linking is a very good one, and it's actually one of the specialities of Mediamatic..but what kind of linking do we need? Links based on what?