I have a problem: I don’t remember who you are. Okay, maybe not you, but in my travels around the Internet, I sometimes become connected to someone on a social website that I don’t remember. I could use a little context, some help triggering my memory.

Has there ever been a time when the average person has maintained contact with more people? Has it ever been this easy to make these contacts public? Between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and scores of other social sites, many of us see over lists of hundreds–or more–of individuals.

A study showed that we can’t maintain more than about 150 relationships. I’d agree that it’s tough to be real friends with more than that. But I’d also counter that contacts on social websites aren’t always exactly like the “friends” we keep in the offline world. This is especially true when contacts are more casual, such as on Twitter or when reading blogs.

The following are issues I’ve noticed with social software where I believe a little context would be useful:

• I don’t remember why I subscribed to your blog. I’m sure you wrote an awesome post that was linked from someone who I respect. Now you’ve written three posts about topics that don’t interest me and I’m struggling to remember our common interest. Google Reader, which I use for tracking blogs, lets me use folders and rename the feed. Those can help, but that often doesn’t tell the whole story.
• I don’t remember who you are or why I followed you on Twitter. You can see this is largely about my memory. As a simplicity practioner, I purposely expunge many details from my brain. This is another example where the software should help me out. Yet, there is very little to go on: your user name, your real name (which may not be set) and your bio. That’s often not enough.
• I can’t decide whether I should follow you on Twitter. Again, I only have so much information to go on. Hopefully you’ve included a link to your website, which helps a lot. Twitter, being a casual social network, skips the whole “friend handshake” thing where you request a friendship and then I approve. I like it this simpler way, but one bit of context that is lost is the message where you tell me why you want to be connected. That can be immensely helpful.

Got Any Ideas?

I see a few ways social software could help us out and I’d love to hear your ideas.

• Let me create a private note that I can use to remind me why I followed you or subscribed to your blog. LinkedIn actually has this feature (see embedded video), but it’s relegated to a paid feature. And LinkedIn Pro is over-priced at $25 per month.

• Track how I found you by remembering the blog post I read when I subscribed, or the retweet I clicked on before following you. Web analytics for publishers has come a long way, but similar software doesn’t exist to help consumers. I believe it is the job of whatever software I use to track content to help me make sense of it.
• Show me our friends-in-common. Facebook does this, of course. On Twitter, I need to go to a third-party website to figure it out. And for blogs, we can share individual posts, but there isn’t an easy way to share the feeds. If there was, I might be able to tell why I subscribed to a blog from the context of which of my friends also subscribe.

Have you noticed these problems, too? What solutions do you have?

Lately I’ve been thinking of distances in terms of a strange unit you’ve never heard of: the LaBo. You’ve never heard of it because I made it up. It’s the number of steps between my house and the local Mexican restaurant, La Bonita.

While I was actively writing my book I would go to La Bonita (which I lovingly call “LaBo”) every day to put in a couple hours of writing. Then I met Ben, who founded Walker Tracker, and I started wearing a pedometer. Each day I could count on at least the 3,000 steps that took me to La Bonita and back.

I started to pay attention to step counts on other walks through the neighborhood. And I couldn’t help but think of them in terms of that daily jaunt down to get fish tacos. The hardware store is one LaBo away. A coffee shop on Killingsworth is about 1.5 LaBos, as is the tea shop on Alberta. A walk to the park, around the track and back? Just over a LaBo.

But I don’t expect this unit of measurement to mean much to you. It’s from my house, after all. And these are the number of steps with my stride. The beauty is it takes something that I can feel and makes it more concrete.

You could do the same and it doesn’t just have to be about distance. A puzzle lover might think of things in terms of how long it takes to complete the Monday crossword, in most newspapers the easiest of the week. “Wow, that Sudoku was a doozie–it took me two Monday crosswords to finish it.” Or, “This post office is busy. It’s been half a Monday crossword and I’m still not to the front of the line.”

There’s a precident for the LaBo, and your own similar measurements, in what astronomers call the Astronomical Unit. If you want to be a pest, try asking people how far it is between the Earth and the Sun. Most will ask clarifying questions and may even toil over how many million miles to guess (it’s 93). When they’re ready for the answer, just smile and say, “one Astronomical Unit.”

The Astronomical Unit helps make sense of how far away planets and other solar objects are using a unit that means more than billions of miles ever would. Step counts–and the LaBo–have had similar clarifying effects for me.

What units could you use to help you make more sense of the world around you?

I’m not sure why I never thought of this. Want to make someone feel good? Create a Google Ad using his name as the keywords. Then, when he does his next vanity search, he’ll see your message front and center (or, well, off to the right, probably).

This is exactly what happened to my friend Rick and I wish I could take credit for it. The advertiser is anonymous for now.

The same might work to get the attention of an important prospect. And there are all sorts of nefarious uses I can think of. But I prefer to consider the way it was used in the image above: as a simple, inexpensive gift that will brighten someone’s day.

(And, yes, it may not work with some more common names, but that just means you need to dig a little deeper to figure out how the friend searches for himself).

When creating products, feature creep is the usually slow process by which additional complexity is added. It is not intentional, but it is normal. And it doesn’t stop at your projects, either. It infiltrates your life, creating personal feature creep.

Rather than additional functionality, personal features are usually commitments we’ve made, or ventures we’ve taken on. In fact, that side project with its own feature creep might be contributing to your personal feature creep. As with creating real products, making your life the way you want involves questioning what’s necessary.

Zen Habits has a post on how to fix feature creep in your life, with a four step program:

1. Start from a blank slate.
2. Only add the features you really use and love.
3. Slowly implement the reduction in the code of your life.
4. Avoid future feature creep.

The process is similar to one of the two simplicity paths: build up from the core. And, though it’s twice the number of steps, my fix feature creep post can also be turned toward your own life. For example, “research before committing” is probably a good way to avoid finding yourself with responsibilities you don’t want.

The full Zen Habits post is worth a read, as it provides practical advice for each of the four steps.

Hat tip: Valerie Yakich