Autistic social software

Abstract

I think 2004 will be remembered as the year that socially dysfunctional Silicon Valley nerds started getting venture capital to codify their own Asperger's Syndrome in the social interfaces that they created with services like Orkut and LinkedIn, and demonstrated thoroughly just how completely they don't understand human-human interaction, let alone computer-mediated human-human interaction. I noticed on danah's blog recently that AOL only lets you have 200 friends. First of all, 200? Not even a base two number! What's going on there! I can just hear Dustin Hoffman in Rainman: "Can't have more than 200 friends. Must discard a friend. Kmart sucks." - Ed.