I'm new to the NetSquared community, having joined after learning about the NetSquared Innovation Award.   My good friend Charles Forsythe and I submitted our social networking project, called Throngz.

Charles is a software developer from way back.   If you're into vintage computer games, you might have seen or played Tower of Fear, one of his very early creations.   I work at a regional foundation based in Washington, DC, by day  and blog on Third Sector issues by night.

Using the tapestry metaphor to think about the Internet, the problem is that we're very good at creating warp (sites, blogs, and other micro-communities), but not so good at creating woof (cross-connections between these micro-communities).   Some individuals function fairly well as cross-pollinators, carrying memes from one site to another.   They have a critical role in maintaining the health of the Internet.  

But even so, there have been egregious failures.   Consider, for example, the fact that the MoveOn.org site for 3/17/07 made  absolutely no mention of an important national antiwar rally at the Pentagon that day.   Where were the folks who could connect the work of MoveOn.org with that of other activists?

As the number of landing places on the Internet continues to increase, as each of us launches his or her own social networking site, the Woof Problem, as I'll call it, becomes even  more pronounced.

This was part of the motivation for Throngz.   Aggregating is unfortunately not the same as interconnecting.   We need more indviduals, tools, and institutions that can play this critical interconnecting function; we need to combine more silos and/or dig more tunnels between them.   And I don't believe it's wise to wait for Web 3.0 to begin solving these problems for us.