Here, from Stephen Baker at Business Week, is a superb article on the psychology, sociology and anthropology of "digital friendships" — you know, all those online relationships you have on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc, etc.

I liked this passage:

"Now we’re swimming in information. We can call up nearly every bit of news, music, and entertainment we want on demand. In fact, there’s so much of it that we need filters to block the boring or irrelevant stuff and help us find the bits we need or desire … The only scarce resource is attention. So how do we figure out where to direct it?

The easiest way is to get tips from friends. They’re our trusted sources. At least a few of them know us better than any algorithm ever could. Little surprise, then, that the companies most eager to command our attention are studying which friends we listen to. Online friendship is a hot focus for Facebook, Google, and Yahoo. They joust to hire leading sociologists, anthropologists, and microeconomists from MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley …

Statistically, friends tend to behave alike. A couple of years ago researchers at Yahoo found that if someone clicked on an online ad, the people on his or her instant chat buddy list, when served the same ad, were three to four times more likely than average to click on it. It makes sense. Friends share interests."

Hellooo! Isn’t this the old maxim — "Birds of a feather fly together" — that direct mailers have used for list selection ever since the stamp was invented?!

Glad to see those smart guys at Yahoo and Google catching on.

To be sure, they have a gazillion more bits of hard data to analyze to help figure out how online relationships work, which "friends" we really pay attention to, how ideas disperse, as well as how much and on what matters we influence each other through our online connections.

Will online friends become commodities, packaged for sale? Like it or not, here’s the article’s conclusion:

"All of networked humanity mingles in this vast marketplace, trading information, creating alliances, doing favors. We may not think of our connections in such mercantile terms. But for business and individuals alike, the value in online friendship is poised to grow."

Again, a superb article … "must read" if you’re in the online fundraising or communications biz. Even comes with a video.

Tom