He sketches how the technologically-mediated public social fabric might look in the future. In slide 2 he postulates that in order to be well-connected we will need to feel safe, establish trust with “familiar strangers” and to share and collaborate with people in the same location. I am particularly interested in the term “familar strangers,” a seeming oxymoron.

I was first reminded of a quote by Diane Arbus, “Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It’s what I’ve never seen before that I recognize.” But then I learned that it’s a term is commonly used in studying social networks and is generally defined as “an individual who is recognized from regular activities, but with whom one does not interact.”

In the future, however, I think the definition can be extended. The recognition can take place via machine-readable data. It all comes down to context, what elements we pour into the concept of context and how we weigh these elements in relation to each other. But it will never be really useful or trustworthy until our digital lives are tagged with open metadata and semantic protocols.

Since the people we don’t know will always be more numerous than those we do, we can gain much more from social search and discovery tools that tap into the knowledge of familiar strangers, applying rules learned from examining our declared identity and our relationships with people we do know and applying them to people that we don’t know.

Yet.