Whose speed dial list are you on?

Whose speed dial list are you on?

Bouncing off of Seth Godin’s recent post “Who is on your list” (about always maintaining a list of the “important” people in your network), I was inspired by my very dear Friend, Ann Mincey, to write about lists of friends.  In this post-Facebook era, the notion of “who is a friend” has seen plenty of virtual and print commentary.  What sort of a friend are you?  How good a friend is he/she?  How many friends do you have?  These are questions that have populated children’s conversations for a very long time. Thanks to Facebook, [adult] people are again re-assessing the nature of friendships, and it is all the more interesting when you cross-reference the culturally different notions of friendship.  A friend in France is wholly different than a friend in the States.  Just as kids who render banal the term “best friend,” we would do well to consider whom our friends are and what sort of friends they are.  That has always been true.  However, in today’s technologically enhanced world, there is a whole new set of ways to count, classify and connect with your friends.  For example, Annie wrote an email referring to her speed dial list of friends.  Who are your speed dial friends?  More interestingly, on whose speed dial list are you (i.e. opt in)?  Going further, Annie’s mail made me rethink about my contacts / friends / network along these lines: who are the influencers among my friends?  I was particularly rethinking the difference between “powerful” and “influential”.  Powerful I associate with able to make things happen; people who operate “above” the system.  Influential I consider as those whose words people willingly absorb and on which they will act.

A few more new types of friend classifications:

• full disclosure friends (on Linkedin or Facebook…) who knowingly allow you full access to all their information
• friends with more than 10,000 Twitter followers or Facebook fans
• friends whose blog post or Facebook status are systematically shared by hundreds (i.e. high klout score)
• friends whose del.icio.us bookmarks are followed and shared by scores
• friends who know many of the same people as you
• friends who create content
• friends who reply to emails (or text messages or Facebook mail, etc…)

With a pinch of salt, I thought I’d take a page out of Annie’s speed dial list to create the minter dial list… my list of core influential friends.  Do you have such a list?  What other lists do you have?  By the way, do you even think such lists are necessary or useful?  Let me know your thoughts!