Beyond "Six Degrees"

A post on Pattern Hunting proposes the idea of expanding social networking tools like Orkut to automatically find links between people who share common interests.

The idea would be to set a profile that will automatically introduce you to someone based on a shared interest and a minimum reputation rating. If both parties accept the introduction, then the connection is made. You might also want the option to "watch this person" (similar to "watch this auction item" at eBay) before making the stronger commitment to contact that person and invite him/her into your network.

Regardless of which methods are used to track reputations, they will likely need to have to go beyond FOAF rankings to include some measure(s) of quality regarding the information objects that a person publishes.