I was thinking the other day about different options we have available while we are trying to layer our social network.

In the beginning we had only the old time classic paper address book. I remember that every 2-3 years, usually at New Year's Eve, I had to copy all names and phones to a new one since the old was too used.

Then I discovered Palm. Actually this was my first mobile electronic address book.  Write once, keep them forever. ok, almost for ever, since even Palms had problems.

Then there was email and contacts address book.

Then came our super mobile phones and the rest is history.

Howewer our social networks are layered and nowdays technology gives us the opportunity to differentiate them.

First of all, I have a very small set of people that I know in my MSN Messenger list. These are the people with whom I can have a synchronous discussion and I can see when they are present online or not. I am trying to keep that list really small. Internet connected family contacts are included in this list, too.

Then it's twitter. The people that I follow as well as the ones that follow me. I am not a really heavy user of twitter, I am trying to keep the number of my posts small and hopefully useful.

Then I have the actual social networks layer. Facebook, Linked In you name it. Again there is a level of choice on who you are connected with, however until now I haven't rejected more than a couple of friend requests. So this list includes people that I have met physically or not, worked or studied together and with whom I want to maintain a rather asynchronous connection most of the time in a 1:many kind or broadcasting, i.e. sharing news, useful links etc, although I find myself using Facebook's 1:1 message system in several cases. This morning I just came across a really good post thru Titana on Facebook friendship strategy and I plan to integrate it in my own.

Finally it's my email contact address book which fortunately is synchronized with my mobile phone, where I have mainly people that I communicate through voice calls or emails. This layer starts to get smaller than my social networks.

Do I miss something ? How your circles look like ?