Over on SAP Ventures, Jeffrey Nolan is experimenting on how large an imaginary person’s network can grow. At last count, his Fakester network has 20 connections with 18,000 people three degrees away. This shouldn’t surprise anyone.

1. People can game the system by accepting invitations to boost their connection rank.
2. It’s rude to say no.
3. There’s minimal downside to accepting invitations.

I would expect this to be corrected once the network really gets to work. It’s easy to accept invitations when nothing is going on. But the decision will be revisited quickly once requests for connection start coming through. In fact, a rank based upon number of requests and percentage of approved requests might be more effective than a manual rank in measuring unsymmetric relationships.