In his SmartMobs blog entry My Facebook friends: please read this, Howard Rheingold outlines the progression of his Facebook experience.

It is a pattern I first understood as a result of reading the work of Danah Boyd, to whom he refers an earlier facebook-focused post, explaining his decision to treat his Facebook community as public.

Through no lack of effort on his part, Rheingold's Facebook "community" has apparently lost a great deal of its personal and/or professional social context and come to resemble the readership of a newspaper or magazine.

Others have confronted what I view as related Facebook experiences by leaving altogether.

I think there is a basic principle at work here, and that it vaguely resembles Boyd's law.

Created by Cory Doctrow and named for Danah Boyd, Boyd's law of social network sites says: "Adding more users to a social network [site] increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance."

To that I would add Rheingold's law, perhaps not the first to be given that name.

This informal SNS dictum states:

The addition of each new "friend" to your social network site "friends group" increases the likelihood of creating an audience with whose members personal interaction is rare and for most members of the group, effectively impossible.