This presentation by Paul Adams, Google’s User Experience Research lead, is a fascinating examination of how we as human beings interact both on and offline, and how current social networking technology is and isn’t responding to our natural human patterns of use.  The setup may be a little long and turn you off (its a 216 slide presentation all told) – but the real meat of the talk starts at around slide 46 and goes until around slide 145 when he moves into Privacy Issues (interesting in light of recent conversations about RealID) and Influentials.

A few highlites:  People tend to have between 4-6 groups of friends.  Each group has 2-10 people in it, and the groups are formed around life stages and shared experiences.  The average American has just 4 strongly tied relationships and about 10 people they meet and speak with weekly.

Check out the whole thing to get an idea not only of how we interact with each other IRL and Online, but also to see how the industry is looking to respond to those interactions and leverage them for business use.