Come to think of it, I think there are two main functions needed for managing large numbers of online connections.
The first is the butler, for managing incoming requests.
The second is the reminder service for monitoring the news and recurring events for online acquaintances, and providing reminders for occasional events like birthdays, job changes, and more frequent events like blog posts and wiki updates.
The interface for this would be a more subtle version of an aggregator notification service. This upgraded notifier would provide visibly stronger notification for dramatic events and for those closer in the circle, and weaker signals for ordinary events and those further away.
The notifier would aggregate signals from multiple sources, enabling one to monitor more people and more sources in a shorter amount of time.
a personalized birthdays feed in rss or better yet in ical would be a fine thing. i count on two people in the household tracking birthdays with two or three systems (mine change regularly) to make sure there’s enough redundancy.
We’ve been fooling with RSS newsreaders in Don Turnbull’s KMS class, and not everyone loves them. I find that the more feeds I load into my reader, the less my blog reading feels like fun and the more it feels like work — in particular, like assembly line work, where I’m being fed items by a serial process outside of my control.
Philosophically I’m inclined to want to gateway every conceivable medium and protocol to every other, but do I really want the reminder to pay the gas bill to be in the same stream as reading a friend’s blog?