My Friends' PlaceBooks...

I was looking at my PlaceBook, into which I've got about 60 places saved, and i switched over my view to look at the collective PlaceBooks of my Friends. Now I only have a few friends connected here, but it didn't matter: I was immediately presented with maybe a hundred points that they had saved.

What happened next happened somewhat autonomically: I started saving places i saw that were in cities that i sometimes went to (or, of course, where I lived). I know this doesn't seem that startling since this was designed for this precise activity, but I guess i thought i'd not bother saving those places, but rather just access them from my Friend's PlaceBooks as i might need them - say, if i was traveling in Chicago and needed some ideas for some thing to see or do. But I guess i surprised myself that I wanted to save them into my own PlaceBook... kinda take ownership of them if they looked interesting. They were, afterall, somewhat vetted by my friends. It reminded me of Linkedin, where I can get introduced to business contacts if the connection is somewhat vetted by the people who know us both. Now I was getting introduced to places.

The thing that's good about me saving these places is two-fold. First of all, i did it without thinking, i did it because some natural force compelled me to do it. I wasn't sure if this would happen, but apparently it did. Second, by saving the places, I make them available to my other Friends, perhaps not connected to the people i am. This means that cool places spread through those connections. Which in turn means that we are in the process of building a collective directory of cool places that we can use, which is superior by definition to a general, all-purpose listing of everything everywhere. The wiki is the repository of that all-purpose listing, and it's great to have it accessible. But I really like having this personal-but-socially-mediated directory, my PlaceBook.

Anyone else have observations as they explore these tools?