But, I’ve been wondering about that same issue lately. I’m not a contact whore in flickr because the more contacts you have, the less efficient if you use your contacts for any type of communication purpose. (Although there is a flickr tool that lets you easily navigate contacts similar to the flickrleech) Case in point, I used some of my contacts for my recently successful widget fundraising campaign.

Anyway, to answer your question … I look at their photos, if I know them, I make them a contact/friend. If I don’t them, but after looking at their profile they appear to work for nonprofit, edtech, library tech, etc., I’ll make them a contact.

There was a bit a research recently about how many contacts your brain can handle .. 150 was the number. It was in a roundup of posts on the topic of “Social media burnout”
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2006/11/social_media_bu_1.html

What’s even more odd are the ways people find your photos for their obscure pools — recently I was asked to join the “Mixer Truck” group: from one photo I have of a cement truck
http://flickr.com/groups/mixers/

And then there are 121 people into graffiti on plants:
http://flickr.com/groups/vegaffiti/

A niche for everything and then some

There’s a similar concept in Facebook, but I think it also gets overused to the point that it’s meaningless. Elgg has a similar thing, too, but I don’t know how well it gets used/abused.