A little over a year ago, I wrote about a digital dunbar’s number.

Dunbar’s number, “the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships”. This is typically set at 150, based on the size of the neocortex. However, it doesn’t take into consideration that when you are working online, you can page in and out sets of people, so while your neocortex may only be able to maintain stable relationships with 150 people at a time, using a good digital rolodex, that number can expand considerably.

This raises a new question. Is there a Digital Dunbar’s Number? A number at which point you start getting overwhelmed with spam or declaring email bankruptcy?

It would seem as an expanded Digital Dunbar’s Number would be based, in part, on how well social media tools interoperate and allow you to organize your contacts. Unfortunately, so far, they don’t do all that well.

I explored the interconnectivity of different social media tools a bit last month. Rafe Needleman explored a similar idea this week as he pondered if we were heading towards a crisis in personal syndication overload.

So, we see continued refinement of various microblogging and life stream management sites. Laconi.ca seems to have constant development. New sites seem to emerge every day, and older sites, like Twitter and FriendFeed are coming out with new layouts.

FriendFeed now has features to show the best of a feed and the ability to add items to different feeds. I’ve been doing something similar by using rooms in FriendFeed. One group of friends are people that I know who are interested in blogging about progressive politics at a statewide level. Another group is people that I know who use Twitter from Connecticut and Rhode Island. I’ve set up rooms so I can see what they are saying, in the context of their groups.

It seems as if I’m not the only person interested in this. On Twine, yet another attempt at organizing social media, I was pointed to an article on TechCruch about a group of Mom’s using Twitter and using Ning.

I had a good discussion about this using another social media tool earlier this week. It seems like the tool that many of us want is something like this: Take something that gathers contact information, such Plaxo Pulse, Spock, Spoke, LinkedIn, etc.. Have it include the ability to group people, probably ideally by tags. Have it pull together all the social media for a person within a group, or with a common tag. Ideally, a user would be able to do it for people that are in a persons own universe, or across the whole universe, the way del.icio.us or Flickr handles tags. For the media gather, it should automatically eliminating duplicates, such as what happens when I use sites like ping.fm, posterous, or hellotxt to send my message to multiple sources. Then it should present a nice consolidated display, where comments can be added that are sent back to the original site as well as being posted on the consolidated feed.

Is that really too much to ask? With such a tool, we could see a giant increase in the possible Digital Dunbar’s Number.