Building effective networks on the web is far easier said than done. In the first place, we must see that there is the "Internet" and then there is "Inter-networking." For most people in most of the world, the Internet is a superlative communication device--nothing more or less. It allows almost instantaneous global transmission of a wide range of information at almost no cost except the cost of connection and operation. Inter-networking is what people do, or fail to do properly or appropriately, with the Internet. It is being able to utilize this wonderful scale-free communication system in a manner that would allow one to network effectively with a large number of different kinds of people from around the world.

One must negotiate what appears to be a Mt. Everest of hype in order to make contact with people on the other end. Merely being on someone's e-mail list (and we are all on strangers' email lists) or merely placing others upon an e-mail list are insufficient to the needs or measures of what true human networking are about. Human networks can be thought of as the articulatory wheels of human social organization and the grinding wheels of human social history. It is what makes or breaks people in a larger world. Of course, networking is primarily about reciprocal exchange, of one form or another, and furthermore, about extending one's opportunities for such exchange. By reciprocal exchange I am not necessarily referring to bartering or the exchange in kind of things of equivalent value. It is about the negotiation and manipulation of "hidden markets" and tapping potentials through making, breaking and keeping promises.

It is clear that though the potential for human networking via the Internet is there, and that in some areas, for instance in chat rooms and in related forums, considerable success has been achieved, the Internet as a common tool for reciprocal network development remains largely underutilized and as yet, mostly unrealized.

I must admit, I've found overall that the basis for success for Inter-networking on the web to be very limited and to lead to very, very poor results. Though I've been deliberately non-aggressive in promoting such networking, I do not think it is any sense of personal inhibition that has prevented such success from occurring. I think it is a common and shared problem and challenge of Inter-network development in the world itself. Almost everyone I've known who have made some kind of effort to make things happen via the web are almost invariably, inevitably disappointed by the poor feedback results that follow high hopes and unrealistic expectations. Of course, I don't know people who are obviously involved in certain areas of the Internet like porn, but I suspect even in these areas it is much the same.

Though I say that the results of reliance on the web have been poor overall in relation to the effort and resources devoted to it, I cannot at the same time say that these results have been completely negligible. In fact, I've achieved far more contacts and connections via the web this past few years than in any other way, from a far wider and more diverse range of potential contacts, than otherwise.

Certainly, there is a broad discrepancy between most people's expectations of the web and of building their own virtual presence, from their actual realization of the web or from the web. Though e-commerce is growing yearly and even monthly in terms of the total volume and percentage share of overall markets, it is clear as well that the distribution of the resources within the web are still vastly uneven. Small "internetrepreneurs" and web-marketers simply do not have the capacity, means or wherewithal to compete with large and established corporate web-entities. Of course,  in a kind of market that is virtually open and equal to all players, one should expect a great dog-eat-dog, big-shark-eat-little-shark scramble competition free-for-all. Advertising, virtual visibility and capturing the public imagination are important components of success via the web that most people who try it out do not achieve or realize very easily--it remains too expensive and out of reach of most small business budgets.

I have of course gotten a little better at Inter-networking even if I hold on somewhat self-destructively to my own non-aggressive style and manner. I keep no real e-mail lists and make no efforts to build such lists. To me, a name on a list is not a person, but an object that receives so much Spam. On the other hand, I've tried to focus on the quality of what few Inter-networking relationships I've been able to accomplish, and while most of these tend to be superficial, shallow and not to go very far beyond an occasional e-missive expressing mutual interest and regard, it has led as well to a few concrete results that would not have happened outside of web-based frameworks. 

My expectation for the future of Inter-Networking is that the quantity and quality of Internet-based network relations and transactions accomplished through my meta-system framework will tend to gradually and exponentially increase in time, and even though this may be only one or even just .1 percent of the total volume of traffic in terms of surfing and Spam received through my web-pages. When the counts run into the millions, even such a small percentage would become nevertheless significant and nothing to scoff at. Certainly, I might have achieved more rapidly and larger amounts of success if I had chosen to push pornography or other highly popular content rather than going after "Systems" stuff, but my measures of success are relative to my own purposes and designs, the larger ways of the world notwithstanding. A pornographically oriented site, for instance, may prove ultimately more "efficient" in terms of eliciting more response from more people visiting or otherwise using the site, even if it does not say much for the average interest or moral caliber of traffic found on the web.

As a measure of relative success, we can gauge the overall efficiency of any page or site or web-system by the ratio of its total volume of achieved transactions over the total volume of traffic in terms of page views, or amount of bandwidth utilized, etc. We can measure this in some larger "absolute scale" if we could compare our volumes to some total volume of daily traffic that occurs over the same period of time for the Internet as a whole, or for some known portion of the Internet, at least. Increasing efficiency would mean increasing these ratios overall. My efforts at development of the web system framework have been increasingly geared to the idea of improving these ratios and the efficiencies they imply, though in a manner that does not compromise on the integrity or quality of the pages or content found within the system.

The point is that efficiencies realized on the web overall by most sites and most people remain low, and perhaps are decreasing overall, not because the web is growing or traffic is increasing overall in terms of its periodic volume, which it is, but because the average levels of the use of the web remain relatively low and poorly developed. As long as people seek and solicit gratuitous and vicarious sex and other forms of exploitation via the web, these low efficiencies are likely to remain a consequence of web-development. As long as people try by any means, by hook or by crook, to "beat the odds" arrayed against them in the web game, efficiency realized by anyone and everyone on the web is likely to remain below what it might otherwise become. As long as people depend upon the relative anonymity and impersonal nature of the web to spin hype and manipulate others, it is likely to remain poor in its overall returns for everyone.

My own trend in terms of web-services has been to offer completely personalized and fully customizable web-service options without any pre-conceived plans. Whatever I cannot offer can be outsourced or obtained by third-party, etc. There is no need any longer to prepackage things in terms of services into units. I think it is a waste of time to spend developing web-services as if products that can be pre-packaged, rather it is to the better interest if not understanding of the customer that their needs are probably unique and can only be best met in a fully customizable manner. This does not overcome the challenges of demands of Inter-Networking, but it does provide a bases for improving the quality and responsiveness of such networking, making it potentially more productive and profitable for all.