A fundamental value of maintaining your social network is the ability to encounter people who your trusted peeps recommend, and to confidently make those recommendations yourself. Need to find a good plumber who wears his pants properly so that your kids aren’t traumatized by ass-crack while the shower drain is snaked? You probably know someone who can recommend one.

Let’s take it to the Interwebs. You’ve got your LinkedIn recommendations, Facebook suggest-a-friend, and I’m too lazy to list whatever else is out there. Thinking inside the corporate box, I’m not aware of any commercial social networking applications that do a good job of enabling recommendations, other than the backdoor method of bookmarking their profile, then including a description about why and for what you recommend them. (For a very interesting look at the recommendation phenomenon from a Jungian dude, check out Michael J Pastor’s (@michaeljpastor) discussion about a related topic, reputation.)

Then there’s Twitter.

I asked Twitter: Is following someone in Twitter similar to recommending them?

Answers:

• Macker: it means they have something to say that I want to hear/read. so I guess that’s a tacit recommendation.
• rickysays: Not for me. I just follow people I know or who have similar interests. Wouldn’t necessarily recommend them all tho (no offense)
• turoczy: Not exactly. Follow some people on Twitter to hear their opinions, opinions with which I disagree. I don’t “recommend” them.
• tselrahc: It would be a recommendation for twittering, but I would not extend that to other domains. That’s my criteria for follows.
• stickfight: sort of, that and a mixture of the fact that they are one of the interesting animals in the zoo
• passepartout: Follow means ‘you interest me, for now‘ If I follow someone FOR A WHILE, I could recommend you.
• IainColledge: For me a follow does not have that high a status, I follow because I want to but not sure it is the same as a recommend