(From a comment on a slashdot post about a study about happiness being catching

To become a social hub, all you really need is to be able to take an interest in everyone else. Start off by faking it, but once you’ve done that a bit, you’ve already got the level of background knowledge that you don’t need to any more – it’s basically the same as ‘geeking’ only this time the subject of your study is people and social dynamics. Accept the idiosyncrasies of people without passing judgment, much like you would with a hardware platform. Take the time to figure out what they’re good and bad at, and keep up to date with their revision history. From there, all it takes is a bit of spreading of invites when you choose to do something…

Haha, “revision history…” too true, too true. Of course, you can’t track everyone, any more than you can track all the software and hardware out there. Some individuals – and some whole social circles – are more personally interesting, and valuable, than others.