I happen to have a few "famous" friends in my contact list on LinkedIn, people who everybody would like to know. This means that from time to time I get a message from somebody (I usually kinda know) asking me to put somebody else (whom I don't know) in contact with one of these famous friends (usually it's Joi Ito ;-).

There are cases when these messages look like they could interest my contacts, other cases when they are clearly spam and then... there are the grey ones. Messages which don't look spam but that most probably do not interest the person down the line (even if it's very hard to say if you don't know pretty well the person).

In these cases my choices are:

1. forward the message anyway (running the risk of not being a good "friend")
2. decline to forward (theoretically running the risk of preventing a deal from being done)

There are risks in both cases, but also some very interesting opportunities.

Plenty to think about as far as social networks dynamics are concerned, uh?