Imagine that you held a party one Saturday gathering most of the friends, acquaintances, co-workers and romantic flames you’d accrued throughout your life. Once collected in your backyard, you picked up a megaphone and periodically shared short anecdotes or else performed some brief show and tell for the crowd. Each time you took the megaphone, you made sure your messages would interest all of these disparate people and offend none of them, despite their wildly different ages and sensibilities.

Though absolutely nothing in that situation strikes us as natural, it’s at the heart of how we currently behave across social networks. A couple of weeks ago Google UX researcher Paul Adams did a brilliant job calling us out on this disparity, posting a Slideshare that seems to serve as his 95 Theses on social networking. Focusing on the sociology of human social networks, he wonders why there is such a discrepancy between our online and offline social behavior.

After years of research, Adams found that most people have between four and six social groups consisting of 2-10 friends each. However, each of these groups have very distinct characteristics, and many don’t mix well. For example, a teacher doesn’t want to divulge her personal life to students she may have befriended on Facebook, and many of us might not want our coworkers to see our embarrassing photos from our last family reunion.

Adams concludes that we must design social networks for multiple independent groups, for different levels of intimacy, and design tools to support how people appear to others. With all the recent rumors of Google and Facebook’s “War For Social” and Google.Me on the horizon, I wonder – is this Facebook’s Achilles’ heel? And will exploiting it help Google’s social network rival Facebook?

At 224 slides, Adams’ piece might seem like the War & Peace of Slideshare, but it’s a compelling read.