I wonder what it says about me that the number of accounts I have across the various social networks out numbers my actual friends. I have accounts with MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Flickr, Last.fm, Twitter, Friendster (does anyone remember Friendster?) and probably a few I can’t think of right now. I’ll admit that some (if not all) of these accounts are for the services provided by the sites, rather than the social aspects. To me, Facebook is essentially a gaming platform, with it’s Risk and Scrabble knock-offs. The point is that it’s hard to think of a website, whether it’s a social network or not, that doesn’t have some social component. From a user standpoint this can be a serious annoyance, having to remember login information and keep social information up to date on all of these sites. It’s also an annoyance from the web developers, having to find a solution for each site and re-invent the wheel a fair amount of the time.
The big players in the industry have started to respond. MySpace is launching “Data Availability”, Facebook is putting together “Facebook Connect” and Google is working on “Friend Connect”. Each is an attempt to broadcast your social network information stored on their site out to other sites. In turn, these networks become THE brokers for your information. The direction that I think the big three will take this is to have an API which web developers will be able to use to build a specific social network into their site. The problem that I have with this is that if a site goes with one network, you’ll have to sign up for that network to use the social features of that site. You’ll get some benefit from having the same network on multiple sites, but you’ll run into the situation where a few sites will be on one network and a few will be on another network. And if one network gets critical mass it could take over the social component of all sites and have too much power.
The solution that I’d like to see come about is a social network that is somewhat separated from the web but parallel to it. One that is open and decentralized in a way similar to email (which if you stretch the definition, is the largest online social network ever). TechCrunch has a very interesting article on how one could decentralize Twitter. Their motivation is different, but I think the suggested solution has some applicability here. Really all we’re doing is passing around information in a decentralize way, and if you can do it for 140 character strings, why can’t you do it for more information? Obviously it’s going to take a lot of work to make sure that no features that we already have are lost, but I think that mostly just requires the creation of a few standards and maybe even some site-specific information templates. I think the biggest problem is the one that comes up in the TC article, which is how to ‘push’ the information. The web, with it’s client/server model, doesn’t push information on you, you have to request it. Having every person on the web polling everyone they are connected to, every few minutes would likely just bring the whole thing to a screeching halt. I’m not sure if XMPP and the other protocols mentioned in the article are enough to address this or not, but I have to think that there is a reasonable solution to this problem.
What I think comes out of this is a more natural social network, one that organizes information, whether it be the regular social type information, blog entries, forum posts or something entirely different, in a way oriented around the individual, rather than ‘locations’ on the web. Also it takes down some of the barriers, as once you have an account, like an email address, you will be able to socialize with anyone. Certainly there are plenty of technical (and non-technical) issues to deal with and maybe this isn’t as glorious as I think it is, but an ease-of-use obsessed web-user can dream, can’t he?
[Joe]
