The endgame for social networking has two elements - input and output:
- Input: One place to enter all data which will show up on all profiles. I want to enter my email address, my favourite music, my photos, my friend lists etc. in one place and one place only. Currently I have to repeat these tasks and others every time I log in to a new site
- Output: The ability for my one set of personal information and social network data to be presented on a multitude of different front ends, with the ability for me to customise which information appears where and to which groups of people.
Facebook is slowly getting to the second part with its forthcoming friend lists privacy options, but of course that will only apply to Facebook and not to any other social networks. Moli is geared up to doing the second part very well too. Mahalo appears to have a function which will kludge together different profiles into a single setting, which mimics some of the benefits of the first option but doesn’t really bring it all together, and doesn’t allow me to enter my data once.
The Google OpenSocial initiative will hopefully push us further down the road towards the achievement of both goals, but ultimately it should be relatively easy to do the first given all the APIs available for social networking sites today. The second shoudn’t be too hard either, for the same reason. Ultimately, I think that either the single service provider or perhaps two separate service providers who can provide this backend and front end to the social networking world will be kings, not players like Facebook, which will merely sit in the middle, watching data fly through from and to other places.
February 4th, 2008 at 10:34
[...] everyone. And I think this is a key feature of the endgame of social networking I discussed in an earlier post. I also wonder how Google will participate when some of the data is password protected. I think we [...]
February 28th, 2008 at 15:47
[...] “What do you want?” I responded as follows in the comments, along the same lines as this post from a while [...]