Buried by relationships
Wired has an interesting op-ed today that I agree with. They call for an opening of Social Networks, making them interoperable and based on open standards. Right now, of course, whatever data you put into them stays there.
Wired feels that the missing secret sauce in a roll-your-own social network is relationships.
At this point, "friend" relationships remain unique to the social networks. The web still lacks a generalized way to convey relationships between people's identities on the internet. The absence of this secret sauce -- an underlying framework that connects "friends" and establishes trust relationships between peers -- is what gave rise to social networks in the first place. While we've largely outgrown the limitations of closed platforms (take e-mail or the web itself), no one has stepped forward with an open solution to managing your friends on the internet at large.
I expect to see several companies pop up soon that do this. I'm working on one myself:)
We're not going to take closed systems much longer, I think, whether they're social networking sites, cellular telephones or windowing operating systems. The whole point of the information age is interoperable information. We buy CDs to put music on iPods. We painstakingly type in our lists of friends so as to capture all of our relationships. Any company that blocks the free-flow of customer data to further their own interests will eventually be smothered in their own dust.
Posted on August 06, 2007
