Social Networks 2.0
A question was recently posted on Linked In about the future of Social Networks. And not a week goes by when someone doesn’t ask me about building on of these behemoths. It’s hip, it’s trendy, and “everyone uses FaceBook or MySpace.” Lets ignore the business aspects of this for a moment – which drives much of the interest, anyway – and look at where this whole deal is heading.
When one steps back and looks at Facebook and MySpace, and view it as a “network” one can indeed see that it is a vast set of connections from one person to another, or many others. It is a network much like the streets of a city … it provides the means to get something from one place to another; or like a phone book … you can look up anyone you may want to find and contact them.
This is basically a “passive” network. When you really boil these services down, they are a place to put “stuff” where other people can find it, and a place to find other people’s “stuff.” Anyone who uses these still needs a phone, email, IM, TXT-messages, RSS readers, a Twitter client, and so on. So, the actual real-time networking between people is actually carried out outside of the social networking sites.
For the genre to advance this is the wall that needs to be broken down. The next social networking revolution will bridge the gap between active and passive content and communications. Does this mean that the next social networking site needs to encompass all these various kinds of real-time communication? Possibly – or possibly there will be a convergence of digital communications which will enable this transition. Consider services like Meebo which already aggregate IM, or the various desktop clients which already aggregate Twitter and RSS.
In fact, Twitter may be the preview of this new means of networking. Consider that a Tweet is content which is posted for public view, yet it can also be private to an individual (a threaded reply). The same datagram, but used two different ways and more or less residing as the same object within the server. Taking this to the next level, consider being able to post to the “Frodus” … a nonsense term I like to use. You can post an article with a category and/or tags. You can post in response to something for public view (like a comment). You can post a message intended only for one person, or a list of people (like mail/mailing-list). You can decide on the expiration and/or publish date of the item. You can post and read from your smart phone, and be notified on any place you’re logged in of new activity. You can present content you want to be view by the public in a template-driven presentation which mimics the current blog/CMS. And other people can aggregate things you post as well … so if you post an article about wanting to sell your old computer, someone out there has a site which looks for those kinds of articles for their classified site.
That’s active networking. That’s where we’re heading some day.
Now, if you’re some big shot VC with gobs of money … call me … the time is Now! 
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