Bob's blog

Social, social, everywhere

I started off the week on a whale watch along with a lot of other people, I think. It was hard to tell, because it was a virtual whale . Monday was the start of the Apple WWDC and a lot of people were planning to follow and connect via Twitter. While the folks at Twitter talked about what they've done to increase their capacity, chances were that the volume generated by the conference would cause the fail whale to make an appearance. This wasn't quite as interesting as a real whale watch, but much less bouncy for me. That's because it wasn't me riding the waves, it was Twitter bouncing up and down. I'm not sure why, but do like that the FailWhale has a website and a fan group too.

It's a good thing that I was able to watch this from the air conditioned comfort of my home office, the heat wave in New Jersey was pretty bad earlier this week. It did give me a chance to catch up on some things I've been watching. As I get invited to more and more (and more) professional and personal social networks, I have to wonder how this will tie together. I think people are already making choices based on convenience or capacity. It's either more convenient to stay with a few networks or people just don't have the capacity to continually join more networks. I've drawn the line at any more social networks unless there's some compelling reason or business group that seems interesting.

I am fascinated by the number of different approaches to social networking and I am interested to see how this grows. There's clearly benefits to being connected - both professionally and personally. I've reconnected with co-workers from 20 years ago and found friends that I knew in high school who are now living nearby. But there are the also the social networks that haven't thought through what they offer or even how they offer it.

I do see this getting worse before it gets better. It's getting easier than ever to setup a community whether you use a hosted site like Ning or KickApps , or use a toolset like SocialSite to add features to your website. This is truly the long tail of communities in action, which is definitely a good thing. The ability for disparate groups to connect is one of the tremendous benefits of the web.

The capacity limit has caught up to me though. I really don't need another set of credentials to YASNS (yes, that would be yet another social network site) with redundant, although slightly different data about me and my friends/colleagues. There's got to be a better way to manage your data and coordinate access to different sites. It seems to me that OpenID had some traction, Data Portability has a lot of conversations and Open-foo -the next hot new thing - is probably coming.

In order to continue the growth of social networking sites, I think that users will demand some changes. In fact, I'm probably not alone in being ready for some change. The big question is how this will be resolved. I think that some of the loose concepts around federation are very useful to help solve this. Depending on what kind of personal information you want to share, some it can be quite sensitive. Because of this, you want to be certain about how it's stored and who you've given that data. The idea of a feed-based mechanism with a personal datastore like a Mine! can be quite compelling. In the end, the ability to manage and track my own data is the goal. The mechanism needs to be fairly straightforward and provide the ability for existing sites to adopt the functionality. In the short term, there may not be a lot of incentive for social networking site to adopt such a mechanism but it's crucial for growth in the long term.

Posted at 03:00PM Jun 13, 2008 by bs in Web.next  |