My idealism sends greetings from Utopia.
Eventually the real live version (yet to be completed) of Rogue Estate will delve into this subject quite a bit… for now, here it is in brief on LJ land.
Social networks, personal identity and the pipe dream of managing one profile that can be transported across multiple platforms.
A good start: http://opensocialweb.org/2007/09/05/bil
Seriously. Myspace, Facebook, Virb, LJ, Blogger, Twitter, Pownce, iLike, Groov, Consumating, Xanga, Joost, Flickr, YouTube… the list goes on and on and on with every possible niche having a social network built around it. It’s too much. One could make a full time job maintaining a presence on even a handful of sites, even with small interoperability hacks and inroads (for example, the widget that allows my twitter stream to be posted automatically to facebook or my Flickr photos to be posted automatically to LJ.)
And lets not forget - every time there’s a new push to a new platform, we all have to go out and spend a few weeks finding all our friends AGAIN.
The big questions are of course - who controls the master silos? (I say google.) How does it all work? how can it be kept secure? What are the limits? There will have to be definite boundaries where the centralized personal data ends and the value-added services of individual platforms begins.
I’ve spoken of it and will no doubt continue to churn away for some time to come. The big prize - the next upheaval (Web 3.0?) will be the plan that brings the dream of Write-Once-Maintain-Many a reality. RSS in reverse. Here is my chosen interface, here is my updated content - computer, do my work for me and make my life easier instead of more complicated.
Total homogeny is definitely not the goal, mind you. Facebooks, Myspaces, iLikes all have their target markets, audiences and their place on the network. The gold would be to be able to move from one to another without having to start from the ground up every time. Much like the telephone number portability law did to ease some of the pain of switching cellular network carriers, I see a social network bill of rights type concept doing for the social web.
