From social networking hell to nirvana

First there was postal mail, then there was the telegraph, then there was the telephone, then there was the telegram, then there was telex, then there was fax, then there was email (with at least three distinct addressing schemes UUCP, X400 and SMTP), then there was the web site (leaving out a few precursors), then there was instant messaging, then there was VoIP virtual phone numbers, and then...

You get it, a never ending set of ways to communicate with people with disparate standards, capabilities and addressing schemes and seldom with backwards or forwards compatibility.

And now there is a whole meta level of communication methods piled on the "web site" layer - the social networking site. The idea is that we create a communications network merely by being linked with the people we know. Most of the time the "communication" is completely passive - the network of links just exists, no data other than its existence (pure meta data) flows. Occasionally that connection is used to send a real message - usually via some out of band method such as email. They call this phenomenon "social networking".

My problem is that social networking seems thus far to be an entirely proprietary field so just like my example above there is a never ending list of social networks I must join, and even more frustrating those that I join are probably related to my "social status" or demographic. First there was Friendster ostensively for everyone (with patience), then there was Tribe.net for the hip 20-something crowd, then popular with teens we got MySpace, then Facebook for students and alumni of all ages, then LinkedIn for "professionals" , then... well you get the picture.

So currently I'm in my very own social network hell with an identity on Tribe, LinkedIn and Facebook, and before that I briefly had one on Friendster. I decided Friendster while interesting as a concept and probably one of the first of its class was useless to me - and really, really slow, I got out before they removed the "delete account" option (great way keep your user count high!). To some extent you could include Digg, Flickr and Del.icio.us as social networks of sorts, however for these the social part is mostly an add on or necessary but not sole part of the concept, as such they giving me far more utility. But now I'm actively trying to avoid joining yet more networks without feeling rude to those that invite me.

And oh goodness, I just realized I have a Orkut membership too (which I actually asked for, thanks Dave) but I only know one other person on it, since the other 99.99999% of members seem to be Brazilian so it isn't really much use to me.

Plus there are all kinds of other ad-hoc social networks being built around blogging sites and communities (with multiple contributors and authorized commenters), web forums and groups (phpBB, Yahoo Groups, Google Groups), mailing lists and chat groups - of which I also belong to many.

Can anyone else see the massive and unnecessary redundancy, inefficiency, and complexity of all this? I mean to me it is crying, nay SCREAMING for a better solution, but all we seem to get is more and more proprietary reinventions of the wheel (I guess they still can't figure out what color it should be...) that just add to the problem.

The problem is that really I am only one person and I have only one network which is defined by me. So why do I have to join a dozen different sites and continue joining new ones as fashion dictates? These become hip and cool for a year or two and then they either go out of business, or something else comes along and they are just abandoned. Why can't I just have some meta-network tool that automatically joins me onto any new social network, and automatically remakes all my connections on that site.

Of course it just seems silly that the later idea might be necessary in the first place, which points to the real solution which is to have a well defined standard that defines connections between things and use that as a basis for ALL other social networking sites, products and features. They are just applications layered on top of the network infrastructure just as web sites are layered on HTTP and HTTP is layered on TCP etc. Those things in the network don't have to be just people either - they can be organizations, places, events, shared occupations, mindsets, etc. Early in Friendster people created bogus user identities for things like BART and Muni lines (Bay Area public transport) and people would make those bogus users their friends - Friendster didn't like that for some reason and went about removing all non-people entities, but their popularity belied a demand for non person to person networking.

Anyway, I believe the definition of such a system would be important as the invention of HTTP/HTML websites in the history of the Internet. Obviously there are huge privacy issues to solve because all that network information should be under my control, not some third party (a big problem with current systems which are probably doing a lot of mining of the connection information, either overtly like LinkedIn or covertly like MySpace and Facebook). So I should get to define my network and when someone wants to trawl my network, or some portion of it I should be the one to grant or deny permission for that operation, and the extent of it. And when someone wants to integrate my network with theirs by making a connection there should be a mutual permission exchange required, just like doing a private transaction on the web via SSL.