Facebook Extravaganza and Social Network Progression
Facebook is becoming the newest social network place-to-be-seen. The recent opening up of their API to provide various types of apps has a lot to do with the current popularity. Robert Scoble has a great list of his favorite Facebook apps - as compared to the list of the TechCrunch interns, who approach things from a 20-something perspective.
I’m chronologically in-between the interns’ twenty-something and Robert’s forty-something perspective, but I do like almost all the apps on Robert’s list better - and those that I haven’t tried yet I’d be interested in doing so.
The problem Facebook presents us with now is that it’s yet another social platform that vies for our attention. Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku also compete for one’s online social allegiance, and if you’re one to follow the herd or are easily distracted by shiny objects (and their online counterpart of new web services), then you’ll find yourself quickly overwhelmed by all the social networking you’ve suddenly become obligated to do.
I believe the next progressive step we need to make in the social network space is a way for them to easily work together. We have figured out how to connect people easily around specific themes, interests, or causes and create an online community. We can enrich each other’s lives by finding new and easier and cooler ways to connect with other people and get to know.
The next step should be to connect the networks.
Example. We now have this idea of “social presence” and status. Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce and Facebook all provide a system to update people about what you’re doing. However, I want to be able to choose which platform I use for my “social presence” and then have that update to any other platform I use.
All of this is somewhat hackable today (Facebook can update Twitter, Twitter can’t update Facebook without a lot of hackery). But it is not easy or intuitive.
Could we define a set of meta-actions that we apply to social networking and then create standards around these? Let’s start with “social presence” and define an open API with a set of primitives for how any app could update another one with “presence” information.
I bet smarter people than I could do this, and I think we need to in order to make social networks truly usable.
BTW, you can find me on Twitter and on Facebook, but not on Pownce, Jaiku or MySpace.
Tags: facebook, social networks, twitter
3 Responses to “Facebook Extravaganza and Social Network Progression”
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