My vision for Open Social Networks
Imagine a time when social networks are not merely data silos anymore for the purpose of showing the right ads to people.
Imagine a time when social networks will be all over and every website will in fact be part of the big social network we call the internet.
Imagine a time when we will be able to define our contacts globally and could group them together to groups like “close friends”, “business contacts” and so on.
Imagine a time when we will be able to define certain permissions to these groups, like “can see me on website X” or “can see my familiy photos/videos”.
Wouldn’t it be great if I go to some website, set the privacy level and then be able to see which of my friends have visited it and what content they might have left there? I could comment there, upload my own content as response and they get notified immediately using standard messaging mechanisms.
And wouldn’t it be great if we always know where our content is and could search through our own content network regardless where it is stored?
Wouldn’t it also be great if I’d only have one login with different profiles attached from which I could choose from when entering some social application?
In such a time every website would again be part of the big social network and maybe better be called a social application. Each social application could concentrate on some core capability, like e.g. handling photos, give me video editing capabílities and so on.
And this big social network would simply be The Internet.
All this is actually not too far off. We have many standards already (Microformats, OpenID, OAuth, FOAF) and maybe it’s just a little step to weave them all together to solve all these problems. In fact there are already some projects/groups thinking about these problems. be it DiSo or DataPortability.
Of course there are problems on the road like established business models and politics but if big players move forward and embrace such things (because they also create new opportunities) then there is a chance. And if it’s build on open standards and the tools are provided on an open source basis it would even be quite easy to implement it.
In one of my next posts I might try to get into use cases and see what makes sense. After that one might think about how to implement these use cases effectively.
Tags: dataportability, diso, vision, socialnetworks, internet, socialnetworkportability, opensocialnetworks, standards, microformats, oauth, openid, foaf
January 7th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
Interesting - I guess.
One question - who the hell is going to pay for it?
Members of such free and open systems have surely proven the fact that they are not willing to give up their cash to use the services - why do you think the Internet is currently driven by advertising?
Sure, I agree that it’s nice to kick back and dream about a Utopian internet - but reality says that it will never take place - it’s takes money to keep servers powered up, supplying bandwidth isn’t free, and hiring programmers to make all these things work together requires tons of cash.
January 7th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
Of course you need money to run the servers but I think money can come from 2 sources:
- the old ad model (I am actually not sure how good this works anymore or in the future. I would like to know more from people in that scene.. I know more and more money is put into it but does that also mean the ROI is ok?). Even if there are only social applications instead of those full featured networks they can still use ads.
- premium services. I think flickr is a good example. I can either have a basic service with ads or a better one without ads but I have to pay for it. And at least me personally I’d be happy to pay for more services if they would let me (and remove ads in turn). I also pay for some already, like 2 flickr accounts, Second Life, XING.
So it’s not too much different from today. Of course some things will change like:
- locking in the user is not possible anymore and thus you might suffer some ad revenues from this principle but
- you will also gain new users because it’s easier to signup. You already bring your friends with you and you won’t have to look for them on every new network you join. This makes each application more useful from the start.
January 7th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
“you will also gain new users because it’s easier to signup. You already bring your friends with you and you won’t have to look for them on every new network you join. This makes each application more useful from the start.”
That does NOT bring in revenue - you really need to run your ideas through a reality filter - it’s not sustainable in any way - sure, for the user it may be better, but for the business owner - where’s the capital?
January 7th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
no, this will bring users. Like my parents never look at my photos on flickr because it’s just too difficult to signup.
Once the users are there (and you have a good service) I still think you can use todays means of monetizing it, which means ads and premium services.
I also do not want to state this as absolute truth but maybe more trigger some discussion
And yes, it is about the user because I am merely a user
But I think having an open platform internet will mostly change that people can easier move from place to place which might hurt many existing businesses right now because they are built upon lock-in but people will not just be gone from the net just because it’s open. They might just be more flexible in their way of choosing the sites they use and thus it can create more competition.
And I still would like to know if ads is the only business model viable in the internet world. And how successful this will be in the future. Isn’t there already a lot of talk of banner blindness etc.?
January 7th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Oh I hear you - and on some level I still like to think that it’s possible.
You started off your post by saying, “Imagine a time when social networks are not merely data silos anymore for the purpose of showing the right ads to people. ”
Well, iTunes is the largest silo out there and nobody is going to change it.
And targeted advertising is where the money is at, so don’t expect that to change at all, ever.
It’s why pod-casters and video bloggers are having a hard time finding sponsors - the middle-man services are still being created and catching up so that all of the various genre’s can be consolidated into groups and sold to the advertisers.
The surface of the landscape may change a bit in the future, but my educated guess is that the underlying structure will remain the same - more refined, but the same.
January 7th, 2008 at 8:40 pm
Well, maybe I would even pay for good podcasts
But maybe also the culture is missing and once podcasts get commercial this also means that they probably will have to pay for playing music (there’s also infrastructure missing).
And yes, I see targeted ads also becoming more and more used but I am also very much sensible to their privacy implications.
Regarding iTunes: For what music I like it might be and thus for targeted ads but I don’t see it that much in terms of where my contact list is and where my own creations are.
Maybe that first sentence is misleading and just shows my general dislike of ads
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October 7th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
I don\’t normally leave comments… but I really enjoyed your post! I will be leaving a link back here in my blogroll! Thanks!