Why did everyone jump on the myspace/facebook bandwagon? Because the Internet is great, but fundamentally we’re all people who like to relate to other people. Myspace made it easy for someone to create an “identity” for themselves on the net, without having to know how to set up a website. Facebook made it even easier and brough Web 2.0 cleanliness and speediness, with the ability to share short updates and comment on everything.
At base, both are simply a way for people to 1) set up a unique identity on the net to associate with everything, and 2) connect with other verified identities. And 3) not have to worry about updating information on those other identities – in other words, it’s like a big, shared address book where you don’t have to manage the contact info of everyone you know, because they all do it for you.
Unfortunately, all these advances require you to sign up with a specific company, and hope that you’re with the most popular one so you are connected to all the people you want to be connected with. Whereas, with email, it’s a commodity standard. There’s nothing exciting about it. You can go to any service provider anywhere and get email and an address book. And for Instant Messaging, there at least *exists* an open standard, Jabber, which Google uses for their chat network.
So. OK, how would one take the advances that social networking sites like Facebook have given us, and make them a commodity standard that you can obtain from any service provider?
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