Open Sourcing of Social Networking....w(h)ither Facebook?

Rationality seems to be dawning in the Social Networking space.....it has occurred to quite a few people in the past (most recently Google) that an Open Social Network, built from Open Source software, is a perfectly viable approach.

A SocNet is typically built of a few main functions:

- A User ID page - stuff about you
- A search routine to find users that are similar to you
- Some form of friending system that allows you to track your actual networked friends, and gives them an inside track to talking to you
- A tool to allow you a bit of voyeuristic perving of their friends etc.
- Tools for people to interact with each other - comment, throw dead sheep etc....
- Silly applications for the masses to waste time with

Now clearly you can fairly easily build this with Blogs, a Search Engine (Technorati), and a directory of your friends on IM (or Twitter, or Jaiku, or even Groupware for that matter), and various tools to make people visible (blogroll for eg). What would still be good is if everyone had some standard script that allowed metadata to be standardised at a certain level to make Tim Berners Lee's GGG a reality.

Anyway, Chris Messina of Citizen Agency has taken the bull by the horns here (tip of hat to Anne Zelenka for the link)

To put my … time? … where my mouth is (I haven’t got a whole lot of money to put there) … Steve Ivy and I have embarked on a prototype project to build a social network with its skin inside out. We’re calling it DiSo, or “Distributed Social Networking applications”. The emphasis here is on “distributed”.

Bravo....my only grumble is that he has kicked off with a semi-closed blognet, Wordpress, to start off - but it is Open Source at least, and you have to start somewhere, and it already has a structured "About" metadata set.

Of course, Chris has also single handedly potentially removed a lot of Facebook's valuation, as this meme is the beginning of the end of the "AOL Walled Garden" approach to Social Networking, and post Beacon the argument for shifting to this approach looks a lot more attractive.

Update...on a related matter, Bebo decides to Do a Facebook and announces that Closed Open-ness is indeed the New Black for SocNets. Clearly Beacon beckoned for a SocNet dressing up for sale.......can;t help but think though that this hors ehas run its course.