The Future History of Social Networks

Good article on GigaOm on the History of Online Social nets over the last 20 years or so (sad in a way though, I've been there for nearly all of them), and the future - for those interested in Ancient Net History it covers FidoNet, Bulletin Boards, the alt.net, the OSP's (AOL, Prodigy etc), the ListServers and Groups of Web 1.0 (many of which are still going strong) as well as the early Web 2.0 Social Nets.

Hands up who recalls when Archie and Veronica were not 2 comic book characters? Mind you, who recalls when they were

Anyway, the conclusion is I think obvious to anyone who has lived through the whole thing so far, i.e they all have their place in the sun*, but there is genuinely nothing really new under it - I totally agree with this take:

Commercial social networks today are a lot like online services in the mid-90s — they’re popular because they make something easier to do (maintain a social graph, keep track of friends, search for new people). It was not that long ago when getting online was difficult for novice users. Large businesses (EarthLink, Netcom, AOL) were built around making the Internet easy to use. They became superfluous as broadband became standard and devices with built-in Net access were shipped.

And they were all walled gardens, making it as hard as possible for anyone to get out of them - like today's crop of broadband based SocNets. But, as GigaOm notes, the components of these things are hardly rocket science, and can be reproduced in open systems. They note 3 main components of a SocNet:

Profiles

Social networks make it easy for people to create profiles using standard templates. This makes sense, but this is really no different than a web page. I like what Chris Messina and co. are doing with their distributed social networking project, which uses blogs as a basic building block, and microformats to embed metadata in pages. Separating profiles from other functions, like search and discovery, makes a lot of sense because then you can have one page or site that is visible via many different search tools.

Search (and the Social Graph)

The social graph is a function that can easily be added to search engines. Once web sites, blogs, etc. are tagged to indicate that they are profiles, search engines can crawl them to pick up metadata, links to friends, etc. Search engines are already good at indexing the web, so adding a vertical search for people and social information is not a daunting task. Expect the search engines to add social/people search features. While the conventional wisdom holds that this task will naturally fall to Google, I think this is an area where AOL or Yahoo could score an unexpected win, as both companies are much more people- and community-focused.

Updates

One of the reasons Facebook is so addictive is because it is a convenient way to track the status of friends. This, too, is something that can be moved onto the open web. Anyone who wants to can publish updates, events, etc. via standard formats like RSS and iCal. Anyone who wants to monitor their friend’s updates can do so, via a feed reader, or via custom applications that have yet to be built.

We did a study of the main components of Social Nets awhile back, and as well as these we found that the following functions are also useful:

- Near-real time Chat - this is what is making Twitter popular, and drives IM usage.

- Ability to upload various media for others to use - it started in Groupware and has continued via Flickr etc

- (increasingly) some form of security / privacy - at the very least freedom from spam, abuse etc.

- User feedback - rating, recommendation, karma, voting etc - some way of getting the hive's view of the cove trying to chat to you.

But, as noted, its not exactly rocket science so we would also expect Social Networking's endgame to be more open. In Web 1.0, Sir Tim Berners Lee and Marc Andreessen et al set us free...this time round Marc A. is flogging a semi-closed Social Net (Ning), but I think Sir Tim's aim is in the right direction with the GGG.

* our analysis shows that the average broadband social net since c 2002 has a sun-spot for about 18 - 24 months before it gets overshadowed by the "new" new one. I expect Facebook's star to wane therefore toward the end of 2008

Update - Allen Stern reminded me of something missing the genre of GamesSocNets - I playe MUD's at college on Commodore's on the network, my kids play Runescape and Woreld of Warcraft, they paly as groups of friends and are busy yakking away on VoiP as they play.