Open Social Network

Facebook. Social Networks. These words keep popping from everywhere these days. We spend more and more of our time online, looking at what our peers have to say. According to recent reports, Facebook tipped Google as the most frequently visited site in the world[ref needed]. Many applications are starting to become "social", i.e., generating their data from your network of friends. For example, what restaurants your friends eat at rather than some random people might be of more interest to you. In the near future, most applications would incorporate the social aspects, so it becomes important that you as a user are a part of a social network to take advantage of it.

Of course, this means that you put more and more of your personal information online to take advantage of the system. Hence, it is important that your information is well guarded, and that you have control over who can access that information and in what ways. As quite famously said, you are Facebook's product, not customer[ref].

In the current scenario, Facebook is the clear leader in terms of number of users[ref needed], at least in the United States. A monopoly of this sort is not good for the end user. The biggest asset of a social network is its users - and not the services it provides. You don't join the social network which has the best photo sharing application, or the best privacy practices; you join the one which has most of your friends on it already. Thus, even if you don't necessarily like the social network you are on, you may be forced to be on it since you don't want to lose contact with your friends. This means that your social network provider can afford to keep the user's best interests as secondary and its revenue generator's interests primary once it has enough users.

If we look at other similar technologies of the past, we can see that the situation is different. Email and telephone are two standing examples. You may choose any email provider you want, and still be able to communicate with anyone who has an email on any server in the world. Heck, you can even run your own mail server if you do not like anyone's service. Google changed the email space by offering large amounts of storage and a clean interface (subjective), which prompted others to follow suite. In telephony as well, you may communicate to any telephone user regardless of who the provider is. However, telephone companies do give you an added incentive to join their network by allowing free calls to anyone in the same network, which means you are likely to join the network which your friends have joined. Such incentives are unheard of in the realm of email (although depending on future net-neutrality laws, this might change - however that is the subject of another big discussion).

The ideal situation for the end-user (you) is to have an open communication model similar to email, where you may be able to connect to users on any social network, with most features intact. The primary driver of the market would then be the quality of service offered by the providers, and all shall be well. If you don't like the privacy options of Friendster, join Hi5. If you don't like the interface of Orkut, join Facebook.

Hopefully Facebook's new message system and Google's Opensocial are steps in the right direction. There are also applications like Yoono and HootSuite which allow you to monitor all your social networks from one place. However, a tightly-integrated system like email is still desirable.