Tim O’Reilly has been writing about his requirements for a social network operating system that is both portable and interoperable.

Every explicit social networking site, which is trying to reconstruct my social network by asking me to invite people and approve their invitations, is crying out for access to my true social network, which (to the extent it exists online) is locked up in applications that don’t think of themselves as social networking applications at all.

I believe the biggest question facing developers of online communities is how they deal with the emergence of Facebook as “the” social network operating system. There is a movement afoot to have one, open source place where your social graph resides. Social graph is defined as the global mapping of everybody in your network and how they are related. The problem is having to register on multiple social networks and “declare your friends and contacts.”

I have written about this before in terms of having a home for your profile. Here’s what I said in January:

What I need is a place for my profile that can be plugged into any web service I join. And by plugged in I mean can dynamically draw text, bookmarks, images, and videos from all of these services and build them into a dynamic view of what’s going on now.

After thinking about this for some months in the context of Swift, our new service for conference organizers, I have come to believe that my blog is the home for my public profile and Facebook (and eventually Linked In when the api opens up and is comparable to the facebook api) is my social network operating system. I am doubtful about the success of the open social graph. I think Facebook just has too much momentum and will serve as the defacto operating system for now. As long as it keeps innovating, it will probably remain so.

That means that online communities will not be able to compete for attention and participation unless they integrate with Facebook. From now on online communities will be defined by individuals and their needs and preferences. I live on Facebook and on my blog and I’m not going to relocate. But I will participate as long as participation is seamlessly integrated with where I already live online.

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 15th, 2007 at 6:38 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.