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Mashable* � Blog Archive � Discussion: The Google of Social Networks? - Internet Entrepreneur Pete Cashmore on Web 2.0 and the Future of the Internet
Pete is asking what the "Google of Social Networking" will look like. I wrote a comment on his post:
The power of Google was that it didn't require an actual human being to connect up a page. No one had to submit their page, add it to a list, etc.
With social networks, there's never going to be a one stop shop. I use LinkedIn for something, and Friendster for something else, but I can't get on the Facebook. The real power lies in connecting the LinkedIn people to the Friendster people to the myspace people.
I have a social network. I e-mail, IM, link tags /for on del.icio.us, Skype, etc. etc. etc... but nothing ties all the people I contact togethere in a displayable fashion... nor does anything tie me to their friends, etc. Frankly, nothing even ties in the people to themseves... my computer doesn't know the difference between Fred Wilson the Skyper versus an e-mail to Fred Wilson versus the guy I'm tagging links for.
Someone needs to do what Google did to the internet, and what Indeed is doing to jobs.
Are you following me on Twitter?
The power of Google stems from search results that are both automatic and relevant. [In fact, any robust Web 2.0 service – Pandora is another good example – should embody these two characteristics.]
Meanwhile, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Friendster – and all current generation social networks - are limited on both counts. LinkedIn can tell me that I have 450 second degree contacts – but it lacks any capacity to sort them intelligently and tell me who the people are that I might find most relevant. The onus is on me to sort through my contacts by keyword and piece together the relevance on my own. Furthermore, while I can search by companies and schools to seek out alumni connections, this really just gives me an opening line, and doesn’t help me know whether a more substantive basis exists on which to ground an extensive conversation. In short, the person initiating contact shouldn’t have to do too much work to sort their network, and both parties need to be assured of a meaningful basis for contact.
LinkedIn annoys people to the extent that it connects you without relevance. The basis for LinkedIn and Friendster’s automatic relevance is degrees of separation. But this has weaknesses – there are second degree contacts who I have very little in common with, while I am sure there are hundreds of people in the sixth degree and beyond that I would have plenty in common with.
Perhaps the next generation of social networks will find their basis in instant, spontaneously generated communities that are relevant. And I think del.icio.us, or some copycat thereof, will form the heart of the future of social networks. Del.icio.us functions as a sort of a grand professional personality profile. What if del.icio.us was mashed together with an algorithm that analyzed my tag titles and the content of the pages I have tagged in order to determine and rank my interests? A Pandora for people! The algorithm could look at my del.icio.us tags and the content of the underlying pages and determine that I’m interested primarily in languages, secondarily in Web 2.0 and international relations, etc... A mindmap or peoplecloud could then be formed of people with whom I share interests and this would be my personal community.
The service could then form an infinite number of spontaneous “intelligent” communities. In a sense, the idea is communities based on tagging (like consumating.com), except that a computer determines the relevance based on my history of expressed interests while exploring the web.
To broaden my horizons, what if I could press a button to see “the opposite of me” – users and communities that the algorithm determines I have the least in common with? It would be the human equivalent of the music that Pandora would play last. There would be an endless number of possibilities for serendipity and self-discovery. The computer could search tags and content of tagged pages for statistically improbable tags and content and tell me which interests or combination of interests make me unique.
Anyway, this comment is admittedly fuzzy, but then again, I guess if I had it all figured out, I wouldn’t be posting it publicly...