A week back Steve Spalding asked on Twitter what will be the next big Social Network?

I emailed him an idea that had been floating in my head, with the caveat that I'm not all over social networks, heck I quit MySpace and I hadn't signed up for Facebook.

The idea being that the next big evolution in social networks is networks being more sociable with each other, and where that would lead.

He said he's going to blog some of the ideas I put to him, but there hasn't been a sign of that yet, so I thought I'd move forward and blog a little myself about the idea - and then Dare Obasanjo posted his Thoughts on Open Networks.

That's going to change the focus of this post a little as I ramble on what he discussed and a few options out there as well as where the future could go for social networking.

I'm going to give the same caveat here that I gave Steve, and just mention again - I'm not all over Social Networks - I see what friends post about, I read the general discussion, when the blogosphere goes nuts over something I read a bit about it then ignore it.

Quite frankly, I hopped on Social Networks a bit when I was younger and found them to be a time sink for me, and I never really generated lasting friendships, I'm not the most sociable person typically, but I love where the technology could lead.

Actually a lot about how I was thinking about all this is completely covered by Dare on his post.  So for the next part I'm going to address some of his points.

From Dare's first point - Now on Openness of Social Networks, I get why some are fairly closeted.  I get why Dare made the case for when people are younger they do stupid things that should not be held against them in the future.  Hell, as I get older I look back each year at all the stupid things I've done or posted, but I'd hope that if someone were to hire me they would realise that anything I posted could be an odd occurrence or wouldn't hold my private life against me professionally (yeah, a bit much to ask for especially if you take on a fairly public role like Dare).

From Dare's third point - As far as APIs and openness, it's a crap-shoot as far as I am concerned.  I look at open and I look at closed Social Networks and I come across a few thoughts:

1. If a network is closed then how do I find things a friend has posted / search for interesting information without going to that exact networks search utility.  Hopefully to some degree if information is marked as open by the user then it can get onto the public web.  How sociable is a site if I can't join because I am unaware of it's existence?
2. At the same point in time, I'd love it if my searches didn't get hijacked by pages of results from depressed teenagers who have posted on their blogs.
3. Open networks, like Flickr, YouTube, Digg, and sites like Photobucket get huge amounts of use for their ability to grab any object on these sites and host in your page, blog, site but then how do they monetize that and keep in business?

Dare's fourth point is where my thinking joined in on this conversation and the messages I sent Steve.

How are social networks going to learn to play nice with each other?

My thinking was around all the aggregators that are available on the internet these days, from my building a tumble blog, which allows me to aggregate my presence but restricts you from joining that conversation without going to the site in question, to how Facebook or MySpace provide APIs or the ability to integrate widgets.

For example, from my Facebook site I could put in a twitter widget, and that would allow me to twitter and have it sent to the twitter site, or to list my twitter feed in Facebook, but what else is there?

How do people talk between MySpace and Facebook?

I mean sure there might be in the future a few key players providing the instant messaging type scenario that Dare proposes of sharing user posts across sites, but that's still fairly limiting.

My thoughts instead went to a site that not only aggregated my personal information, but then allowed you to add to the conversation.

The problem being that aggregators bring all of my conversation to one point, which is great for anyone interested about me, but then they'd have to follow the conversation by drilling into the site, joining that social network, posting on that blog, or blogging somewhere else and I hope I get a trackback or something so I know the conversation takes place.

Then there are services like hcard, OpenID, and CardSpace who are supposedly going to help me prove to sites about who I am.

There are services like Gravatar and Pavatar, which give me my little icon that identifies me anywhere I go online.

At some point, I can see a Social Network building that forms into all these ideas.  They provide the key that says I am who I say I am, they provide the information like my birthday, or security information, and maybe they provide me with something akin to an avatar that I can use cross sites.

But then why not use that information?  I mean Google uses my information on searching and where I go with their sites, cookies, to track me.

Why not use my avatar usage to track when I comment on a blog, track that back and link it somehow to a global profile?

Why not have a site where I can blog a reaction to someone else's blog, have the trackback formed, and then rather than aggregating our blogs separately, create that link as a tracking item across our profiles?

The idea flowing to, no matter where I blog or comment, as long as this Social Network knows who I am on any social network, blog, or API it can track what I am talking about and not only in the form of aggregating my presence, but tracking my communication.

For example, say I blogged about what someone said on twitter, couldn't a social network conceivably show that link?  Couldn't you follow the conversation across sites?

Couldn't my comments on a blog like Dare's be aggregated as part of my daily feed for anyone interested in subscribing to me?  And thereby they can follow that thread back to Dare's post.

Couldn't someone then, on the social network, choose to reply via Pwonce, or Twitter, or their own blog, or a Facebook comment, about what I have said if the API to produce a post was there?  And couldn't they track it?

So where we end up with is a Social Network site that then not only aggregates, but allows you to track a conversation across multiple other social networks and using posting APIs allows you to add to the conversation and track them.

For the most part, quite a few Social Networks provide unique page urls and ids for this to happen, however, again the issue of how open it is to create these links, and how powerful the search utility in the social network needs to be to create these links without plug-ins to browsers, or user interaction.

The end result could be however, a site that you could start browsing an entire conversation across multiple platforms, moving back and forward across the tree.  This could be either taking the information contained in RSS feeds, and displaying it raw in it's own interface, or providing a way of moving back and forward between the social networking sites themselves to view the posts.

I'm sure there are aspects to this idea behind quite a few of the aggregating sites, but I don't know if or when something like this could get off the ground, even if it is a good idea for something like this to get off the ground.

Again the issue of openness of Social Networks might be a huge barrier to something like this getting off the ground, but that was the basics of my thought process on where the next Social Network could spring up.

I know this post rambles a bit, but I hope I got the idea across, I'll be blogging a bit more in the next few days about where I see some problems in Social Networking, and I hope some of you might check back in a few days to see how these thoughts end up going.

If there's anything you'd like me to clarify, or if you'd like to leave some feedback, please feel free to leave a comment!