Developing Possibilities

February 28, 2008 · Comments

We’ve got OpenID. We have OpenSocial. We have cross-platform IM clients like Adium and Pidgin. We have life stream aggregators like Friend Feed, Spokeo, and Lijit.

I want the following to be product features of something cross-platform, and I want it soon-ish:

  • Friends list portability.
  • Proximity-based social networks.
  • Mesh networking widely built into laptops.
  • A Network Communicator (that allows for IM, Voice, SMS, Status, Presence, and a platform for commands (like “follow” and “@”). I want this communicator to work the same way on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN, my IM client, etc, the way a cell phone just cares about connecting the call, not which network you’re reaching.
  • Granular, modular grouping of friend data.

What do YOU want?

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  • jon
    a service that pushes me content based on WHERE I am, as determined by my phone/ip address based on my interests and friend linkages. Give me my Geo-based cohort content please.
  • Joe
    Some of these features you are waiting for are already available on 8hands:
    http://www.8hands.com
  • I have been doing some similar thinking and posted on this topic over on my own blog. I think that ultimately what I want is:
    * one place to input my data, friends' names, email addresses etc.
    * one place to check on everyone else's (ideally the same place as the first)
    * one tool to communicate with all of those people

    The fact that data sent from/to that one place passes through / ends up in other platforms like Facebook/MySpace/Twitter etc. is irrelevant in some ways. I can always go and check it there if I happen to like a particular format or way of presenting it, but I want to have a single place (I use the word "place" - I guess site or even service or application would work too) to manage it all from. Then it's less about data portability (since my data never moves - at least its home doesn't) and more about APIs that allow me to plug my data in / feed data out of other services as needed. I think whoever figures out how to do all that will make a lot of money, and destroy advertising revenue streams on the social networking sites in the process. (just think what offline messaging has done to that aspect of Facebook's site traffic).
  • Great thinking, Jan. Thanks for sharing some of your thoughts here, too. I agree that it's not the data portability, but rather the data interface that we need to make work better.

    Interesting. I like where you're going.
  • I can't wait for more services to allow you to import friends from .vcf files. I use OS X Mail for my email, and don't have many people in any online address book (like gmail contacts, etc). Some sites already allow you to this with .vcf files.

    Even the people I email everyday aren't in my gmail address book, they're in OS X's Address Book. I'd love a way to select them all, click export, and upload that file to various networks, and give me the option to add those friends (like they currently do with gmail contacts). That'd be nice if more sites adopted that.
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