Remember my post on Decentraized Social Networks? Matt Hollingsworth points out correctly about the first step we need to do in the social networking scene.
Could we define a set of meta-actions that we apply to social networking and then create standards around these? Let’s start with “social presence” and define an open API with a set of primitives for how any app could update another one with “presence” information.
On a related news, Robert Scoble tells us that Plaxo is going to come up with new features on Monday. It appears that it will be a much open social network where you can export your data and take it with you (unlike Facebook). But, Scoble is not optimistic about Plaxo gaining traction because Facebook has already established itself as a cool player in this area. I agree with Scoble on his prediction that Plaxo will not gain traction at this point of time. But I am pretty certain that people will soon want to take their friends with them from one social network to another and also to interact with friends in other networks. As Matt says, it is time to first start defining an openAPI that can be utilized to update the user presence across various networks.
Tags: SocialNetworks, Open Standards, OpenAPI, Facebook, Plaxo
