Is it time for social networks to all start working together?
Social networks are growing in popularity. The chances are that everyone reading this has an account on at least one, but probably several sites which come under the banner. But if social networks are really going drive the Web forward, do they need to start working together, becoming interoperable and interchangeable?
Social networks are the new email. That is at least the view of David Sacks, founder of business social network Yammer. His views back up evidence from Nielsen Online which suggests that social networks and other member communities are growing while use of email as a form of communication is faltering.
According to BBC News, Sacks was talking at the South by SouthWest Festival in a panel titled ‘Feed Me: Bite Size Info for a Hungry Internet’ when he labeled status updates on social networks such as Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook “e-mail 2.0.”
Mr Sacks said:
What people want to do on social network these days is post status updates. We think it’s all people want to do.
While Ari Steinberg, an engineering manager at Facebook added:
It’s been interesting to see the way people change the way they communicate. You used to e-mail content to people and you had to choose who you wanted to e-mail it to and you didn’t know if your friends even wanted to see it.
Now you can passively put something out there and let people engage with it.
This is all true, and it makes clear how important social networking is becoming, with the various different sites driving conversation. Twitter has shown the way forward in the way it operates, so much so that Facebook first tried to buy it and then just copied it instead. The newly rolled-out Facebook homepage looks strikingly like Twitter.
The problem is that these different social networks usually don’t interact with each other. And until they all learn to work together and develop a set of standards, they cannot hope to truly compete with email.
Social networks should start to work towards becoming interchangeable, with status updates on one appearing on others, if the users choose that option. As it is, many of us have different sets of friends on each social network we belong to, and have to choose which one to update with our statuses and life casting.
Surely it wouldn’t be that hard for the big players to work together on a new set of rules and standards which at least gives users the option of combining our accounts on different networks. If that happens, then I can truly see a time when email becomes nothing more than a service for spammers to spread their wares.
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March 16th, 2009
“Social networks are the new email. ……. If that happens, then I can truly see a time when email becomes nothing more than a service for spammers to spread their wares.”
So.. why are social networks spam free? If so, why can’t regular emails be made spam free too?