Le futur des sites de social networking

Appleseed : Social networking future

While building Appleseed, I realized just how simple it was to get two "nodes" to communicate. It became a matter of a simple behind-the-scenes request which returned a small XML file. It became apparent to me that the reason that we don't have communication between social networking sites had nothing to do with technological constrants, and was a purely economic decision on the part of existing sites. Almost all major social networking sites business models are centered on having the largest userbase possible, and user lock-in is a major part of that. By restricting your ability to interact with outside sites, they also restrict your ability to choose another site and still maintain your relationships and ability to contact your friends.

The whole situation we're in makes no sense in the context of the way the internet was meant to operate. Concentrating user bases into centralized locations and locking them in seems more like the early 90's and the way Compuserve, AOL, and the like attempted to use walled gardens to monopolize the internet. The natural evolution is an open, distributed standard. A sort of SMTP for social networking, which allows any node to fully connect to any other node. Would people put up with an email address at gmail.com which could only email other gmail.com users? Of course not, and the same standard should be applied to social networking.