The Social Media MBA Blog by Karl Long

Social software, like ryze, linkdin, friendster and the like, have proliferated because they are based on a fundamentally good idea, linking people; and they leverage what the internet is good at, linking things.

The trouble is, the internet is so good at linking things that these organizations are going to get undermined by the internet itself. They are kind of like early AOL, with its IM and its chat rooms it was far better at connecting people than the internet at the time, so it was more popular early on. As soon as the internet itself evolved to provide a level of people connectivity, like IM and chat rooms etc, AOL literally got undermined by a bigger network.

All of these social software plays are currently in a bit of a gold rush at the moment, because they are probably under the impression that whichever has the biggest network wins, and thats true, the problem is the internet is going to be the biggest network and unless they are open and adapt to take advantage of the emerging changes on the internet they are going to fail.

I came across two emerging standards recently that could well undermine many of these social software plays, one is called XFN (XHTML Friends Network) and the other is called FOAF (Friend of a Friend). Both of these tools are emerging XML standards to describe relationships between people online. The simplest and easiest to impliment is XFN, I originally found a reference to XFN on clagnut.com. You can take an existing blogroll and enter in relationship data, for example
<a href="http://tanya.example.org" rel=”friend met colleague”>….

They’ve even got attributes like “crush”, “Muse” and “Sweetheart”, that is so cool.

FOAF seems a little further along and has even created a svg application that draws vector diagrams of the FOAF network (although I’ve had problems getting adobes SVG plug in). This is the FOAF browser, foafnaut.org.

Here are some more interesting articles re. social software:

• How Many Social Nets Are Too Many?
• http://www.kassandra.ch/tobias/2003/07/social_networks.html
• MANY-TO-MANY: social software articles on Corante