The future in the world of thousends social networks :)

Some History
When people speak about social networks names like Facebook, Myspace, Hi5 and Friendster come in mind. However the idea isn't that new. Long before that, a site appeared on the web with a simple idea and a great domain name: classmates.com. The difference from the actual networks was is they actually charged money for their services and it was a very sucesfull site. Well... why was :) It is still very sucessfull and actually buys lots of advertising meaning it is profitable for them to advertise. In 2002 I was discussing with one friend a possibility to open a social network in a country that wasn't covered by classmates.com and we came upon a $1,5 Millions in advertising expences per country to gain enough momentum to become widely used. Unfortunate for us we couldn't get more then $750k together and we don't have a lot of venture funds nearby (3 in europe). Well it surely sucks doesn't feel great to know about the next big coming and watch it happen, but i got used to the fact that after 10 years in web I am better at predicting things and developing projects rather then pitching VCs and that's not the point of my post ) The point is that there are lots of companies that actually have the money and each of them wants an own social network. The calculation is simple who owns the means of communication, that owns the traffic that is then distributed to all the other projects. Let's leave alone Google with it's entry point strategy and huge media support making it near to impossible for any other search engine to establish itself regardless of the technology used. So what we are seeing now is that finding and contacting people gets tricky as they spread between social networks.

Why the hell do people use social networks?
An easy question for social network addicts is a hard thing for internet professionals. Exchanging photos and arranging meetings is great but it could be easily done via e-mail or IM. The thing all of the big companies missed in the battle over the best e-mail with the hugest mailbox size is actually that people don't know the e-mails of each other. Search engines meant to find people didn't establish and couldn't fullfill a basic need as it is impossible to advertise them - people rearly come back and don't bring the money spent on ads back. Right now Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are desperatelly searching for a way to gain control over the contacts that previusly lived in theirs hotmails, y-mails and gmails while the solution is just in their hands.

What's next
As the number of social networks will grow more people will be trying to "break free" and that's exactly what Facebook and others don't want. Well... GMail is really better then facebook's internal crappy messaging system and other companies like ZenBe roll out great solutions too. I won't even write about the usability of the home of thousends ugly pages where i spend 2 hours once a month (it is in my ToDo calender) trying to understand what people are doing there and keep up with the web. Last week Google, MySpace and Facebook all rolled out some solutions named simular to "DataPortability" and making exactly the other thing - send your visitors our way to login (or sign up) and you could have a fancy iframe on your site. Thanks for a generous offer, but i humbly reject ;) Many newspapers and blogs are atacking social networks to open the data and talking about it's the only way for survival however opening data is a straight way to the grave. This time social networks just made a move that's not too sweet for web developers, they have to roll out something better.

Will the "walled gardens" survive?
I guarantee not :) It's a del.ico.us piece of cake lots of companies and web-developers including me want to cost and work hard to make it happen. And we will ) Leading to a decentralised social web. Whoever loses, users win.

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