As I have ranted before, many new technologies evolve from applications to protocols [1]. I have now spotted the first call for an open social network protocol [2].

Damn the Facebooks and the MySpaces. The last time we checked, there was this thing called the internet that had 6 billion users. It's time to take our personal data out of Mr. McGregor's little gardens and put it back where it belongs -- free and open on the open web.

This will, of course, happen in due course. Facebook is the old (and, I might add, extremely profitable) walled-in AOL which was eventually made largely obsolete by the Tim's open protocols: HTTP/HTML. The interesting question is how this will happen and what will the new protocols look like. We can answer these questions by using the existing centralized application (Facebook/myspace) to figure out what works and then try to iimplement that in a distributed open protocol.

My hypothesis is that the popularity of social network sites can be mostly attributed to the failure of email programs to evolve and integrate the web, chat, and mobiles. Why can't I just click on a sender's name in my email app (gmail/outlook) and go to their homepage? see their current status? Why won't it show me the conversations that my friend Tom is involved in? or the people he communicates with? (given, of course, his permission). Why don't they categorize on content, separating work, family, friends, gossip, and broadcast interactions?

I also found this slashdot discussion [3] on the article. Notice how many people erroneously assumed that an open social network protocol means that everyone can join all networks. Clearly, it does not, no more than an open HTTP/HTML protocol means that I can read all webpages.