I became interested in online social networking systems because I love traveling, but hate staying in hotels. To me, they seem boring, wasteful, sterile, and isolating. Thankfully, although I travel a lot, I am only very rarely forced to stay in them. Instead, I use a hospitality exchange service called CouchSurfing.com (CS) to find accommodation with local residents in the areas I visit. This may sound a bit strange at first, but let me briefly explain how this works.

I registered an account with CS in 2004 and submitted a bunch of personal information including my age, sex, occupation, my Skype and chat IDs, links to my websites and photo galleries, etc. It isn't mandatory to provide so much info, but when thinking about opening your home to a stranger, it all seems very pertinent to the decision. If you really wanted to do a thorough background check on potential hosts/guests, think about all the information (that isn't covered above) which might prove useful. Still, many CS users' profiles even lack a facial photo. This represents a particularly egregious omission in the world of online social networking, particularly within a system like CS that is entirely predicated on face-to-face meetings in the “real world”. However, around 200,000 people worldwide have well developed profiles and access the system on a regular basis. So, whenever I'm planning a trip somewhere, I search the database for interesting and trusted people in that specific locality and ask if they might be able to host me at their place during a certain period of time. Though we are formally strangers to one another, we have an initial trust base from which to build on because reliable third parties within the system have attested to our status as good guests/hosts. Since this trust mechanism relies on accumulated reciprocity and reputation, I do my best to be a good guest wherever I go and an excellent host to travelers staying at my home.

CouchSurfing has so profoundly changed the way I travel (and live) that I felt compelled to explore further online networking technologies and their social impacts. By now, most of you have heard enough about MySpace and Facebook... you probably even remember Friendster. Exciting as they may be, I won't rehash their respective controversies and business fortunes. Instead, I want to emphasize that they should be viewed as much more than an anomaly of US youth culture. They represent a fast growing global phenomenon with extremely important social and economic effects. You may not have heard of the dominant online social networking systems in non-Western countries, like Mixi in Japan or CyWorld in South Korea. The latter has the largest national coverage of any system (over 90% of 18-35 year olds have accounts) and has recently attempted forays into the American market. Hundreds of online social networking communities with distinct user populations and sets of functionalities now exist, but these are overlapping more and more each day. While there will always be some holdouts, these networks will reach saturation among young people in the developed world sometime in the very near future.

However, there are looming problems with balkanization along linguistic, national, and interest lines. Most of my American friends are members of either Facebook, Myspace, or both. Most of my Indian friends are members of Orkut, a social networking service owned by Google that now draws most of its membership from India and Brazil. Other people I know primarily use networks that are oriented towards particular lifestyles and “real world” functionalities, like LinkedIn for business networking or LastFM for audiophiles. Like them, I choose to really only use CS because it fits my lifestyle best and offers me pragmatic value like savings on accommodation and meeting really interesting fellow travelers. These are services that the more generic “friend management” systems like MySpace cannot fulfill, but if I was more stationary and intent on keeping up with the hundreds of friends I have accumulated over my lifetime, they might very well better suit my needs. This doesn’t mean I don’t keep shallow profiles on these other services so that I can try them out and allow other people to find me through them. However, they don’t have much allure to me mostly because I don’t much “believe” in their vision. As I got to know the people and processes behind CS better by volunteering and researching their organization, I began to see them as a admirable social entrepreneurship venture. They are different from the others not just in bridging the real/virtual divide, but because of their organizational form. It certainly isn’t perfect, but they are trying to be member-driven, non-profit community that sees itself as providing this service as a way to improve the world.

I just cannot bring myself to embrace a bunch of different networks with their attendant bureaucracies and business models. Moreover, if I give in to the desire to have a digital presence everywhere, I subject myself to the process of registering an account, building a profile, and maintaining contacts in each new network I join. This would involve a lot of time, redundant effort, and crossover costs associated with learning different sites' designs. I’m sure many other “network loyalists” like me sometimes wish it were possible to simply export my data from their main networks to all the other networks, but since they all use such different data structures, it would take colossal redesign agreements to make more than any two compatible with each other. Contrary to popular belief, most application programming interfaces (APIs), like the one Facebook recently released won’t be designed to serve this purpose. This also means that new the aggregator applications like Ziki or SocialURL will never amount to much more than link dumps for an individuals' profiles on different networks. There is a large gap between this activity and an actual aggregation of digital identity, which I think will be closer to OpenID - a service that provides a more powerful means to manage one's identity online.

Commentators have proposed that 2007 may be a weed out year for the ever expanding ecosystem of social network sites. Although consolidation of the online social networking landscape may indeed be in the cards, I think traditional market mechanisms of buyouts or die offs will play a very small role. One network will not be so successful that it eclipses all its competitors. Instead of a winner-take-all outcome, I predict the emergence of an entirely different framework. There is a paradigm shift looming, one I often refer to as “open source social networking”, or a “SocioNexus.” It will not look or behave anything like existing social networking sites. In fact, I don't think it will really be a “site” with discrete functionalities at all, but a set of distributed mechanisms individuals can use to create, store, and control access to their personal data. In a few years, most people won't be logging into bounded social networking sites with different passwords and limited personas. They will still be using a multitude of social networking applications like today, but the data used to drive them will be pulled from their own central resource of personal information that they are responsible for managing and control access to instead of from a bunch of services’ databases. Why?

It partly has to do with the nature of the technology that they will utilize. Bigger social networks can deliver more complex information services than smaller ones, but growing to truly massive sizes requires a high level of data standardization. Ever since the inception of the Internet, there has been a push to standardize its protocols. While this may seem at odds with the observed tendency towards innovation and diversification of online content, greater consistency of information remains a core goal that continues to exert ideological and institutional pressure. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the leading advocate of Internet standards (and the folks that brought us the long-standing common html format for web pages), develops and promotes consistent protocols for presenting information on the Internet. This is key to the emergence of the next generation of social networking applications because it will allow complex data to be interpreted by computers without human help. The ability of machines to “read”, or make sense of human directives and reference information without the aid of abstract programming languages is referred to as “Web 3.0” or “the semantic web.” The family of technologies that can make this happen (RDF, OWL, SPARQL) are now in the final stages of development and approval by the W3C. However, even without invoking these advanced technologies, it should be simple enough to state that different services cannot understand each other’s data unless they standardize the vocabulary they use use to describe it. On the Internet, a rose by any other name means next to nothing.

Still, it partly also has to do with the nature of the information involved. Businesses generally have an interest in breeding exclusive and non-congruent information frameworks, which essentially is a deal breaker for any kind of open source social networking project? Moreover, they would have to brave huge liability risks in the event of leakage or theft of personal data. Because the intensive personal data stored within it will likely be very sensitive, it is highly unlikely that users will trust it to any larger entity without some kind of tight oversight. The level of opposition to large corporate holding of sensitive information varies from place to place, but has been shown to be especially strong in Europe, where the German government has been quite hard on Google’s search history features during past months. Governments themselves are certainly not immune from these problems either, though they have been faster to undertake more ambitious efforts in the name of international justice and health issues. Still, these collection efforts still worry most people when they hear of them, both because they don't like the idea of the state knowing so much about them and because they think (with good justification considering recent stories of massive data leak) that they cannot fully protect their data from falling into the wrong hands. Thus, not only will the framework and the data likely be non-proprietary, but non-governmental as well.

Without a doubt though, businesses and governments will still be especially interested in using it. However, it is my hope that they will have to buy the right to access it. The idea of individuals controlling their personal information is very different from how companies that provide online services today own, control, and sell their users' demographic and behavioral tracking data at will and without remuneration. No one wants their personal information forcibly or covertly collected, but most of us actually assent to this whenever we register on a new site. I believe there is a viable alternative to a future in which we are unknowingly tracked and manipulated whenever we surf the web or pass within range of a radio frequency tag. Instead of our attention, attitudes, and behaviors being tracked by some third party and sold to interested businesses, we can do most of that ourselves; to the extent that we wish to participate in such activities. Currently, the vast majority of overt data gathering efforts, from phone surveys to customer feedback forms to national censuses, yield no real compensation to participants. Moreover, they’re incredibly boring. I've written and administered enough surveys in my time to realize that people generally hate these processes. It doesn’t have to be this way - online data gathering efforts could be a lot more entertaining and useful if we put more thought into the methods and presentation. So much is now possible just by using Flash technologies, from simple little games to complex multimedia adventures.

Still, some argue that no one ever really wants to take a survey, no matter the format. I ask them to take a look at some MySpace pages and marvel at young people's enthusiasm for publicly displaying their survey results via the kitschy backgrounds designers provide them. I argue that if surveys (or anything else) are made into a game, people (especially young people) will play them. This isn’t the same as the “educational” software that many critics rail against ineffectual, because they are inherently social. It seems sometimes surveys, like interviews, help us learn more about ourselves. People desire interesting presentation mediums to help share these insights with others. Marketers fielding such surveys have an interest in allowing them to accumulate this data (especially in addition to their personal information) because it will help them to deliver better targeted advertisements and promotions in the future. This benefits users too because when ads are developed for and delivered to the particular groups of people most likely to purchase a product, they are usually far less annoying than those that are delivered indiscriminately. Moreover, users should receive monetary compensation for their attention to these online ads because they assume much more potential value with these additional demographic and behavioral data attached. Reshaping the advertising landscape in this way stands to really empower the individuals and reign in the increasingly ubiquitous power of those who deliver media to assail our attention everywhere in our world.

These data gathering and aggregation improvements will undoubtedly yield huge amounts of data on individuals around the world. I cannot wait for the day when I can search the majority of humanity for a certain kind of person, skill, experience, good, service, or a combination of them. Some folks within CS like to talk about a future in which people no longer just look for places to stay when traveling, but learning experiences and personal growth. This may seem murky, but consider it in the context of resource sharing in general. Using someone's spare bedroom instead of getting a hotel room reduces the demand for hotel rooms in a city. Being able to borrow someone's bicycle in the city makes it less likely that you will need to rent a car in order to get around. Learning some yoga from an amateur enthusiast instead of a certified instructor may seem less professional, but it is certainly cheaper and perhaps less intimidating. Remember, this will all happen under the umbrella of well developed trust mechanisms within a social networking system like CS. Better information about the world around us allows for the discovery of possibilities that before were not even perceptible. It also allows us to make more informed and efficient decisions in our day to day existence. Think about how much time young Americans spend driving around in cars fairly aimlessly just looking for things to do. It will allow people to navigate the world in new ways and alter the way they are able to envision and shape their lives. When we combine data about individuals with the resources we already have concerning knowledge and commerce, the possibilities explode.

For social scientists like me, the scope and depth of its data will be unprecedented. It will quickly outstrip that of national censuses. This is because our constant utilization of it and contribution to it will yield a constant stream of data (lifestreaming) that is incredibly longitudinal and lends itself to all kinds of causal analyses researchers can only dream of now. It will become the most important source of data on individuals and social trends. Behaviors made possible by this new technology will entirely alter the nature of the debate on privacy and spawn changes in the legal system. However, the effects will certainly be bidirectional - network processes will also be guided by new laws and social norms created through these changes. I hope the framework under which necessary changes are made will be shaped by the open source emphasis on remaining non-profit, independent, self-maintaining, and self-evolving. Still, the path from here to there is still quite unclear. Despite the huge amounts of press coverage over the last year dedicated to publicizing different aspects of the most popular online social networking systems, there is still a lack of meaningful discussion about the future direction of this medium. Most of what does exist is found on the blogs of people who study this phenomena or run businesses involving them, which are relatively obscure and difficult to find if you don't know where to start looking. The point I'm trying to make herein is these developments are imminent and that we should start focusing more attention on the possible implications, both good and bad. There will certainly be downsides and dangers to this technology as well. We should not allow the technical aspects of these issues to overshadow its potential social consequences.

Now, what of the fate of the networks to which we now belong? Does this mean that all the different social networking sites existing today will simply fold at the arrival of the SocioNexus? Will the manifestation of a more consistent information architecture for social networking be all it takes to supersede earlier tribal models? Not necessarily. Some of the services they offer are complex, useful, and may not be easily duplicated under this framework, at least at first. We should expect users of the old networks will cling to them so long as their needs are still best served there. However, it does likely mean that they will increasingly cease to be “online communities” in the sense that users see them as a bounded and protected social space shared only among “members”. This seems sad, but it won't destroy most users’ worlds, since they were never really uniquely digital social spaces. Individuals mostly just modeled their “real world” social networks digitally. People with huge social networks online are often looking to project their popularity or connectivity, but really only maintain a small fraction of those links on a regular basis. Even in a “real world” service like CS where users have relatively fewer total friends in the community, most represent brief ties established with geographically distant hosts and guests that are rarely well maintained, digitally or otherwise.

The SocioNexus will be neither a service nor a community per se, but a medium for the development of both. It will allow people to use a multitude of ever-changing online services more easily and effectively by structuring their personal data in a much more consistent fashion. It will allow them to build communities not bounded by these services and their attendant corporate brand loyalty strategies, most often aimed at keeping them sequestered in specific domains for as long as possible. The critique commonly leveled against this idea is that internet is too overwhelmingly expansive, that we need these services to subdivide social spaces and make navigation simpler. I argue that the new nature of data online makes it possible for a very big network look, feel, and behave like a smaller network. However, scalability only works in this direction – small networks simply cannot offer more with less. Information and the ability to search it generally becomes far more robust (accurate and efficient) the larger it becomes, but only it utilizes standardized and accessible querying protocols. If a centralized data storage mechanism for humanity did exist, how would individuals manage and protect their stored data - determining who can access what and when. Would everyone need their own unique domain or subdomain name with common extensions like .bio denoting space exclusively reserved for information about real, live human individuals? Could all their data just be behind the scenes on traditional web pages (using html) using microformats and the W3C technologies I referenced earlier? Under such a framework, what kind of expertise would an individual need to construct and protect their data? Could federated (distributed) searches of decentralized web pages ever hope to match the efficiency of the more centralized indexes of a big social networking site? I do not know. I am not a technologist, thus I cannot claim any credentials to make such predictions. However, I am quite confident that this is the direction we are moving.

Still, within all these technically murky areas, the very critical area of verifying identity and establishing trust mechanisms is now perhaps one of the clearest. I think it can best help us see the possibilities for this kind of technology in the very near future. Recent advances in Internet identity technology have given us the OpenID protocol and its sister project, ClaimID. They function together to allow individuals to assert their unique identity online and make ownership claims on particular web content to establish credibility. OpenID doesn't just allow us to use the same login and password protocol for different sites. It also provides a decentralized means for individuals to be able to verify each other's identities. That means they won't need to be reliant on larger services to do this for them. Also, it may allow individuals to share their data across websites, if both accept the OpenID protocol, which a fast growing number of sites do. So, if I want to import my friends' chat IDs from CouchSurfing to another social networking service, I may finally be able to execute an automated mechanism to do this task. So, just as we can share data between websites, we should be able to share it with other individuals as well. The depth of the data we could potentially share will allow trust to be fostered outside the big social networking systems. Still, if on Facebook I know that someone is a “friend” of someone else we know, that is not really a good enough reason to trust that third party very far in the real world. However, if we know more detailed information about the nature and duration of their relationship, trust can be more easily cemented. This is easier to accomplish with decentralized mechanisms that allow us to look at personal data across networks. Anyhow, I encourage you to look into these services today, because their marketing budgets aren’t big enough to receive mention in too many places outside hard core tech enthusiast sites.

To summarize, the basic idea is for people to be able to submit their data online in many ways, have it stored in consistent and secure formats that that can be accessed and compared with a colossal amount of other people's data, yet allow many different display and application options. One will “own” their identity by determining what data they submit and who can access which parts of it. So, one might want to list their email address, but only allow other certain kinds of individuals within their trust circle to see it. Moreover, potential employers visiting your site would get access to very different pieces of information under very different presentation formats than would potential dating partners. Again, if it indeed does become the most important central repository for personal information on the web, it will also become the foundation for the next generation of integrated social networking tools. Programs will be written to parse all this human data and display its patterns in meaningful ways that help us better understand social, economic, and political patterns relevant to our lives. These calculations will take into account a huge number of human data factors found within particular population parameters. They will help weigh us weigh different choices and make intelligent recommendations based on what we have learned about our own behavior as well as that of others. This will vastly enhance our ability to navigate the world when we shop, date, travel, work, volunteer, communicate, and generally share our resources and knowledge about the world. The richness of the information when uniformity, intense data collection, and massive population coverage coalesce will yield possibilities that we cannot even currently imagine.