Supples’ Pub

I’m going to disagree with the wording of the title, but the spirit of the article is dead on. Social networks won’t be email based - they will be an all-encompassing service.

Today you have a social network for every need. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn…getting down to social networks which specialize on an extremely small facet of society. (Wikipedia has an interesting list here). del.icio.us specializes in social bookmarking, Flickr is photography, etc. An example of a niche social network would be Dopplr - sharing travel plans within your network so you might meet up with a buddy during a layover.

Google is working on making sure you don’t have to go anywhere but them for your web social networking experience. Almost all of their services are share-able (Calendar, Reader, Notebook, Photos). Their services are inter-linked (If I click the handy e-mail button in Reader to share a post, it now references my GMail contacts). Photos replaces Flickr - Notebook competes with del.icio.us - Reader is pretty much in a class of its own. And with the Google OpenSocial Platform, the smaller social media players may jump aboard and leave a few super powers to own the social networking landscape.

Does that mean Facebook & Myspace will disappear when the social media world is composed of Yahoo! & Google services? Not necessarily. If Facebook/Myspace/etc don’t get swallowed, if their user bases are strong enough to keep them going outside of any other unified networks, then I hope we will see the Yahoogle big boys offer easy integration to Facespace for their users. After all, if you can’t beat ‘em - join ‘em. Or at least make it easy for your users to access their favorite 2nd choice tools with your uber-platform, even if they are your competitor.

The New York Times’ Saul Hansel suggests that Yahoo! and Google are working on bringing social networking features to your email account. Think about it. What’s the first thing that happens when you sign up for Facebook? The service scans your email address book to find friends who are already members. There’s a lot of valuable information in your inbox. So it makes sense that the companies providing your email service might want to build on that information and give you a few more reasons to stick around their site all day.

Social networks of the future could be email based - Download Squad