Today I read three stories, all loosely connected which could make for interesting time for social networking in the not too distant future.

Firstly theres social stream, which seems to offer the potential for users to share their socal data to many different applications, an approach discussed at the recent FOWA conference by Yahoo and their Fireeagle application, which is also designed to share the (location based) information of a subscriber to multiple applications ...but i digress (told you so).

Social stream, suggests that the guys at Carnegi Mellon University are working towards a solution which will allow you to share social data across multiple sites, if you, like me have mulitple profiles on multiple socal networks, then this Unified Social Network as they describe it, could be a godsend. One place for all my virtual friends, for me to discuss the finer points of life with them and ......they with each other? wow. ok thats freaky...but 'super' cool.

Then there comes the news that Ibm and Linden Labs are working ona project that would allow users to share avatars across virual worlds, ok so now i can not only create my USN but i can create a persona that can literaly walk from one virtual environment to another. Socially thats impressive, economically thats opportunity, considering the value of some of this vitual property how long before the first virtual bureax de change is set up ;) virtual tour operators selling virtual holidays and renting space in other virtual networks, what next, world of warcraft tie ins, dwarfs and orcs running riot in second life...no wait ill get back to the point.

In his article social networks and groups formed Shiv Singh described (amongst other things) how, in social networks, 'isolated regions' became part of the more active middle region by nodes (users) in the group joining the larger middle region. Thus the larger middle region grows organicaly and new isolated regions are born, is this going to happen to all social social networks, ultimately will they become part of the collective, the single unified social network, web 4.0?

Then along comes Google(again), who its seems have been busy, it would appear that they have decided to out do facebook in the TechCrunch article, google to out open facebook Michael Arrington discusses how google are to open up the API to their social graph data, big deal, who uses orkut anway right? But wait, go back to the the begining, and add into the equation the work Google are doing with the social stream bods and there Unified Social Network stuff.

disclaimer, ok heres where you put on those rose tinted specs, this is the intraweb we are talking about

So now we have everyone moving across every (ok maybe not every) social site, and the API is and 100% open....with avatars. now that really is super cool and possibly a little scary, will there emerge a brave new world in cyberspace with an entirly new set of rules, a new reality and should I stop taking the Matrixtoo literally?

meh

maybe Ferris Bueller had a point I'm off to trash a ferrari, virtually of course ;)