MARK CAREY

Future of Social Networks

As posted on Tribe.net:

Those are great questions, Lars. I haven't been too active in these social networks yet myself - though I have a new year's resolution to make more of an effort to investigate the possibilities.

As a potential answer, I have recently thought about the potential for social networks as reputation systems(http://www.markcarey.com/web-dawn/archives/discuss-p2p-reputation-systems.html), that can be used for social and business interactions. For this to truely work, it seems, the system would have to be open and peer-to-peer in nature - so that any number of applications could access nad use the reputation information contained therein. Currently there are many islands - while you may build a reputation on one island, you can't take it with you to the other, even thought you are still the same person. For this reason, it seems, the ulitmate social network will be the one that is controlled by no one, and open to all.