jr conlin's ink stained banana

This post has been rewritten more than anything i think i've ever done.

It went from several pages of blathering rant, to just this. Four people on the planet will care about this, but it's one helluva annoying itch that DEMANDS SCRATCHING NOW!

Groups are peers, fans of a band, neighbors, students, folks waiting for a bus, you name it. Social networks are basically group meet-ups. Folks want to socialize or be part of some group and if that group happens to be on RandomSite, you'll probably get an account on RandomSite. Personal pages exist as a side effect of that (as well as attempts to get laid, but we'll skip that for now). There's precious little loyalty to one social site than any other, except for the fact that folks will go where their friends are (or where they think they can get laid).

It's certainly possible to load up either the group or personal page with tons of useless crap. In Office Space, that was called "flair", and much like said movie, will probably not be heavily used once it goes up. One can establish one's self as "Pirate or Ninja" only so many times. Groups may add elements of flair because they're distractions from either the focus of the group, or (in a few instances) they actually do aide the group, but those tend to be exceedingly rare.

Where a great many social sites fail (and do so gloriously) is that they don't provide groups the ability to communicate any better than what already exists. In many cases, what does exist is worse than what folks are used to using. This explains why the top "applications" tend to be things like bulletin board "apps". That's also why folks aren't abandoning blogs, forums or other existing services in favor of living life on MySpace or Facebook. They're just supplementing them. If someone were to show them a way to do what they want in a much easier or faster way, they're fairly likely to move, held back only by any other group that may also be using said source.

This is why there are hundreds of "social networks" out there, and why new ones are popping up all the time for things from cooking, to education, to getting laid.

Now, as for the OpenSocial thing? Ok, so they got a bunch of sites to agree to a common API structure. Chances are pretty good that it wasn't really a hard sell since most social networks have the same basic data set and issues (see above). Yes, lots of companies that sell "flair" will be happy about this. They get lots of pages that have links back to whatever service they're offering. Yeah, a bunch of social network sites will also be fairly happy about this, particularly when they think that they can fire the two or three guys that were working on solving the API thing (bad idea, but hey). Is it earth shattering? Well, no. Not really.

None of this will actually solve the problems that folks are having, and what draws them to sites like this to begin with (or get them laid).