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Facebook, MySpace and Friendster took the web by storm because they filled a gap in how people wanted to interact over the web.
The internet lacks a generalized way to convey relationships between people and can not easily help people connect with each other.
This lack is what gave rise to social networks in the first place, but while the networks continue to exist, we've outgrown the limitations of closed platforms.
Facebook is a black hole and every time you post something, your data disappears over the event horizon.
What happens when the next Facebook comes along? How will you migrate your data? Facebook offers no export options -- you, and your data, are bound up with the services and limitations of Facebook.
In order to overcome this and other limitations, you'll have to create your own platform.
In the old days this meant learning some programming languages, but today, with tools like Wordpress or Movable Type that's no longer necessary. And while Wordpress and MT may have started as blogging tools, they're much more than that now.
Wordpress especially, with its massive community of plug-in developers is perfectly suited to rolling your own social networking platform capable of storing your entire online existance in one place -- just like your Facebook page.
Even Facebook recognizes that this all-in-one Platform is its strength, which is why they too have created a platform. And while the blogosphere may gush over the new Facebook platform, all it really does is pull in data from other services, where other services offer an Application Programming Interface, Facebook created an Application Programming Vortex -- data can be pushed in, but nothing ever gets pulled out.
Since 90 percent of the new little widgets for Facebook draw data that is already out there on the web, why tie your all-in-one place platform to Facebook when you can build your own and control your data forever regardless of what the next big thing is?
Phase two of social networking is here, the DIY solution has arrived. Here's how to roll your own.
First off you'll need a domain name, then you need some sort of content management service -- Wordpress is a great choice for its extendability. And while web hosting isn't necessarily free, it's pretty cheap and there's even a number of hosts that offer Wordpress pre-installed.
Let's look at Facebook's main feature set. There's the "wall," which is essentially a blog/comments thread folded into one confusing list. No need to fret here, the blogging capabilities and builtin comment system of Wordpress more than cover your bases here.
So now you have your own domain and anyone can see your content even if they still believe Facebook is actually a book with pictures of incoming freshmen.
Want to know what your friends are up to? The wildly popular Upcoming event notification service has a dead simple code generator that will create a "Badge" listing all your public events as well as those from any groups you belong to (groups on Upcoming are the equivalent of networks on Facebook).
Then there's Twitter, the micro-blogging and status update service for keeping track of what your friends are doing right now. Twitter also offers badges and widgets for displaying your twitters to the non-twittering world, or pulling in those from your friends so you can keep track of them.
There are also a number of third party apps which use the Twitter API to offer more options. There's even a ready-to-go plugin for Wordpress.
Need somewhere to store your photos? Flickr, Picasa, Zooomr and more offer all Facebook's photo functionality and loads more.
Not only can you retrieve your images from these services and display them anywhere you want, in the process of uploading and sharing them with the local site community you just might make even more friends.
And there are far more web service outside Facebook than in. Share links on your site with del.icio.us or ma.gnolia, list your music at iLike or Last.fm and post about your favorite book at Shelfari or LibraryThing -- all of these services offer cut-n-paste simple ways to draw data out and display it on your new, customized network page.
So far so good. We've replicated most of the features of Facebook without getting sucked into the black hole, but what about the concept of "friends" and "networks"? What can you do until the magic formula arrives?
Well here's where it gets a bit tricky. The internet lacks a generalized way to convey relationships between people. This absence is what gave rise to social networks in the first place, but while the networks continue to exist, we've outgrown the limitations
Microformats define ways of creating links to define the relationship between the linker and the linkee, but while these convey the information they don't provide any way to utilize the information. The also require hand-coding any changes and updates.
Which is why we'd like to propose a humble idea, the next big leap in social connectivity is going to be an open, free way of defining and connecting with people that isn't locked inside a particular domain or service.
Think of it as a language or structural way to link individuals sites along friendship lines, a way of defining micro networks within the larger network of the the web.
Ideally this micro-network, or microwork, would be open and discoverable there would be ways of defining multi-tiered relationship and creating links between individuals and their sites.
Already a new crop of social networking services have sprung up to allow you to create a custom social network for any topic. These services offer the option of hosting your network, but some also allow you to host it yourself on your own server.
Here's how you can go about replicating nearly all the features of Facebook, without getting a poke in the eye.
There are a number of canned DIY social network services available -- Ning, vibEngine and PeopleAggregator are three of the more successful.
Ning, which was founded by Marc Andreessen of Netscape comes the closest to an open DIY network, but it still requires others to actively join in networks you've created rather than automating the discovery process.
Ning, while it offers many advantages over Facebook or MySpace, still isn't a truly open solution.
That's the future, but what about right now? Want to shed the chains of Facebook and MySpace right now, but still keep your social networks in tack? It's possible, but it might take a little work.
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