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Social networks initially took the web by storm because they filled a gap in how people wanted to interact over the internet.
Facebook, MySpace and Friendster all essentially offer the same services: tools to keep track of your friends and ways to manage your personal data. They collect your photos, your social calendar, interests and written thoughts into one place, your own personal corner of the web.
While most web services offer an Application Programming Interface to retrieve your data, Facebook and MySpace have created an Application Programming Wormhole — your data goes in, but nothing ever gets pulled out. That also means that anyone without a Facebook account will never make it to your little corner of the internet.
And 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. So why tie all of your personal data to Facebook's little corner of the web when you can do the same without it?
Phase two of social networking is here — the roll-your-own solution has arrived.
To truly control your data from all the disparate sources — Flickr, del.icio.us, LinkedIn and the rest — ideally you'd pull it in and store it in your own database. While this requires some programming know-how, tools like <a href="http://www.djangoproject.com/">Ruby on Rails</a> or <a href="http://www.rubyonrails.org/">Django</a> have made it easier than ever to take that plunge.
Not up to speed with Ruby or Python? No need to fret, you can still carve out your own corner of the web, without resorting to Facebook. By using your own web site and freely available components that you can embed on it, you can develop your own data aggregating platform.
Before we get started it's worth asking: are we trading one big black hole for a series of smaller ones? As it turns out no, all of the services below offer some sort of way to retrieve your data, whether through an API or a bulk exporter.
The drawback to badges and widgets is that they just display your data, they don't actually save it anywhere, so if these outside services disappear will your data go with them? Yes, but it will be just a small portion of your overall web existence.
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"Get Hosted"
If you decide to go the hosted website route, we'd recommend <a href="http://wordpress.org/">Wordpress</a> as a content management system.
First off you'll need a domain name, then you need some sort of content management service — Wordpress is a great choice for its extendibility, fueled by its massive community of plug-in developers. 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.
Another option is to use a sharable and customizable start pages from Pageflakes or Protopage. PageFlakes will allows you to build a customized chunk of cyberspace that aggregates all your content just like Facebook, but PageFlakes also has export options.
The basics — blogging and comments
Now 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 built-in comment system of Wordpress more than cover your bases.
But Facebook's wall lacks a direct coupling between your posts and people comments. Want to offer a way for friends to stop by and leave a shout-out? No problem, there's a nice Wordpress plugin called <a href="http://pierre.sudarovich.free.fr/">Ajax Shoutbox</a>, which has you covered.
If you're going the PageFlakes route, there's a feature dubbed Message Board, which accomplishes the same thing.
"This is how I roll"
One of the key ingredients to social networking is showing off your impeccable taste. List your likes, your dislikes. Show off your new hairstyle.
Ostensibly this is point of Facebook's new Platform and its myrid of plug-and-play tools. But most of the services offering those new Facebook widgets have been offering the same to the internet at large for years, so let's grab a few.
For all those hip new sites you stumble across before your friends there's <a href="http://del.icio.us/">del.icio.us</a> or <a href="http://ma.gnolia.com/">ma.gnolia</a>, both of which offer full APIs and customizable widgets for your site.
Displaying your musical tastes via widgets from <a href="http://www.ilike.com/">iLike</a> or <a href="http://www.last.fm/">Last.fm</a> ensures your status with the hipsters hanging in front of the record store.
That cuty down at Starbucks needs to know you're the sensitive literary type — post about your favorite book at <a href="http://www.shelfari.com/">Shelfari</a> or <a href="http://www.librarything.com/">LibraryThing</a> and, yup you guessed it, pull it in with a nice little widget.
When the Starbucks cuty is finally yours, you'll want to post plenty of pics as you travel the world in bliss. <a href="http://www.flickr.com/">Flickr</a>, <a href="http://picasa.google.com/">Picasa</a>, <a href="http://www.zooomr.com/">Zooomr</a> and more offer all Facebook's photo functionality and loads more. Naturally there's a healthy dearth of widgets for displaying them on your site.
"Keep up with the crowds"
Want to know what your friends are up to? Facebook will let you know about your friend's plans and thoughts via status updates, but there's no need to login to Facebook just to see what you're friends are doing tonight.
Why not just stick that info in your RSS reader and then display it on your site, giving you two ways to stay on top of all the happenings.
The wildly popular <a href="http://upcoming.yahoo.com/">Upcoming</a> event notification service has a dead simple code generator that will create a widget 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).
You're already showing off your own Twitter activities, but the what about your friends' feeds? Twitter also offers badges and widgets for pulling in tweets from your friends.
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.
Other potential friend management tools include <a href="http://www.plaxo.com/">Plaxo</a> for contact information, <a href="http://wwwl.meebo.com/">MyBlogLog</a> for including snippets from your friend's sites and any number of RSS badges which can pull information from just about any feed source.
"Chat"
Tweets and blog shout-outs are nice, but as long as we're replacing Facebook, let's make some improvements as well, how about we add in something more immediate: live chat.
No need to switch over to another program, there's plenty of tools that let you and your friends chat right from your own site. <a href="http://wwwl.meebo.com/">Meebo</a> offers an embeddable widget for chatting, but no need to stop there — <a href="http://jaxtr.com/user/index.jsp">Jaxtr</a> does the same for SMS and <a href="http://skype.com/">Skype</a> offers a button for one-click calling straight from your page.
"Read All About It"
You'll never have anything to talk about if you aren't up on what's happening. Thankfully, you can pull in headlines from all of your favorite services — <a href="http://digg.com/">Digg</a>, <a href="http://reddit.com/">Reddit</a>, Netscape, or any news site and keep you and your friends informed.
"Giving it away"
What if someone else wants to subscribe to your feed? No problem for individual sections, i.e links, photos etc, just point your friends to the feed source (check with the services you're using to find out where that is).
To create an everything in one place feed like Facebook offers, just create an account at one of the many feed re-mixing site — <a href="http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/">Yahoo Pipes</a>, <a href="http://feedshake.com/feedshakev1/login.fs">FeedShake</a> or <a href="http://feedblendr.com/">FeedBlendr</a> will all get the job done. Just plug-in all the feeds from your various sources and then cut-and-paste the resulting URL into your site — viola.
"Make connections"
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"?
Well here's where it gets a bit tricky. We can pull in info from friends, but we don't have an easy way to manage friends or to define the relationship between our site and theirs.
Friend relationships are unique to social networks — the web still lacks a generalized way to convey relationships between people. This absence is what gave rise to social networks in the first place, and while we've outgrown the limitations of social site, no one has stepped forward with an open solution to managing your friends on internet at large.
One possibility is the microformat <a href="http://www.gmpg.org/xfn/">XHTML Friends Network</a> (XFN) which provides ways of defining the relationship between the linker and the linkee, but while these convey the information they don't provide any way to utilize the information.
Some developers are beginning to offer easy-to-use tools which can create XFN code (Wordpress and Movable type both offer templating solutions), but use of XFN isn't yet widespread enough and doesn't offer any tools for managing friends.
Which is why we'd like to propose a humble idea, the next big leap in social connectivity is going to be an open standard for defining and connecting with people on the internet.
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 and managing multi- tiered relationship and creating links between individuals and their sites.
It may sound daunting or even impossible, but nearly all the tools we've mentioned so far started small. Movable Type was a few people trying to publish on a daily basis, del.icio.us started with one person looking for a way to manage his bookmarks and even Facebook started with a few friends trying to keep in touch. Eventually an open network will emerge.
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