• 43Things
• Bebo
• Catster
• del.icio.us
• Digg
• Dodgeball
• Dogster
• Dopplr
• Facebook
• Fatfold
• Flickr
• GoodReads
• Hi5
• Jaiku
• Last.fm
• LinkedIn
• LiveJournal
• MOG
• Multiply
• MySpace
• Naymez
• Newsvine
• Ning
• Orkut
• Pandora
• Pownce
• Reddit
• SonicLiving
• StumbleUpon
• Tabblo
• TagWorld
• Technorati
• Tribe
• Twitter
• Upcoming
• Vox
• Yahoo Mesh
• YouTube
• Zooomr

You’ll have to pardon me if I missed any, but I think my point has been made. The web is FLOODED with social networking sites right now. Don’t get me wrong, I think they’ve all done wonders for the internet (especially the most grassroots of all the social mediums… the blog), but most of them fall into the same generic template:

1. Get an account
2. Fill out a profile
3. Add some friends
4. Look up an old girlfriend
5. Get sick of it and move on

They all have their individual quirks that set themselves slightly apart from the rest of the pack like videos, traveling, music (I’m listen to Pandora as I write this), bookmarking, etc., but until there’s a service that really stands out as something unique, we’ll be stuck in some sort of a social internet rut.

The industry has recently recognized users getting tired of creating profiles and signing up for every site they find with OpenID. For those of you who aren’t familiar with OpenID (I wasn’t until January of this year), it’s essentially a global login/password system. If someone makes a web site that requires a login, they can hook it up to OpenID and then the users won’t have to sign up for an account, they can just log in with their current OpenID username and password, then approve the site (try it out, its actually really nice from a user perspective). Google is using it on a few of their apps and the folks at Web Directions have used it for conference goers. I imagine it will be a topic of conversation at The Future of Web Design in London this April too along with the Mobile web, which is coming on very strong, thanks to the iPhone.

If the web really is getting more and more mobile, how will the classic model for social networking hold up? I know Facebook mobile is actually a little better than the version currently available for the desktop web.

This brings me to the actual point I sat down to write tonight… the future of social networking, not sure how I got sidetracked to OpenID, but no matter. I can’t for the life of me remember who said this… I think it was either Jeffery Zeldman or John Allsopp, whomever it was… they said that the future of social networking was in the mini-blogging applications like Twitter, and if you follow Jeffery on Twitter, you can tell he must really believe it. Apparently 2008 is supposed to be the year Twitter really explodes onto the market (more so than it has already). I don’t use it that often, maybe a few times a week (my Twitter account). I signed up while Twitter was in it’s infancy but have only really used it recently. They’ve really jumped into the mobile market with multple options for posting like IM, text message or right from the web. It’s very simple, and I know everyone knows that already (anyone who is reading this atleast). My point is that this is not just another bland social networking site. Yes, it has a lot of the same features, but the main feature, the mini-blogging is the direction social networking appears to be headed once everyone finally gets sick of Facebook, as they did with MySpace, it’ll be Twitter’s turn to really shine. Heck, maybe they’ll even integrate OpenID… that’d be a hoot.

Places like Twitter, Pownce and ::ahem:: Fatfold should really have a strong showing this year, if they can get to the public, that is.

my2cents

any thoughts?

with ease,
Tim

Call it being stuck inside the box, or whatever, but I see a lot of designers clinging onto the concept that the web should look like something tangible (book, magazine, dog, etc.). While the its considered pretty young…around 21 years old… I think the web has been around long enough and created such a great presence for itself that it can be separated from aspects of the physical world. Of course, this don’t concern most website out there, but who said that nytimes.com has to look like a digital news paper. I understand the branding issues that come with making an online news paper look like the paper version, but with the influx of XML/RSS, I don’t see any reason to not have fun with designing on the web.

Anyways, this is my maiden post to the blog and, in a nutshell, I think there are still far too many people not using the web to its fullest potential.
my2cents

with_ease,
Tim