At the Graphing Social Patterns conference I attended on Monday, Charlene Li of Forrester Research gave a brilliant keynote where she predicted that "Social networks will be like air"
Meaning your social graph will be with you wherever you go on the web. It will be all around you. Having a web experience in the future that is not social will be a very foreign and antique concept. By "future" she meant 5-10 years out...
She was describing data portability in the sense that your social graph is portable and accessible outside of Facebook.com or Myspace.com. (and not "data portability" in the sense that you screen-scrape your contact list so that another web service can spam your friends)
Here's one example she used that I thought was pretty compelling.
There are several Facebook apps that let you post book reviews. Here's an example screenshot of Dave McClure's review of a book called The Mystery of Capital:
This is cool. But it would be really useful in the right context - when I'm browsing the bookstore for something interesting to read.
I buy books from Amazon.com. I login to Amazon with my email address. I login to Facebook with that same email address. What if Facebook shared my social graph with Amazon?
Instead of seeing reviews from random people on Amazon for a particular book. I could see what my friends thought about it. This data sharing is all technically possible and doable today. In fact, Beacon was essentially doing something similar... even without shared logins.
If you think this is too far off in the future, Mark Zuckerberg recently said:
The trend in platforms is that they aren’t going to be focused on any single site, such as www.facebook.com. We’ll be focusing on improving the platform to help developers build applications that live on other web sites, so people can use the connections they have to communicate more efficiently. An increasing number of Facebook applications live outside of Facebook.com
So... what kind of application and benefit can the church reap from all this? Where do YOU envision this going? Feel free to drop a comment, or brainstorm some ideas with me through email - joe [at] mychurch.org
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