A (slightly dated) study from Forrester Research, summarized by Jeremiah Owyang, is breaking down the evolution of social networking into 5 eras:
With the following timeline of these 5 eras:
From the executive summary:
"Today's social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit. A simple set of technologies that enable a portable identity will soon empower consumers to bring their identities with them"
Facebook Connect, in my opinion, is the definitive leader and pioneer in this move towards interoperability - the ability for web users to bring their social graphs, contexts, and content with them wherever they go.
If you run a church website, I think Facebook Connect could be very interesting to you. Imagine your church members logging into your site, posting comments about the latest sermon podcast, and having those comments (and the podcast) appear in their Facebook streams for all their friends to see.
And now with the Facebook Connect wizard (announced here), there's very little programming knowledge required to implement it. Are there any churches that have implemented FB Connect on their website?
