Social Networks - being social is the killer app

The New York Times makes the point regarding the lacking "social" bits of the big "Social" Networks:

But these companies have a particularly lonely vision of sociability. None of them let users actually talk to one another yet.

That’s right: When you visit a site that participates in any of the three programs announced recently, you may see pictures of your friends there. You may see comments posted by them. You may be able to push a button and transform them into a virtual plum pudding.

But at first, there will probably not be a button you can push to send the people you see on these sites an e-mail, an instant message or a message through their social network.

As we have noted before, research we did 3 years ago showed that - surprise - communication (ie some variant of chat) is the "killer app" - so why don't they do it?

The engineers are rushing to build a world that is midway between e-mail and closed social networks. They want some of the information from your profile page and some of the interactions with your friends to appear on sites around the Web. Google’s vision even includes sites that blend information and links to friends from multiple social networks on one screen.

What none of the engineers I’ve talked to at any of these companies have thought through is how the governance of these interactions will work when multiple sites, with varying norms and standards, are mashed together all over the Web. Who will decide the rules for what is spam and what is legitimate communication with a company or a person? Who will decide what constitutes abuse and how will offenders be ostracized?

In fact, the "chat" function of Social Media has been taken over by systems such as Twitter, and compared to those "microblooging" - aka Unified Comms 2.0 systems - the others' efforts pale into insignificance.

The horse, in fact, has probably bolted already. Rather than a Google SocNet I look forward to an ability to interoperate between Twitter, Skype, IM and email.

Because that's where we chat...........

Update - those people at Facebook are on the ball - after writing this last night I wake up today to find they have announced they will support a Jabber/XMPP based interface. They must've been reading Broadstuff ......