Participation in a social network is not an account in LJ or MySpace. The real social connections of an ordinary Internet resident extend beyond any single blog hosting. Each person is a small knot of a social network in which threads of different communities in which it consists converge.
But the current organization of social networks does not imply convenient means of going beyond them. Even developed blog-hosting, uniting a large number of users and providing ample opportunities to create groups of interests, limit their users within themselves.
And I do not want so.
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If I have friends and fellow interests in LJ, on Habré and on the same conditional MySpace, I want to communicate freely with them, on the spot. I do not want to do cross-posts on different platforms and RSS-aggregators to collect fresh posts from the tapes of different communities.
I want to go to my blog - and maybe not even a blog at all, but simply to my personal online space - and see everything that happens in the communities of interest to me and to people who are interesting to me. I want one button and in one interface to post comments in any community of any blog host, in which it is registered. And I also want to register in them without leaving my seat. And no matter what the place is - LJ accounting, standalone blog, or just a homepage on the People.
I want to be able to build my own place on the net, which I don’t know what to call it, from bricks, each of which allows me to share information with any person or community. And since I am not a programmer, it should be no more difficult for me to build this place than a cubic house for a child.
And this very place, built by me easily and without restrictions, and will personify me network - with all my interests, friends and foes. This is a full-fledged, not spread in the space node of the social network.
Some of the above are currently being implemented by numerous mashup-services and web-sites built on their basis. But for the time being it turns out to be rather important - it is possible to collect information from different places with a sin in half, but the reverse process is clearly lame. And without this, all these services are not far from the usual RSS-reader.
I dare to assume that all this will develop in the direction I have described - going beyond the framework of the reigning social networks today and building our own places of presence on the network using simple and convenient services, interconnected by intricate connections. And then the resulting Social Networking completely crowds out the social networks of the past generation that do not correspond to the spirit of the time and the growing needs of the users ...
... or does this Strange Thing seem natural only to me?