Social Networks: What's Next?

In communicating with domestic Internet workers, you note that the dominant ideology of development of the Russian-language Internet is borrowing. Indeed, successful domestic projects are tracing-paper of Western projects. There is every reason for this, including something as exotic as the absence of a national school of IT philosophy { I hope you did not take it pathetically? :) }.

Nevertheless, some attempts to look into the future of the development of network services are simply necessary. At least for the purpose of their own development. And this article is devoted to some considerations regarding the possible development of social networks.

Today, most social networks are based on a one-dimensional conceptual grid, in which [labels] (tags [tags]) are used to label an entity. Socialization of a social network object is carried out by selecting the appropriate label. At the same time, objects that correlate themselves with the same conceptual fields form social groups. { I understand, it is abstrusely said - but we are not talking about a specific project, but are trying to abstract. }
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With all possible uses of tags, their system can be arbitrarily complex, but it remains one-dimensional. It can be assumed that the further development of socialization tools will follow the path of overcoming this one-dimensionality. This is supported by the general development of network services, which over time offers the user more and more flexible tools that more accurately describe his preferences, tastes, and views. Once logged into a user profile, they allow him to make less effort to find and use what he wants in the network and in the real world.

On the other hand, from the point of view of companies earning money on the user, the same pattern is true: the more accurate and exhaustive the user profile, the lower the costs of its maintenance. So, we see a two-way trend aimed (in general terms) to reduce communication efforts.

Then we enter the field of even more vague conjectures, wondering: how will the current unidimension be overcome?
One option — in my opinion preferable — is the imposition of an emotional grid over the conceptual grid.

Imagine that each entity is marked not only from the point of view of a concept (ie, reason, reason), but also from the point of view of emotion.
The emotional sphere, of course, is more ambiguous than the conceptual one. Due to the fact that for different people the same emotional concept may not coincide.

In order to level this ambiguity, it is possible to divide the entire field of emotional marks by the psychological profiles of a person, for example, by temperament. As a result, we get that, for example, the emotion “joy” of the profile “sanguine” will be perceived approximately equally by all sanguine people, but will differ from the emotion “joy” of the profile “choleric”.

The imposition of such a system of emotional labels on a social network on top of concept labels will allow a more exhaustive description of the user profile, gives room for new combinations of searching for suitable communities. And in the end, it promises savings in efforts to find the desired, taking into account new criteria.

Also, such profile refinement can be used for business purposes. And how viable this idea can be seen with some patience in the future.

So how are you ?