Creating The Uber Social Network

Steve Bennett
Posted by Steve Bennett July 19, 2009

I am currently working on developing new media strategies with a number of organisations. For a couple of them we are trying to create a single online conversation with the customer – combining Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, ning, forums and a hundred other social networks. The aim is to create a virtual ‘über’ social network so that all of the individuals interested in an organization can interact regardless of the specific social network they prefer to use.

An example may help to illustrate what we are looking for: I write this blog and it is syndicated to a number of other channels such as the SmartData Collective and the Business Intelligence CORTEX. Some people will comment on the blog itself using the comment link under each entry. Others may comment on the CORTEX. This is good as far as it goes but if you comment on the CORTEX and I on the SmartData Collective – we may never know of each other’s comments. This is a missed opportunity. I want to link all of the channels to each other – automatically.

This is easier said than done and is one of the core goals of the Semantic Web (also known as web 2.0). I posted a short comment what I want to do on my LinkedIn account …

I am currently working on developing new media strategies with a number of organisations. For a couple of them we are trying to create a single online conversation with the customer – combining Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, ning, forums and a hundred other social networks. The aim is to create a virtual ‘über’ social network so that all of the individuals interested in an organization can interact regardless of the specific social network they prefer to use.

An example may help to illustrate what we are looking for: I write this blog and it is syndicated to a number of other channels such as the SmartData Collective and the Business Intelligence CORTEX. Some people will comment on the blog itself using the comment link under each entry. Others may comment on the CORTEX. This is good as far as it goes but if you comment on the CORTEX and I on the SmartData Collective – we may never know of each other’s comments. This is a missed opportunity. I want to link all of the channels to each other – automatically.

This is easier said than done and is one of the core goals of the Semantic Web (also known as web 2.0). I posted a short comment what I want to do on my LinkedIn account and a couple of people (thanks to Patrick and Rajasekar) suggested the following links that I have found useful – and I add a couple of my own:
  • GizaPage – “GizaPage is a social network organizer that helps consumers and brands manage their online presence by consolidating their many social networking profiles side by side under a personalized URL.”
  • OpenSocial – “Friends are fun, but they’re only on some websites. OpenSocial helps these sites share their social data with the web. Applications that use the OpenSocial APIs can be embedded within a social network itself, or access a site’s social data from anywhere on the web.”  
  • FOAF – “an acronym of Friend of a friend is a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects. Anyone can use FOAF to describe him or herself. FOAF allows groups of people to describe social networks without the need for a centralised database.” 
  • Go2Web20.net – a web2.0 directory service, currently listing over 2,700 services. 
My investigations continue and I will blog about the results as they happen. Contact me if you have any ideas …

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