Breaking out of the Walled Garden

Here's an excerpt from a comment regarding a previous post:

"Jon, I want to hear why you so strongly believe the same thing that has happened with IM and Gaim won't happen with SN and Always-On...If the Gaim analogy fits, it seems to me that Friendster and other networks will try to resist integration at first [with something like Always-On], but once a big player gets complacent or cooperative, there'll be no turning back from open integration. Occasionally there'll be integration problems with the closed networks, but they'll be quickly addressed. And it will be massively popular"

I think the paradigm question is an important one -- what historical frameworks might be most instructive when trying to plot the future of social networking technology?  IM might be appropriate because it's a web technology marked by proprietary networks.  But perhaps still evolving.  Let's examine an even wider paradigm than instant messaging alone -- what can we learn from comparing today's social networking platforms to the early days of all internet content? 

Remember (and I'm speaking figuratively here to some extent -- I was born in 1984) that the 'net back then was characterized by 'islands' of content.  Users dialed into isolated BBS systems, and later into 'online services' such as Prodigy, Compuserve and AOL.  Online services empowered users with much more than mere tools for browsing content: they generated and acquired proprietary content themselves.  So back then, AOL drew its competitive advantage from the quality of its (entirely exclusive) content at least as much as the applications used to access that content.  Since then, AOL has long ago opened access to the public 'web and even chipped away at the boundaries of its 'walled garden' of exclusive content.

It seems increasingly clear to me that social networking profiles are destined to share a similarly ubiquitous space one day.  Not cobbled together from overlapping databases: unified and distributed, like e-mail or web content is today.  This would yield a larger and richer -- and exponentially more powerful -- network than individual providers could accomplish by proprietary means.  This could be based upon new technology or some descendant of FOAF, although using FOAF for this as the spec stands today might be too computationally difficult.

Social networking platforms would, as other web technologies are today, be differentiated by features and security rather than proprietary content.  LinkedIN could still focus on professional relationship management, for example, and HotOrNot could focus on personal ones.  Access controls could manage who else is able to see my e-mail address as well as my pictures from spring break.

But that's all in the medium to long-term.  Today, we remain faced with overlapping but proprietary social networking platforms who value their private information dearly.  So smart platforms may well respond to serious competitive threats, as Charlene Li suggests, by leveraging profiles as "distribution currency" and sharing network data amongst themselves (this may even establish a de-facto standard).  But I'd be very surprised if they were willing to abdicate control over users' interface to profile information,  because that will be their primary source of competitive advantage once the profile space opens up.  AlwaysOn's strategy would demand just that.