Yep, you heard that right: 2009 could be a year of MetaSocNets. That is to say meta-social networks, services that give you access to all of your social networks in one place, a bit like the way that Adium will give you access to all of your IM accounts in one package.
And it could be a very good thing indeed. Although not if Facebook has anything to do with it, seeing as it has started the year with a law suit against Power.com.
Users of Power.com can stil access Hi5, Orkut, MySpace, YouTube, MSN and other social networks, but no longer Facebook.
It seems a bit mean, given that Facebook Connect is all about letting you access other web sites and serivces while remaining within the comfortable grip of your Facebook log-in…
That’s hard cheese for Power.com but as Alan Patrick at Broadstuff observes, this could well just be the beginning:
I await with interest the surfeit of MetaSocNets that will now predictably emerge in 2009, but without making Power.com’s main error of having an office in the US – fighting the lawsuit in their native Brazil would have been far more entertaining.
Now, I’m no Facebook hater. I like that Facebook is there giving so many people their first taste of the power of the social web, spreading the seeds of social media literacy, as it were.
The fact that so many of my friends and family use it have also prompted me to make an almost-resolution to use it more this year. Social media snobbery aside, it’s the best thing online for doing that because that’s where those people are.
But open, as we know, beats closed…
Good luck, then, to the rising tide of MetaSocNets, the FriendFeeds, the aggregators and the filters… we need things to make things simpler and to provide easy exits (and entries) into platforms like Facebook. The more bits of the social web work as walled gardens, the more potential good things with wither and fade away.
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