Social Networking Inside Out

One of the major challenges in the world of Social Networking is social network fatigue: the idea that there is a relatively tight limit to the number of social networking applications in which any user can participate, because it quickly gets rather exhausting to keep track of multiple logins, post news to multiple streams, reply to comments in multiple different contexts, and monitor friends' activities in parallel silos.

The existing social network sites and platforms, however, don't make it easy to coordinate and distribute activity among multiple networks.

(Ever try to leave a comment for someone you know on MySpace from inside Facebook? Ever asked a question of your business contexts on Xing from inside LinkedIn?)

The recently launched DiSo project hopes to change all that. Described as "an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts," the project is starting with WordPress, a popular open source blogging platform, and creating a series of WordPress plugins which implement and leverage standards like OpenID, hCard, OAuth, and XFN.

The plan?: "to build a social network with its skin inside out."

The concept is to leverage an open approach, enabling data and actions to work across platforms, so that you can interact with those in your social network regardless of which host/server/platform they've selected to host their online identities.

There's a long way to go here, and cross-platform cross-business collaboration is always difficult, especially with privacy and ownership issues at stake. It will be very interesting to see how the open, collaborative, open standards and open source approach competes with the walled garden (but open API) approach in 2008.