The Future: Where is Social Networking Headed Next?

1. The Social Graph Will Become Portable

Right now our social graph (whom we are connected to and their key information like email addresses) is mostly held captive by Facebook.  There is growing pressure on Facebook to make this portable and they have made some progress on this front.

2. We Will Form Around “True” Social Networks

Facebook lumps us into one big social network.  Nobody exists in one social network. I have the one with my friends where I want to talk about how wasted we were at the party last weekend that I don’t want to share with my family network where I share pictures of the kids with my parents and siblings.

To get around all of this jumbling of social graphs young people simply create multiple Facebook accounts under pseudonyms for their real discussions and more pristine Facebook accounts for their real names.

We will seeing the growth of social networks around topics of interest likeStockTwits for people interested in investing in the stock market.  There are new networks forming to try and address the needs of specific social networks such as Namesake that is in its experimental stage but sees a world in which people want to network outside of Facebook.

3. Privacy Issues Will Continue to Cause Problems

Facebook made a deal with us that our social network was private.  When they jealously watched the rise of Twitter they decided that it should be made more public, but that wasn’t the bargain we made when we signed up in the first place.

What I realized in working with so many startup technology firms is that even if you don’t give permission to third-party apps to access your information much of it is available anyways as long as somebody you’re connected to is more promiscuous with third-party apps.  Also, all of those “Facebook Connect” buttons on websites are awesome for quickly logging in, but each gives those websites unprecedented access to your personal information.

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. Social Networking Will Become Pervasive

As our social graph becomes more portable I believe that social networking will become a feature in everything we do.  You can already see it slipping into services like Pandora where my social graph instantly appears and my friends’ musical tastes are displayed without my knowing this would happen.  On NY Times I’m getting recommended articles by friends and I didn’t explicitly turn this feature on.  This trend of social pervasiveness will continue.

5. Third-Party Tools Will Embed Social Features in Websites

One thing that is obvious to me is that while many websites want to have Facebook Connect log-ins to know more about you, they don’t really know what to do with you once they have that information.  They’re mostly now thinking about serving demographically targeted ads to you, but that’s not very interesting.  Third-party software companies will start to offer features to websites to actually drive social features.  This will take a few years but players such as Meebo are already innovating in this category though their toolbar.

6. Social Networking  Will Split Into Layers

One of the most interesting trends in the last few years has been watching the Internet split into layers.  At the bottom end of the stack is storage (S3) and processing (EC2).  At the top end is the business logic created by startups and established technology companies.  We know that the layering of the PC era led to huge innovation at each layer in the stack and I expect the same to continue to emerge on the Internet.

One interesting layer is the “mapping layer” that is emerging in mobile social networks.  If every startup had to figure out the locations of every business, what type of business they were and where they were located on a map we’d have very few startups.  There will be other layers including place information and open-source data.

7. Social Chaos Will Create New Business Opportunities

We know that Twitter is leading to customer service opportunities for businesses but the opposite is also true.  If you don’t manage what is said about you in social networks it could be detrimental.  So tools in the areas of social CRM, social customer support & real-time data management will emerge.

8. Data Will Reign Supreme:

One thing has become clear in the era of “participation” is that as more people create content the more important the ability to sift through data, organize it, share it, analyze it and present meta-data / trends will become.  If you look at the power of Bit.ly it’s not because you can create short links but because of the analytics that bit.ly provides you.

Once we’re uber connected and getting information online from people we’ve only met online we need to know more about the “authority” of the people we’re following.  Enter Klout, a service that tracks the influence of individuals in social networks.

9. Facebook Will Not be the Only Dominant Player

I know that in 2010 it seems ridiculous to say anything other than “Facebook has won – the war is over.”  In a complete return to where we all began with AOL – the world is “closed” again as Facebook has become this generation’s walled garden.

Well, here’s a quick history primer that may change your mind:

1. In 1998 the Department of Justice launched an anti-trust case against Microsoft.  People feared they were going to have a monopoly over the Internet due to “bunding” Internet Explorer with their operating system.

2. In April of 2000 there were fears that the AOL / Time Warner merger would create a monopoly on the Internet.  As you know, Time Warner eventually spun off AOL for peanuts.

3. In May 2007 there were fears that Google was becoming a monopoly.  It controlled two-thirds of all Internet searches in the US and as we all knew – search was inevitably going to be the portal to finding information on the Internet.  We now know that social networking is having a profound impact on how we discover and share content online.

4. So … November 2010 and Facebook has 500 million users.  They have more page views than even Google.  More than 10% of all time on the web is now Facebook.  They have become a juggernaut in online advertising, pictures, video and online games.  And now they want to revolutionize email.  It is no doubt that the next decade belongs to Facebook.  But the coincidence is that 10 years out will be 2020 and it’s when we look back from that date I’m certain that people will find a Facebook monopoly a bit laughable.