The future of social networking

The economist thinks that social networks are a fad that will never see the massive revenues enjoyed by Google and the like. They talk about the problems with social networks, and what the future holds for social interaction online. From the article:

“E-mail in the wider sense is the most important social network,” says David Ascher, who manages Thunderbird, a cutting-edge open-source e-mail application […] That is because the extended in-box contains invaluable and dynamically updated information about human connections […] an e-mail account has access to the entire address book and can infer information from the frequency and intensity of contact as it occurs.

There’s definite value to a social network that can track your interactions passively, but email isn’t the best platform to build it on. As immersive as email is in our lives, it is now only a piece of the puzzle in our daily interaction. Most of my conversations take place over IM, and more and more people are jumping onto Twitter or just communication with plain old fashioned cell phones.

A ‘passive’ social network will need to be able to plug into email, IM, voice, and aggregate user information from the rest of the web. When google released their gtalk IM service (and subsequent integration with gmail), no one really knew where they were going with the service. Now that they’ve started integrating the service with other platforms they’re starting to gain the ability to mine a vast majority amount of data on user interactions. Combine this with their recent purchase of Grand Central, and add a pinch of their excellent online alerts service with some clever text analysis and they can track all four major interactions.

I can’t decide if that’s really cool or really creepy