A ZDNet blog called Between the Lines reported today about the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit 07, specifically the Social Networking 3.0 panel. It always amazes me that “startups” can afford the time and resources to send people to these panels, but its worse when they are quoted saying things that are so off the mark. Gina Bianchini, CEO of Ning, is quoted:

“In ten years we’ll see millions of social networks for every niche, need, language, location and passion. I disagree that people want a single profile-they want to have identities for different social networks.”

What planet is she on?

What a perversion of the meaning of a social network. Social networks are connections of people. Not collections of software to process assets that people collect. I do think we will have software applications for “every niche, need, language, location and passion.” These applications will facilitate the sharing of collected assets, like photo’s. People will migrate to each niche that is best suited for their needs say Flickr for photo’s and YouTube for video. But no one wants to subscribe to a slew of social networks just so they have some middleware application to facilitate their contact management and connect to the few assets people share in that particular network.

What people really want is a way to manage contacts that allow them to aggregate everyone “lifestream” information in a simple way. If I want to know when you put photo’s online I will subscribe to your photos RSS feed. I don’t want to join Flickr just to see your photo’s. People just want it simple. Social networks like Ning are not simple.

Give me a system that is so simple that when I add your photo feed the system says, I know who that person is and they also have a blog, would you like to receive updates when this person posts a new blog entry? Most blogs already facilitate conversation through the use of comments and trackbacks. Someone just needs to make that easier. Not build a new social network to handle conversations.

Facebook is a great example of a software application that does a lot of stuff, but doesn’t do any of it very well. Right now people use it because it’s easier to subscribe to Facebook to connect to their network and use a weak service than it is to manually aggregate everyones streams from better designed niche applications.

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