Fred Oliveira of the Webreakstuff blog decided to talk about the elephant in the room earlier this month. There’s a new social network going online every day and its a big elephant that everyone wants to ignore. This wouldn’t be such a problem, except for some reason people like to join them all. It’s gotten to the point that individuals are spending so much time managing their friends and different accounts that they tend to be a lot less social.

There several model’s for dealing with this out there right now:

• The Facebook Model: No world exists outside of Facebook. (Further reading)
• The Ning Model: If one network is good 80,000 must be better.
• The Spokeo Model: Why join another network. If you can find your friends feeds we will make it simple to follow the conversation.

None of these models as they exist today are really great. Some, like Spokeo, show great promise. Others, like Ning, seem just plain crazy (but really well funded).

Oliveira suggests an alternative that I feel shows promise. The OpenId/Microformats alternative. The specs exist. How to process and use the data is easy for applications. The fatal flaw right now is that it shoots right over the average persons head. OpenId is a mystery to most people. No one understands how to use it or even why. Microformats have yet to be adopted seriously by the blog software creators or other sites for that matter. Do you really expect every user to learn XFN?

If this model is to gain traction it needs wide spread adoption and it needs to be easy enough for the average person to use. It needs better marketing. People need to believe they can’t live without it. Somehow adoption of things like OpenId will make our lives easier but right now it just makes signing up to services harder and unclear.

This model needs an evangelist to rise up and champion the battle like we had for web standards. But at this point is it to late?