One day soon, the world will recognize that modeling applications after social networks is bad. Until then, I expect we’ll continue to see apps that could be described as such:
“I need a publishing mechanism that lets members post content chunks to individual colleagues or groups.”
…being described as so:
“I need a social network. Users need to be able to set up a profile similar to LinkedIn. Images and files have to be easy to upload, similar to what you’d find on Flickr. Collaborative file editing may be necessary in the near future.
Each registered user gets a standard blog like MySpace only more customizable. Some users will be podcasting, so audio / video uploading / transcoding needs to be handled like YouTube. Users should be able to automatically burn their smartcast and submit subscription info to iTunes.
Users will then be able to set up groups like on ma.gnolia and friends lists like on facebook with required approval. Users can be friends, colleagues or acquaintances with each category allowing further access to personal information.
Users can contribute links using a bookmarklet and import feeds they find interesting to be output in a river of news stream that they can apply standard output filters to.
Users can tag other users, photos, files, blogs, posts, groups, friends, links, or feeds to make them easy to come back to. Users need to be able to rate videos with a standard 1-5 star ranking and share or embed video using a custom player. Any user that is logged in can also comment on other user’s profiles or posts if they’re authorized, and in-network messages can be sent between linked users at any time.
Users should also be able to easily search for friends / colleagues as well as content by keyword, tag, or type within categories, groups or geographic location.
Finally, I want to tie in AdSense throughout the site to help me pay for all this.”
I’m kidding around with this post, right? Not really. We’re catching more and more ideas being positioned as social networks. Otherwise elegant concepts are being weighted down with the manufactured complexity of elaborate profiles, friends lists, content ranking, locked messaging, and much more.
Social networks have popularized the spec.