Yesterday, I wrote about Yahoo’s social network they have lying around in parts. Looks like my timing was off as now the Internet is talking about Yahoo’s vision of a new social network, Inbox 2.0. In an effort to keep up with the meme, I’ll just link to the NYT post and drop in an excerpt.

Yahoo, of course, has had many different takes on this over the years: its member directory, Geocities, Yahoo 360. It recently started Yahoo Mash. But none of these is quite right, Mr. Garlinghouse said. Mash is simply an experiment, not a product being readied for mass promotion.

Glad we can all participate in their experiments.

Bang in their name or not, it’s hard to get excited about Yahoo! Even after a year’s worth of commentary following Brad Garlinghouse’s peanut butter manifesto, I still don’t get their corporate strategy or see any forward progress. Maybe I don’t care enough about their brand to pay attention any more.

That said, I’m at Flickr every day. And upcoming. And del.icio.us. And MyBlogLog. And if Y! could pull off a Twitter acquisition, they’d have all the components for a fundamentally improved social experience (and the perfect mouse trap for my online attention).

Presence. Check.

That’s right, I included MyBlogLog in a short list of apps that I hit on a daily basis. I won’t try to change your mind on the service itself, but if ever there was an app that almost implemented the foundation for the perfect social network, it’s MBL.

MyBlogLog decentralizes presence. There is no log in wall, no data lockdown, no single destination. Just a networked profile and a footprint that surfaces on participating services. It’s a simple idea. But it’s fundamentally better than the opposite approach of old networks like facebook.

So, assuming MBL & Y! realized their full potential, you’d no longer have to play constant gardener to profiles scattered across the internets.

Content. Check.

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t produce content inside closed networks. My blog posts, Flickr streams, Tweets, bookmarks, etc, are all available for re-syndication. So, hypothetically, I could roll all my content into a single-point stream of consciousness and call it my online me.

But I prefer the idea of leaving it in the field. My Tweets have more context with friends than without. My Flickr photos are organized in sets, collections, and groups. My bookmarks are tagged. My events list other attendees. My posts have comments. (Sometimes.)

In other words, content has more meaning in its native habitat. (Much of that habitat being Y! properties.) And as much as I dig Jaiku, I think a lifestream could be a lot more than a blended river of xml.

Connections. Check.

Far be it from me to criticize anything that Microsoft values at greater than $15B, but my issue with facebook is that I have to be a registered facebook user and facebook friend of another facebook user to interact with them inside facebook. What if we’re already Twitter pals? Facebook doesn’t care.

Yahoo! could care. With very little effort. It could see that I’ve friended / followed a member of one of its niche communities and extend that connection throughout its properties. It could show me streams from friends specific to events I’m attending. It could let me know when friends are in my vicinity. It could do more. And with MBL, they could extend this even further.

Yahoo! remains a player. I wonder if they’re aware.

I love the picture on Oberkirch’s site of Tantek jamming on portable social networks. I can just picture the problem being cracked on all Will Hunting style - complex XOXO lists being greased up on whiteboards, chalked up on blackboards, penned out on napkins - nerds getting excited about breakthrough stuff. “We’re tearing down the walls over here! Woo! Hey Facebook, you like apples? How you like them apples?!?”

Alright, let’s slow this down. If you made it past the Good Will Hunting reference but I lost you at XOXO, that’s okay. A fraction of the online population knows what microformats are. Fewer still know what to do with them.

And those of you who did swim alongside the microformats reference are probably getting ready to hit me in the comments with “Why not just use hCard + XFN to mark up friends lists? There’s an FAQ and everything.”

I like the idea of simple fixes. hCard + XFN is one such example. For my non-microformats people, hCard is a simple format that allows you to structure contact data with machine-readable tags in standard xhtml. XFN is even simpler way to represent your relationship to each contact using the rel attribute inside anchors. Easy stuff.

Luckily, it’s only the nerds that are having the problems maintaining 30+ profiles / porting friends right now. Because the nerds know microformats, and we’re beginning to see more and more networks supporting the ideas above.

Personally, I don’t think that’s enough. I’m a huge fan of microformats, but I’m a realist. Browsers will have to fully support them before they do much good for most.

I’m also a huge fan of opml, especially if it’s of the hosted flavor. I’d love to see a similar, standard xml spec for contacts that you could host [and point to inside your OpenID account] and then allow social networks to subscribe to. But that’s still geeky.

Here’s what I see going down. My heros behind microformats are going to keep working on recommendations. The cool networks are going to pick them up and mark up friends lists. (The geeks will know what to do with that.) And just as the networks figure out how to allow you to import your contacts, Microsoft will swoop in, plug in a friends organizer inside the Internet Explorer nut, and proceed to take over the social networking world. I saw it happen in a dream - it must be true.

In the meantime, I’ll mark up friends lists [on networks we’re working on] if you do.