I wrote earlier about the degree to which MySpace sucks as a model for staying in touch. Truth is, I really don’t care. MySpace is in it purely for profit, so it only makes sense that they’d try to confuse the hell out of their users while assaulting them with ads. That’s my perspective, at least.

Not everyone sees it my way, though. We get the “how does facebook do it?” question all the time. The answer is typically, “they do it wrong,” but I get the thought process behind the question. One would only assume that social networks have built their [user] experience around [user] behavior and that popularity demonstrates a successful implementation of [user] interface.

So, I give you MySpace, the most popular social network. Its user interface is most definitely not built around user behavior. Requiring 6 - 21+ clicks to send a friend a message should be sufficient proof of that.

Think facebook is any better? Nope. They just save you the effort of looking for the log in form by requiring you log in before you do anything at all.

So, the next time you find yourself asking how the popular sites “do it”, step back and also ask how you should be doing it. I like to think the latter is the better question.

Moral of the story: beware what you clone. We’ve all seen Multiplicity.

Related to the moral of the story: man, I wish I had my copy of Multiplicity with me last weekend while I was getting coffee.

Plot: I want to send a friend a message but don’t have their email address. I do know that they’re on MySpace. Should be pretty simple to ping them over there, right?

Scenario 1

This person is already my friend on MySpace.

1. Fire up myspace.com.
2. Search for the name.
3. Click on the profile link.
4. Click “Send Message” in contact options.
5. Take a minute to figure out that you’ve just been bounced back to the front page.

If you spot the “you must be logged in to do that” message, proceed to the next step. Otherwise, start over.

6. Log in.
7. Use the form to send a note to your friend.

6 page views, 37 ad impressions to send a note. Assuming, of course, that I remember my password and don’t wander.

Scenario 2

This person is not yet my friend on MySpace.

1. Fire up myspace.com.
2. Search for the name.
3. Click on the profile link.
4. Click add to friends.
5. Submit form.
6. Wait for friend to accept me. (This will take him 3 page views to do.)
7. Receive authorization from friend by via MySpace.
8. Log in
9. View automated acceptance message.
10. Click on profile link.
11. Click “Send Message” in contact options.
12. Use the form to send a note to your friend.

11 page views, something like 54 ad impressions to send a note.

Scenario 3

I don’t have a MySpace account.

1. Fire up myspace.com.
2. Click sign up.
3. Proceed through 5 - 7 pages of profile information.
4. Submit.
5. Check email for confirmation request.
6. Click confirmation link.
7. Search for the name.
8. Click on the profile link.
9. Click add to friends.
10. Submit form.
11. Wait for friend to accept me. (This will take him 3 page views to do.)
12. Receive authorization from friend by via MySpace.
13. Log in
14. View automated acceptance message.
15. Click on profile link.
16. Click “Send Message” in contact options.
17. Use the form to send a note to your friend.

18-21 page views if I know exactly what I’m doing, fill out all information immediately, and do not add any photos. I also have two trips to my email client and cause my friend to 6 page views to accept my request and then read my note. Ad impressions will vary slightly depending on the path, but I saw approximately 80.

Let’s not forget that these are 6 to 21 of the most cluttered pages you’ll find on the Internet. It takes serious dedication to not wander off.

Maybe it’s time for an outside review.

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.

Social networks suck. I’m tempted to stop right here, but I realize that’s just a side effect of my Twittering. Since we have more than 140 characters to discuss, I’ll keep it going and try to explain what gets me down.

It isn’t the friending issue. As much as I hate re-upping each friend / colleague I have inside each new network, support groups are already being formed by geeks with more friends than me, and solutions will find the market (real people) before the market finds the issue (social network fatigue).

It’s not even redundant profiles. The idea of creating / gardening more than one is also lame, but there’s a lot going on with decentralized presence. Services like OpenID and OAuth are already batting at the cause, and it’s only a matter of time before the browsers jump in as well. (I’m downloading Flock 1.0 right now.)

Then there’s your caged activity profile (i.e., who, when, what you interact with). This also sucks, but I can live with the idea that, beyond my friend lists or profiles, most of my data activity is meaningless outside of the context in which it’s caged. Did I get bit by a zombie or a werewolf? Maybe it was a chump. Whatever. I’m only interested in keeping the connection, Facebook can have the manner.

So what else is locked down? Publishing streams, right? I can get past that too. I don’t originate anything inside a closed network that doesn’t need that context to make sense. The crap I post in MySpace should stay there. I don’t want it on my blog. The streams I deem ready for public consumption are available for re-syndication via RSS, etc. My answer to not being able to export my Facebook statuses, for instance, is to not post them there to begin with. I republish my public Twitter timeline instead.

I’m pretty much over all of that (which is to say, I can point to and even implement emerging solutions for most of these issues).

What I can’t get past is the idea that these damn things (social networks) put a log in wall between communication channels. So any point of contact I want to make (whether message, friend request or zombie bite) means the network I’m currently logged into is just going to bleep/blorp an email to my counterpart instructing them to log in if they’d like to see what just happened.

WTF is that? It’s certainly not interaction. At least not in the sense of anything that’s come since email chess, circa 1993.

*sigh*

We bang up against requests to build social networks every day at ep. Most of the projects we’re engaged in, though, are either niche enough to keep my data caging complaints at bay, or they aren’t actually social networks at all (they’re collaboration apps). But we still battle the idea of the log in wall.

Too many people think you measure community in terms of sign-ons. And the way to build sign-ons is to blorp a bunch of teasers to their users.

But what if there was a service like OpenID that actually did act as a single sign-on model? What if people were perpetually signed in to their networks? And, what if messages and alerts and notifications across all networks were delivered in decentralized form, like that of an IM window?

Crazy right? It shouldn’t be.

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.