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.