The Future of Social Networks

I’ve been following the question What is lacking in Social Networking now? on Quora, which is a fascinating series of thoughts about the current state of social networks, and how people hope that they will evolve over the coming years.

Many of the answers seem to center around the way that current social networks don’t properly reflect the flexibility of our real-life brains, and the ability that our squishy grey matter has to appropriately categorize every other human we meet, more or less on the fly. It’s like we have the world’s most forgiving, flexible, robust, and quickest database in our heads, and it’s tightly linked to all our sensory inputs. We’re pretty cool.

I think that this is a real opportunity in social networking - a problem seeking a solution - and many companies will undoubtedly be working hard on creating amorphous, flexible, one-off networks that more accurately reflect the way we live our lives, BUT:

The future of social networking is going to be much more like RSS. I think that all social mapping becomes more useful the more invisible it gets. I don’t want to have to sit in front of a web browser to catch up with my friends on the east coast, I don’t want to log in to Facebook to get my event invitations.

What I really want is direct hardware integration with my smart social network. I want event invitations to appear directly on my calendar (which is in the cloud) for me to accept or reject. I want my Television to bring up an overlay that my friend wants to chat with me: display the incoming messages on the TV, let me type my responses on my iPad.

I think the future of social networking will be in making the social network disappear.