When visiting a page that is rss enabled, my browser knows that its a feed that I can add to my list. Thanks to xml being developed, we have an open standard for distributing data.
In the near future, our socialization through the web will move away from inside the browser, to being an extension of it, just as news has gone from inside of the browser to being pulled into aggregators. Thanks to our changing perception of hiding information from one another, aggregators will soon recognize events, people and profiles and the interconnection between the three.
Our standards need to be developed cooperatively and openly in order for widespread adoption. Don’t you want to visit a blog, add it to your newsfeeds, look at the author and put him in your list of friends, create an event (like getting together for beers) and ‘feed’ it out to the community? It would eliminate the redundancy of having a different profile on every site you’ve ever been a part of.
There are a lot of high level conversations going on about the future of the online social network, but unless someone can tackle the underlying data distribution and the future of aggregation, we will continue to operate in misconjoined networks.
I'm Brad Cooper, a user experience designer and front-end programmer with a passion for actualizing visions. I strive to create a piece of art in each site that I put together both visually and technically.
