On his website’s blog, John Breslin included an article he helped author for IEEE magazine titled “The Future of Social Networking on the Internet.” The link to the above mentioned post is here .

In the article, Breslin points out that while the internet has worked well connecting people for many different purposes, flaws remain in the social networking sites (SNS) of today preventing the creation of a single network that allows people complete access to all online content as well as each other. Some reasons for this include:

1. While physical social networks are designed to help people work together on common interests, evidence suggests that online social networks lack these common goals. Rather, a SNS user may make a connection for no other reason than to increase their number of friends. (Facebook being a good example.) As Breslin states, “These explicitly established connections become increasingly meaningless because they aren’t backed up by common objects or activities.”

2. Different networking sites do not work together. If one wants to join another social network, they must rebuild their profile and their network of connections from scratch every time.

To provide more meaning to online social networks, Breslin suggests that networks should be designed such that people form connections around the interests they share. This “object centered sociality” better simulates real life social networks and focuses the online network around the content that keeps people interested and continuing to visit the site, such as blog posts, photos, video, etc. With this approach, people will connect over things they have in common, rather than more or less at random.

Several efforts are already underway to achieve more interoperability between different SNSs. To achieve this, a method of representing connections between different people and content. One way Breslin suggests this can be achieved is through the Semantic Web (Wikipedia Article) which has the means to create an agreed upon format for representing people, content and the relations between them that can be used by all SNSs, allowing them to effectively integrate with each other.

There are several currently ongoing attempts to achieve some of the goals stated in Breslin’s article.

Among these are the Friend of a Friend project and the Semantically Interlinked Online Communities Initiative which are using the Semantic Web to expand ways to create and connect content on SNSs, And OpenID which provides a method to create one user name and password for the various websites people visit that require a login. With these effors underway, it will be interesting to follow how the online social network evolves in the next few years.