Meet your real social network
Almost everybody on the intertubes are participating in a social network of some kind, yes, the forums are social networks too (sort of) since they bring together people with same interests. But the real network… where is all your social information stored with all kind of details is… in your email and your cell phone.
Let’s go in parts, in your email you have all the addresses of people you communicate and interact, right? Also there is in a way how important are these people to you and what you do with them. The email is the next frontier for social networking. Who will win in these race (that is not even started), the email services providers like Microsoft (Hotmail, now Live Mail), Yahoo (Y! Mail) and Google (GMail), these are the 3 major players in the email service market. They are actually trying to take advantage of this, releasing features that interact with the social graph that reside quietly on your inbox.
Now, your phone, yes in your phone is a more intimate social graph, but almost no one is getting in to it. You remember the migration from your last phone to the new one, was a pain right? But once the pals at DataPortability get thing a little bit further all your data can flow limitless anywhere you allow it to go (hopefully).
That will be a huge step in the social part of our daily activities cause your social graph will be not only people you are never seen or even talked on the phone but people that you interact with, in a daily basis.
What is the key? Communication! What you need a cell phone in the first place? Mainly to be available to any new information that your social graph generate, no matter what is, a SMS, a phone call, an email and lately a twitt or a pownce. This information come to you and mostly flow back to your social graph modified by you. All this interactions occur without been noticed, but is interesting once you start to watch it, from a little distance.
The future of Social Network and how interact with your social graph is not in FaceBook or MySpace, is you pocket, more exactly in your cell phone. And is likely to wait for the next generation of applications taking advantage of this, let’s not call it social applications cause the term is just overused.
Keep flowing.
