How Will Social Networking Change The Internet, Long-Term?How Will Social Networking Change The Internet, Long-Term?

As I start to write this blog post, I'm waiting for a flight to San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Summit. The big trend in Web 2.0 this year is social networking. Services like Facebook are transforming the fundamental architecture of the Internet, the way search engines like Google changed the Internet before. What will the post-socnet, post-Facebook Internet look like?

I'll ask that question of the people I interview at the conference, and I'll let you know here what they have to say.

Here's what I think so far: Socnets are transforming the Internet from a network of pages and machines to a network of people.

Of course, the Internet has always been a network of people. But you wouldn't know it to look at it. The only way to figure out who's who on the Internet is through the relatively crude tool of usernames and signatures. And each username and signature is a separate role. Each person has individual accounts on different IM systems, e-mail accounts, a blog, or more than one, a photo-sharing account, or more than one. Each person's name might appear on multiple Web pages, in connection with professional, personal, and community activties -- and the appearance of that name might be different from one place to the next, as Susan the attorney is Sue to her softball team, Susy to the alumni page for the camp she attended as a child, and Golden Swordbearer to her friends on World of Warcraft.

Social networks provide us with means of tying those diverse identities into a coherent story. We see the first steps today, as applications built using Facebook APIs allow us to automatically aggregate our blogs, photo-sharing, Twitter, and other accounts in a single location -- our Facebook pages.

Privacy protections are built in to this new architecture -- or, at least, somewhat. Don't want people knowing what you're up to online? Use a pseudonym, not linked to your socnet identities. A pseud won't protect against a determined investigation or subpoena, but it will stand up for most purposes. (Your passion for collecting My Pretty Pony toys is still safely secret, tough guy -- just don't let the missus catch you braiding ribbons into their little manes).

Those are the short-term effects of the socnet transformation. But I don't really know what the long-term effects will be, and I hope to get a handle on that this week at the Web 2.0 conference.

The long-term effects of the search transformation were similarly hard to discern when those changes began. The short-term effect of the search transformation was, of course, to make information easy to find. The long-term effects were to obliterate barriers between Web sites. This was an especially big deal for commercial Web sites -- like this one. Publishers of commercial sites used to try to channel users to our home pages, and then to landing pages, and then to the page containing the information they wanted. And we tried to upsell and advertise to them at every step. Now, we still have home pages -- but we know that Google is our other home page. Many publishers hated that transformation, and fought it, but that fight is pretty much over -- despite some final battles.

And blogs and RSS readers and other Web 2.0 technologies are still accelerating the transformation, breaking Web sites down into information molecules.

The search transformation is pretty mature, but the socnet transformation is just beginning. How will it play out in the long term?