The Web as the social network

At this year’s CES, Yahoo announced their plans for Yahoo! Mail to become a central hub for your social activity. This new Yahoo! Mail (called Yahoo! Life) will treat email addresses as social profiles, and friendships will be based on how often you communicate with your contacts. In many ways, this is what Spokeo has been doing so far, and we’re quite excited that our concept has been vindicated.

When we talk about social networks, we immediately think of MySpace, Facebook, and Friendster. What’s not obvious is that almost every website today (such as Youtube, Flickr, and Last.fm) has become a social network. They all have user profiles, messaging, sharing, and other member interactions built-in. In the past, you can only communicate within the community, but increasingly these social networks are opening up the data to enable interoperability among networks.

This data-portability movement pushes the ultimate social network – the Internet. As Spokeo has demonstrated, it does not matter where your friends are, or what social networks they use. When they post blogs and photos for you to see, you want to access it immediately in a secure manner. Information should not be constrained within certain networks; after all, the free data flow is what makes the Internet so great.

Previously the Internet was just a bunch of web pages, but now it’s becoming a web of interconnected people.  Hopefully one day, we can start organizing the world’s information based on not just PageRank, but also social relevancy