A flock of twitters

Quite an interesting article.  In particular, there's a reference to the
term 'social web' .  Not sure I agree with everything, but it's a good read.

http://jeffsayre.com/2010/02/24/a-flock-of-twitters-decentralized-semantic-microblogging/

*What might a truly connected Social Web look like?
*
This image is a tracing of all the Internet traffic circa late 2006. It is
licensed under a Creative Commons License (by-nc-sa/1.0) and created by
http://opte.org/

(
http://jeffsayre.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Internet_traffic-300x300.jpg)

Where would the big social networks appear on this graph?

Twitter would be a single point in this image with a few tenuous tendrils
extending out representing the limited access that Twitter allows to their
data silos via their proprietary APIs. There would be no lines representing
conversations between users as the totality of conversation all occurs
within the walled-off Twitter space.

The same holds true for Facebook, Google Buzz, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, and
many of the other social networks. The lines connecting these services would
be nothing more than gossamer strands representing the brute-force pushing
of limited duplicate content between these data silos.

You might be thinking that conversations regularly occur between users of
these platforms. For instance, I can choose to show my latest tweets on
Facebook or LinkedIn, I can choose to display my latest Facebook or LinkedIn
status updates on Twitter, and so forth. But these are not conversations.
They are just snapshots of conversation that are occurring within other data
silos.