In My Route to MySpace, co-founder Chris DeWOLF talks how life led him to MySpace. He had this to say about the future.
In the future, social networks will be more distributed on the Internet. They’ll be able to be part of virtually any Web site, even content sites. People don’t want to maintain 20 different profiles for 20 different Web sites, but they do want to take their profiles with them to make the Web experiences on other sites more social and personal.
All start-ups must continue to innovate as they grow. There are a few ways to do that. One is to focus on the evolution of the product offering. Another is through acquisition, and a third is to start new companies. Recently we expanded the third way — we proposed a separate organization to News Corp. called Slingshot Labs, composed of a handful of companies in one location. We wanted to mirror pure start-ups but have them exist within the structure of a large corporation. We’re not quite ready to announce anything about them yet, except to say they’re working on some interesting things.
People don’t want to deal with 20 profiles, dating or otherwise. Chris gets that, a core group of technologists and consumers are starting to become more vocal, but dating sites don’t, yet. If you run a dating site, you should be intimately familiar with Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect and other technologies that enable portable profiles and social graphs.
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I’ve had this idea for a while, actually…
Open Universal Profiles—dating in the 21st century.
The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that separating profiles from the rest of the mechanism is the way to go. In this scheme, there would be a single worldwide profile repository based on an open profile standard, perhaps based on OK Cupid’s profiles because they are dynamic and extensive, and the actual “dating sites” would serve as a window into it. (I don’t see the Facebook playing this role because its profiles aren’t geared for dating.) Each dating site would be responsible for display and search capabilities to search the repository and implementing communication.
Such a scheme requires cooperation among multiple dating site owners to succeed. But there are lot of free sites out there, and they’d still be getting ad revenue, depending on the quality of the services they would be delivering, but at least they have one less thing to worry about. The dating site community as a whole would maintain the universal profile repository.
The benefit is tremendous for the both the users and those who manage the sites. For example, no longer must users prepare a profile for EACH site. Every online dater has one and only profile! Each dating site can instantly redirect their users back to their own profile. The profiles could truly become awesome to include things like voice and video, and items that have largely been ignored by the industry, such as medical history and criminal background checks. The reason why these additions could occur easily is that one it is done, it’s done forever. Verification checks would help prevent fake profiles.
Beyond this point, I haven’t worked out all the details. If a dating site can search the entire repository, how does a person on that site send a message to someone who isn’t?
Maurice, you get it! There are several people thinking hard about this, privately and publicly. I am not saying any more, expect the pieces of the puzzle to begin to come together in 2009.
Facebook is the logical choice. They sign up 5 MILLION people a day. FacebookConnect will play a role, go read up on it and you’ll see what I mean.
Maybe it won’t be the top 10 sites, more likely the second tier players.
Keep thinking, you’re getting really close…