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.
