I love the idea of Facebook as a blog template, and Fimoculous is a great example. The thing Facebook does that Fimoculous doesn’t is of course to feed my my friends’ life aggregation as well as simply organise my own. Facebook is a personalised, if rather basic, life aggregator and an RSS reader for other peoples’ life logs, which rocks.

I want my own Fimoculous now!

While facebook is clearly in the ascent it’ll be interesting to see if the pattern of the facebook-myspace switch happens again away from facebook.

I’m still undecided

The only universal ID that has had any staying power is email addresses.

I believe that the next step in social media will be ‘distributed social networks’, where there’s not one site or platform that will be a winner (like google, amazon, etc). Instead all individuals will own their respective networks at all times.

Users are going to decide which network they need when they need it (adhocracy). Current networks like facebook/linkedin will become either obsolete or nothing more than ‘open storage facilities’ for contacts. A standard identity protocol will arise (like openID, but maybe Facebook will develop one backed by a larger userbase) for authentication in any given network and XML / microformats / etc will do the rest.

Adhoc networks will be created on demand on any device (we’ll definitely see a strong rise in mobile – contextual – social networks) that communicates an open/standard language. This will give users an unprecedented level of privacy, flexibility and value.

I think there’s something to this. Aggregation and social connections are the peanut butter and chocolate of social software right now. The problem with Facebook (or rather, one of the problems) is that it’s too generic. Someone’s going to figure out how to do this in a more vertical area — sports, local news, miniature gnome collecting, whatever — and then Facebook will be forced to crack itself open and basically become the Google of identity systems.