Linking social networks

Thinking further about social networks and the need to link them, I rememberd the classic post from Jason Kottke: Being your friend is hard. This was written in the heyday of the first generation of general social networking sites, before a clear winner had arrived - at least for specific areas, such as geographic (bebo for the UK, hyves in .nl), thematic (facebook) or generational (myspace).

The fact that these 'winners' have indeed arrived is an indication that users flock to communities that are large enough - with large enough being pretty damn big. Too big for individual libraries, that's for sure.

Maybe Aquabrowsers' interoperability might be good enough so that it becomes a de facto standard, like RSS became. For this to work, they need to solve the problem of unique identifiers for any item in the system, whether ILS item, internal digital asset or digital from an external source. Ideally, this would be the first step towards a generic DOI for objects.

Of course, let's hope it won't be like the tangled mess that RSS became. As the library community, we'd better keep an eye out! Interesting times, interesting times.