My predictions for 2009/2010? The decentralization of social networks. Why? People are going to realize the value of their information being held by sources like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Delicious and want to control it and “own it”. They will realize the danger or loss they would face if cut off from these sources and the value of the information that they are freely giving large corporations.

I am/was very excited about the dataportability movement earlier this year, but after reading the docs, following the groups, the three things I felt were lacking was the plans of what to do with the data, the lack of contribution from people who were going to actually do things with it (designing from one side of the equation is never good) and the correct marketing plan to make John and Jane Doe see the need.  I think the dataportability movement has realized this and it making plans and is trying to reevaluate/correct these “flaws in the plan” so to say. I think this is a part of the solution, but the problem needs to be addressed not with code, but with concepts.

The Diso project takes a different direction to solve the same problem. Instead of thinking “how do we get our existing information out of the system”, Diso looks at it more like how do make a connected social system that you control/own/manage. I think approach while faulted in the fact that we have existing networks currently and it doesn’t seem to leverage that data, it has more vision to solve the problem “once and for all”. Yes we may need to reset up our Facebook networks, but hopefully it will be the last time. Who knows, maybe Facebook will play nice.

So talking to some business friends of mine about this theory, they of course wanted to know “what is the business model”. If everyone moves their data off these centralized services, how are people going to make money and is everyone going to have to a geek to set this up. I understand where these questions come from. From a very high level people think “oh I have to get my own server and install this software and run it and manage it… NO WAY!” It is more in depth then that.

The solution something like Diso offers is making the social network modular and building connectors to make those modules speak. Diso isn’t software per say, it is more of an IDEA of making software talk, share and play nice. The hope is by giving people options of where they want to store their data, the providers will be forced into setting up methods to communicate with each other.

Confused? Don’t worry, so was I. Here is an example that I think will help illustrate the point/power.

We have three friends; Sue, John and Nancy. They all each have a blog, a micro blogging solution, online photos and interest groups they are apart of. They want to be able to effortlessly share these bits of information, but each have their own preference of the tools they want to use. Sue has a Wordpress blog, uses Twitter and Flickr for her photos. John stores all his information on Facebook. Nancy has a hybrid solution where she uses Facebook for most things, but like Flickr for her photos.

So what now? Well currently all three friends would have to have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and follow multiple Wordpress blogs.  Not only is that annoying for each of them to have to use tools they don’t want to, but that means they each need to check in tons of places to keep up. So the Diso solution would be that everyone runs in the configuration they want to whether that is self hosted or hosting with a provider that supports cross platform communication and when you want to check your friends information it is displayed for you in your UI from your friend’s chosen source.

So from our example when you wanted to look at your friends pictures, if you used Facebook for photos you would view all the photo information in Facebook, but for your friends that used Flickr or something like gallery, it would talk to those web sites and get the pictures and display them for you.

So what does this all mean? If everything “falls into place” correctly you will be able to host your data wherever you want and still communicate with your friends without your information being held hostage by one centralized provider. This is not to say that commercial providers won’t exist, they will just be competing based on features and not winning because “I have to be there, that is where all my friends are”, but win because they have the best feature set/interface/network/speed/tools.

By having open source solutions to social networks components, you can of course choose to self host everything and truly “own it” but the larger providers if they don’t already provide methods to export/get your data, the “connectors” will allow you to take your information where you want to go, so while you may not “have it” in terms of you are hosting it with a company, you have the freedom to move it where you want, in essence making it yours. Using Flickr but decide you like Picassa Google better? No problem… move it.

Anyway, a lot of things can change in 2 years, but the winds of change are “a comin”.