• Advertising Age, Tuesday, May 13, 2008 12:16 PM

Ad Age looks far into the social future, beyond the recent data portability efforts of MySpace, Facebook and Google, declaring that the days of the walled garden social network are numbered. Over the past week, social networking's big three (although Google's position at that table is debatable) announced similar moves to open up their profile data to third-party Web sites and applications.

According to the companies, the moves are unrelated, but the announcements are indicative of a greater trend: That social media tools and services will ultimately be separated from a single service; rather, they'll become the utilities under user control through which we experience the Web. In other words, we will own our social data, not MySpace or Facebook.

As Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li wrote on her blog: "I believe (we) will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to 'be social,'" she said. "Instead, I believe that in the future, social networks will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be." That said, the future is a long, long way off, as the likes of MySpace and Facebook will do their best to retain control of our rich social data for as long as they can.

Read the whole story at Advertising Age »