Its time for the Social Semantic Web

How many times have you filled in your name on a new Social Networking site? And one of your mail addresses? And your photo? The answer is most likely: Too many times. With the Social Landscape still forming, you're probably in for many times more. What's awkward is that this problem can easily be solved.

Linked Data
The answer has been around for quite some time: Linked Data. It is one part of the Semantic Web technology and aptly called Social Semantic Web when it comes to Social Networking. Linked Data offers a universal way to store data which enables sharing.
For Social Networking, the "Friend-of-a-friend" (foaf) can be used to store one persons names, e-mail addresses, photo's (only profile, not the gallery) and all his/her friends, family and collegues. This data can in turn be used by all Social Networking sites.

The advantages are plentyful:
- With one set of your data, it takes only minutes or seconds to sign in to a new website and you can start working with it
- Updating your linked data via one of the sites means that it can be propagated to all other sites that use your data
- Linked Data can be queries, so finding a cross section of all your contacts (e.g. age less than 40 and have a pet cat)

So, why aren't the Social Networking sites jumping to implement this for you? It could be one of many reasons. Here's two:
- There is no business model for it (yet). How to earn money off just data? The data just generates traffic while other companies display it on web pages with ads. Asking money for it just kills the whole priniple of sharing.
- Sharing data with your competitors is not-done. This is where many companies have a paradigm to overcome. It will become benificial to share data with your competitors.

Lets hope one of the big players (Google, Facebook, Microsoft) sees the light and starts to offer a service that gives you control over your data. Hopefully we can all spend more time collaborating and socializing... and less time just filling in the same data again and again.