I’ve read thousands of words on the Next Facebook; actually, I’ve probably read almost a thousand blog posts on the subject.  But not one seems to share my expectation of just what the Next Facebook will be.

1. The Next Facebook will not be a distributed network. (But Diaspora and Michael Chisari’s Appleseed will have their part in it.)

2. The Next Facebook will not be Path.com. (But Dave Morin and his company are still awesome.)

3. The Next Facebook will not be Color. (But that doesn’t mean Color won’t be hugely successful.)

4. The Next Facebook will not come from Y Combinator, TechStars or 500 Startups. (But we’d gladly join their programs.  Get in touch, Harj, David, and that other Dave.)

5. The Next Facebook will not slowly evolve out of a photo sharing app or a local deals site or a unified social api. (But… well, there is no but on this one.)

The Next Facebook will come from all of us.

Distributed? Sometimes.

Open? Sometimes.

Not-for-Profit? Sometimes.

And often centralized, partly closed, and profitable.  The Next Facebook will come from a social graph that no longer belongs to one service and no longer exists on only one service.  The social graph will spread over dozens (and eventually, hundreds) of services, going wherever you want to take it, moving with you as you move from your last favorite app to your next favorite app.

It’s using Instagram, LinkedIn, and three other products no one’s heard of yet, and not feeling poorer because you just never “got Twitter“.  It’s staying on Facebook and not feeling like it’s uncool that your grandma’s there, too, because you can still talk to your cool friends over on the current Social-Network-of-the-Month.  It’s using Diaspora or Appleseed or BuddyCloud or StatusNet without being forced to abandon who you were back when you made all those friends on MySpace.

It’s something that everyone’s working on in their own way, Diaspora, Google, Facebook, Appleseed, Color, Instagram, LikeALittle, Spork, and probably NASA or maybe the NAACP and a kajillion other people.  And our service, the Windsoc Unified Social API.  When a new service can make its data available to thousands of developers without needing them to learn yet another API, well… that’s pouring on the gasoline and watching the Next Facebook go BOOM.

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