Social and Business Networking

In the modern era networking is not just the preview of business men. There have been many sites created over the last few years but they only seam to implement one or maybe two if the strategies for providing either a community or business networking site. A list of social networking sites can be found on Wikipedia.

The problem with the current  social networks is that you need to set all of them up separately, and although they provide ways to import your contacts it is time consuming and is prone to error if your contact details are out of date.

What we need is a central contact, connection and linking system that all of these sites can communicate with to update their details. Such a system would, of course, require to be secure and have the ability to partition the data so that it only pulled information on people who are registered for the calling site.

If it used CardSpace (or similar) to authenticate users then users could be identified whatever community site they were using. To add to security the core service could provide components, or a client infrastructure that could pull back data and present it without the community site being able to skim it, allowing users to invite their friends from other networks to other specialist networks. This way if a user updates their email address on one service it is updated on them all.

I have started a Community Foundation to provide this but it is still in the early stages, and honestly, the amount I have learned in the last few years, would require a sever refractor.

If I coupled this with some of the more recent features I have been working on a service could be created that would provide a hosted community service that would provide a Framework for any community site (all right, only the ones in .NET).

In this way some of the more complicated, but usefully services provided by social networking sites would be much easier to implement for fledgling services.

I will need to think of some sort of pricing model tough… Hmm, maybe Paul Slater can help; if he ever posts to his blog!

A possible pricing model:

• A service access charge  +
• Per user cost: with the cost per user being divided between all the services that a particular user uses +
• Per transaction charge for communicating with the service

This model may be complicated but would be fairer to smaller sites, while still charging more for small sites that have a high number of transactions.

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