Broadly speaking, most social networks separate out into a few main groups.

• Eyes - e.g. services like Flickr for pictures and YouTube for moving pictures.


• Ears - e.g. AudioBoo for voices and SoundCloud for songs.


• Feet - e.g. FourSquare for where I am now and RunKeeper for where I have been (running).


• Hands - e.g. Etsy and Github show what I am creating.


• Mind - e.g. Twitter and Facebook for what I'm feeling and thinking, and what I "like".


• Brain - e.g. Coursera for what I'm learning now and LinkedIn for what I'm doing with that knowledge.

I'm sure you can think of many more examples and some rather different (and equally arbitrary) groupings.

So that set me thinking about what else we could share socially. Some of these ideas may already exist (and no doubt I'm not hip enough to know about them).

Touch and Texture

3D printing is already garnering a community around it - Thingiverse, Shapeways, physibles. But what about touch and feel? Companies like Senseg are already able to simulate textures on a touch-screen.

Sharing the feeling of rain falling on your skin, the way your hand drags across a crocodile's scales, or the squeezability of a friendly cat.

Eventually, this leads us down the route of teledildonics - a technology of limited usefulness while it consists mainly of motor speed variations but perhaps of more popularity when we can share very refined haptics.

Smells and Tastes

Despite our best efforts, we haven't found a simple way to encode, distribute, and produce olfactory sensations.

Imagine a site like Untappd - which tracks which beers you're drinking - which allows your friends to experience the smell and taste of your beer.

I've watched with joy as my friends eat the food I've prepared - and laughed helplessly while they try to handle a spicy curry or super-sour sweet. I could use InterFlora to send you some roses - or I could create a personalised fragrance to emanate from your phone whenever I call you.

Bio/Health

My friend Alex Blandford has written about tracking medical conditions with personal technology. Perhaps we don't want our friends to know our body temperature, T-Cell count, or the level of dopamine in our brain - but it might be useful for our doctors. Or maybe social attitudes will change and sharing our body's weight and brain's happiness with the world will become de rigueur.

Sites like Fitocracy check our physical fitness and share it with the world - so why not track our mental health in the same way?

As we experience dramatic emotional reactions, why not share them and their causes? Services like ThisIsMyJam and GetGlue tell your friends what you're doing - but not how intensely you feel it.

We may not always know how we feel, be able to identify the cause of our distress, or understand how to articulate it - a medical implant could silently monitor our brain chemistry and alert our friends if we needed help.

Integration

None of these are a paradigm shift - they are all datapoints which can easily be integrated into our existing social networks. Until we have the ability to directly create memories and sensations in the brain - we may be limited to vicarious enjoyment by proxy.

Many years ago, the next big term was "Social Objects":

The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the rea­son two peo­ple are tal­king to each other, as oppo­sed to tal­king to somebody else. Human beings are social ani­mals. We like to socia­lize. [...] There needs to be a rea­son for it to happen in the first place. That rea­son, that "node" in the social net­work, is what we call the Social Object.

Our social objects are only conduits to what we really want to share. When you tell a joke, you want to make people laugh, when you tell a friend to see Les Mis you want them to cry, when you talk about your bowel movements you want them to know how you feel.

What if "checking in" to The Seven Year Itch allowed you to directly share the weird feeling in the pit of your stomach when Marilyn Monroe's skirt is caught in the updraught from an air vent? What if sharing your car's average fuel efficiency of Fuelly allowed your friends to experience the same smugness you do?

When we share, it's not because we love a brand, or a film, or a mere thing - we share because we love our friends and we want to bring them joy and help them understand the journey we're taking.

Maybe that's what's next for social networks.

In the original days of computing, every user had their own computer. Well, Turing had his own computer... Then, everyone had to timeshare on a massive mainframe. Later, every user had their own computer. Now, we're back to mainframes. Sure, we call it "cloud computing" or "thin clients" but it amounts to the same thing.

That's the way technology works. It yo-yos between extremes.

Think about web hosting. Originally, each user had their own web server. Well, Tim Berners-Lee had his own web server... Then, everyone hosted their websites on a few big servers like GeoCities. Later, every user bought hosting from their preferred host & had their own domain name. Now, we're back to hosting our sites on the mainframes, and sharing domain names again. FaceBook and LinkedIn is our new presence on the web.

As we move to IPv6, high speed home Internet, and powerful personal computers, it's not inconceivable that we'll swing back to hosting our own sites.

So what does this mean for social?

We started with no real infrastructure. Hosting our own blogs and guestbooks (man! Remember guestbooks!?!). Then, we outsourced our lives to sites like blogger.com. Later, we self hosted our social lives using WordPress and MoveableType (man! Remember MoveableType!?!). Now, we're in hock to FaceBook, Flickr, and Twitter. They're the massive sites which hold us and our data hostage.

None of this is historically precise - and there's a lot of overlap - but I think it points to a definite trend.

What if the next trend is us hosting our own social networks?

We needed Flickr because storing gigabytes of photos was too expensive. We needed YouTube because transcoding and streaming video was too complicated. We needed Twitter because sending text messages to a website required significant infrastructure. We needed FaceBook because finding our friends' online identities was nigh on impossible. We needed hosted social networks because there was a strong commercial incentive for them to gather us together.

Is that still the case now? I don't think so.

Who's Next?

Here's how I imagine the world...

I own a domain name. I get hosting with it. I have a catalogue of software I can choose from. In this case, Softaculous.

Imagine, instead of WordPress and phpBB - I could install Twitter, or Instagram, or Pintrest.

I am no longer twitter.com/Example - I am twitter.Example.com! FaceBook, Habbo Hotel, Friends Reunited - they're no different to ftp, www, gopher, etc. Just another service to hang off your domain.

Imagine there was no need for data portability - because your data never left your servers.

Imagine never worrying about breaching some nebulous terms and conditions - because the only law that matters is the service's protocol.

Imagine... Imagine...

Decentralised, federated services, running on your hardware, communicating freely, using open standards. No one profiting from owning our data, no one holding us hostage as they grow more tyrannical, no arbitrary changes to terms and conditions.

"Nae King! Nae quin! Nae Laird! Nae master! We willna' be fooled agin!"

It's a pipe dream. But I'm not the only one dreaming.

Ten years ago, I posted on usenet that I'd watched a bootleg of The Phantom Menace. I discovered the post recently and it got me thinking about how little progress has been made in the digital download arena.

The actual resolution of the bootleg

Picture the scene, it's my first year at university and, like any good geek, I am obsessed with Star Wars - Episode I.  So much so that I help run a fan site, ThePhantomMenace.co.uk.  The guys on my corridor are similarly hungry for Star Wars.  We all grew up with it and we all love it.  Yoda's benevolent gaze eases us through our homesickness.

With Yoda watching over us, we can't possibly fail our exams!

George Lucas is a visionary when it comes to what we now call social media. Huge, detailed websites chronicle every development in the world of Star Wars. Behind the scenes movies, proto-blog posts, forums and chat rooms all blossom around this incredible social object.

Then, at the last minute, it all goes wrong. The release date for the movie is set to 19 May 1999. For the USA.  or those of us stuck in the UK - where the movie was filmed - we have to wait 2 months.

How I felt

I can't accurately describe the sense of betrayal that many of us felt. Not only were we going to have a needless wait - we were excluded from our new-found social life.

We couldn't frequent any of our favourite haunts lest an American blurted out a spoiler. Going online at all was going to be perilous - a casual glance at the wrong website could accidentally reveal something as momentous as Luke's parentage.

A few days after the première, I was ranting about this imposition when I received and anonymous email.

"Heard you couldn't see the movie. Click here. "

I clicked. It was in the innocent days before 419 scams and rampant malware.  This is what greeted me:

TPM1.mpg - 650MB

TPM2.mpg - 650MB

It took over 24 hours to download. The whole corridor kept a vigil, counting every bit as it matured into a byte. We ran out of disk space at one point and had to delete all sorts of important coursework. I missed lectures. I didn't care.

With popcorn, beer and inflatable sofas we gathered in the room with the biggest monitor - 17 inches.

The Most Profound Cinematic Experience Of My Life.

Much has been written about the merits - or lack thereof - of The Phantom Menace. But for me it was the culmination of 18 years of waiting. The grainy picture & tinny sound didn't diminish my enjoyment. I was with my friends and we were watching the movie months before anyone else in the country.  It redefined my relationship with cinema and content consumption.

The next year, Napster exploded in popularity. Those of us on blazingly fast University connections were already downloading TV shows and movies using the humble Windows File Sharing utility.

Since that day, ten years ago, I've paid to see The Phantom Menace - once on VHS, once on DVD, a few times in the cinemas. I've bought the books, the t-shirts and the video games.  I know it doesn't excuse the fact that I downloaded an illicit copy, but it is the perfect example of supply and demand being coupled with the disruptive power of the Internet.  Once my demand could be satisfied with "official" source, that's where my money went.

We've moved a long was since then. We can now download perfect quality copies of movies which play on any of our devices. High definition, surround sound, DVD extras downloading in less time than it takes to view them.  The movie industry writhes in pain, wondering where this viscous assault on their livelihood came from.  They missed the boat ten years ago. They try - but I still can't legally download The Phantom Menace. The movie downloading "problem" is caused by demand far outstripping supply - this is not a threat; it's an opportunity!

We're living in a fantastic multi-media landscape of limitless possibilities.  Can someone please tell the movie studios?