REthink Wine Blog

A few weeks ago I posted about how social networks are perfect for the wine industry as a tool for demystifying wine selection for the average consumer. Where instead of being faced w/ a wall of bottles at the store, one could lean on their social wine network for choosing a wine.

eljefe  replied saying, “… Here’s an interesting one for you: should a winery start its own social networking site? If so, how?”

My initial reaction to this was sure, why not? However if you scale this up then every winery would possibly have their own social network.  Each new network would be yet another social network where members would have to manage many different accounts across many different networks.

This brings to the front the notion of a network of networks. The next natural evolution for social networking would be to create a social network interoperability protocol (SNIP). SNIP would allow social networks to connect to each other and provide the opportunity for creating user interfaces for aggregating networks presenting them as one. Now instead of having to manage many accounts at separate sites, one could aggregate their social networks and content into a single user interface. In addition new social networks could spring up all over the place and easily incorporated into existing networks.

One analogy to this would be RSS. RSS defines a common protocol for the syndication of web content. This standard allowed the creation of RSS readers to aggregate this data. Instead of visiting each site separately, the RSS aggregate client can present the information all in one place.

Googling for ‘social network interoperability’ naturally turns up hits showing that there is some thought and energy going into the notion of a SNIP.

This entry was posted by Michael Brown on Friday, July 13th, 2007 at 1:59 am and is filed under Resources and Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.