You might have heard of the web 2.0, but let’s face it: is there really any difference between 1.0 and 2.0? What we have in this new online wave from the beginning of the century, is no more then a better comprehension of what the web can do for us and how we can use it. Since the WWW was born, we were already capable of publishing out own content on the web, however there came recently some service websites that made the publishing process easier for the world. These sites got to be know as Social Media.

We understand Social Media as those whose content is produced for and by its own users who share common interests. And it’s in this definition that the problem we’ll discuss in this post rises. Note: “the content is produced for and by its own users“, in other words, the social media websites don’t talk with each other.

At first, it might not sound as a problem, but if we take a deeper look on the internet structure, we’ll see that the web itself as know it wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for its interoperability. If the social networks can’t interact with each other, then we don’t have a Internet, rather a Multinet, a collection of multiple isolated networks struggling for space in a infinite universe of bits.

The solution pointed for that is the Federated Social Web. Read federation as a group of parts acting towards a common goal. We saw and we used protocols of federated communication before. E-mail itself is a set of different servers talking with each other in order to allow for the network @abcd.com to connect with the network @efgh.com, for it is based in patterns for operating towards this collectivity.

A Federated Social Media, therefore, would be the one in which its users can benefit from its features not only among other users on the same network, but also with users belonging to other networks, other media.

Picture yourself as a member of the network abcd.com, with your friends and shared content stored there. Then imagine you met someone nice and cool in a party and want to add that person to your network, but she is a member of the network efgh.com. What now? In the current model, you, or the person, would have to create a new profile in another network just to keep in touch. It is as if we could only e-mail people inside our own e-mail service. With the Federated Social Web we would have, among other possibilities, the capability of adding friends from different networks, exchange messages and more.

The e-mail and the WWW are what we know due to the federation protocols. Before that, we only had isolated networks. Describing the impact that the Federated Social Web will bring is an almost impossible task. But we can guess. I imagine how it would be like if organizations, both big and small, could have their own social network and stablish between their people relationships such as friendship or collegiality; if these very organizations could exchange content and data through their social networks, instead of a static document such as e-mail…

Sounds like a dream. But it isn’t! The Federated Social Web  is already on for us and many more initiatives are borning such as Diaspora, OneSocialWeb, Status and BuddyCloud. We at SB Virtual are also joining the fight. This is the first post of many on the subject. Keep up! Follow us on Twitter, or through RSS, to keep up-to-date.

Written by Luciano Santa Brígida