I'd bet against you, but I don't think your definition of "gain significant traction" is reasonable.
It's pretty easy for a network to get 1 million sign-ups, and then it's pretty easy to get 1 million people to pipe their Twitter status's into it. See Identica etc.
That doesn't mean is has significant adoption as a social network - it's really just a Twitter client.
I agree that there will be many social networks, but I don't think there is much reason for them to interoperate.
Take a listen to Eric Ries talk about his experience building an interoperable IM client[1].
He built the whole thing, then showed it to heavy IM users and they were (paraphrasing) "err.. why would I want that? I already run 6 IM clients, running another isn't a problem. And I don't want the same people to see me on each one"
We already have an interoperable, distributed social network for messaging purposes. It's called email. I doubt another one is needed. (OTOH, I did build a Pubsubhub powered demo of one back in the FriendFeed days. The technology was cool...)
Trillian is either a good or bad example, depending on your perspective. I don't want to have N IM accounts; I want to have one account/identity that can reach everyone. That has not happened with IM and I am skeptical that it will happen with social networking.
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I'd bet against you, but I don't think your definition of "gain significant traction" is reasonable.
It's pretty easy for a network to get 1 million sign-ups, and then it's pretty easy to get 1 million people to pipe their Twitter status's into it. See Identica etc.
That doesn't mean is has significant adoption as a social network - it's really just a Twitter client.
I agree that there will be many social networks, but I don't think there is much reason for them to interoperate.
Take a listen to Eric Ries talk about his experience building an interoperable IM client[1].
He built the whole thing, then showed it to heavy IM users and they were (paraphrasing) "err.. why would I want that? I already run 6 IM clients, running another isn't a problem. And I don't want the same people to see me on each one"
We already have an interoperable, distributed social network for messaging purposes. It's called email. I doubt another one is needed. (OTOH, I did build a Pubsubhub powered demo of one back in the FriendFeed days. The technology was cool...)
[1] http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2273
Trillian http://www.trillian.im/ have been selling their cross-platform and interoperable IM client for over a decade.
If people didn't want Eric's interoperable IM client, it wasn't for lack of a market.
Trillian is either a good or bad example, depending on your perspective. I don't want to have N IM accounts; I want to have one account/identity that can reach everyone. That has not happened with IM and I am skeptical that it will happen with social networking.
A niche market != significant adoption.
I know lots of people using Linux on the desktop too. It's a market, but isn't really significant in comparison to its competition.
You guys should put your bet on www.longbet.org!