Up to a billion people interact with each other every day across millions of websites and communications services. Blogs, email, forums, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Diaspora, Identi.ca, Drupal and more… These can each be used as a limited type of “social network”.
This is really interesting. I’ve written and talked about this issue for a few years now… essentially the hoarding of people and connections, which only benefits those sites (and causes heaps of trouble when they shut down). Really people just want to communicate – so using the APIs at each of the “network hoarders” makes sense. It’s still a pity the hoarders don’t do this themselves, but heck otherwise they wouldn’t be hoarders and their reason for being hoarders is that they have borked business models (I’m being kind there: some have no business model at all).