I wrote a post a few months ago in the heat of the Facebook vanity URL debate. In it, I argue that while owning your name space is important, the name itself is negligible – the links between your names are what matter:

Your identity online, in your own space, can be Jake Levine, Jakel25, Jakerlevine, levine.jake, or whatever pseudonym you wish to go by. Many will be forced to settle for almost-names (or will choose to). Or, god forbid, you may choose to forgo owning a domain name altogether!! Whether your owned namespace is chrismessina.com, facebook.com/chrismessina or factoryjoe.com, what is important is that search and discovery recognizes that facebook.com/chrismessina==factoryjoe.com==the Chris Messina I am looking for.

I thought it relevant to include this in light of Google’s recent announcement of a new service called Social Search. Danny Sullivan has done a great job explaining the service.

It is easy to see the value in Google’s social search offering. When searching for information about the new Google Social Search product, for example, I am far more likely to attribute value to a link provided from my friend Alex (who works at Google) than to a link generated by a generic Google search.

Now imagine if social search were implemented on a larger scale. Imagine if Google could pull in my contacts from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Last.fm. Perhaps a LinkedIn connection who works at Morgan Stanley has linked to an article on Twitter about the economy. Might that article have greater potential value to me than a quick search on WSJ.com?

(Unfortunately for this example, LinkedIn does not allow access to contacts data, so I would have no way of seeing this article unless I am also friends with this person on Twitter.)

I’m very happy to see Google get into this game. We all recognize that it is important to maintain an online identity above and apart from the proprietary services that make up the social web, but the fact is that while we nerds of identity might go waaaaay out of our way to make the connections between our online identities all too clear, the majority of social web users just don’t care to go through the trouble. And now, they don’t need to.

Making clear the connections between our siloed identities is the first step towards realizing a truly user centric social web. Here’s to hoping we can repeat history -

I came across a recent TechCrunch article titled  ”Sean Parker: Twitter/Facebook Will Soon Dominate The Web – Not Google“ summarizing Sean Parker’s (Founders Fund, Facebook co-founder) speech at Web 2.0 summit yesterday.

I took issue with two points that he made (as presented in TC):

Parker noted that data portability is a red herring. Data portability is easily solved by converters and adapters, he said. Facebook has of course been criticized for being much more closed with regards to its data than many of the other social networks. In Parker’s view, it would seem that not only is this not a bad thing, but it will help them dominate, because it will force other users to join them. That’s something that I would bet a lot of people believe, but it’s interesting to hear someone like Parket be ballsy enough to say that.

It’s not hard to agree with Parker that keeping user data locked within Facebook’s walled garden will help Facebook “dominate.” In fact, we might also agree that AOL did a great job of locking users in and consequently “dominating.”  Or that Microsoft successfully “dominated” by boxing out all competition (read: innovation).

Tim O’Reilly will beat you over the head with the argument that companies reap long term success only when they create more value than they capture. Parker might dismiss data portability as a “red herring” but to do so is to do Facebook’s user a great disservice. If Facebook turns its focus to maintaining market share instead of delivering the best possible experience to its users, a younger, nimbler (and yes, generally more open) competitor will eventually emerge, and that familiar cycle of creative destruction will begin again.

To be clear, he thinks Google will stay huge and relevant, but it’s dominance will go down because collecting data is less valuable than connecting people, he said.

I often read about how old school Google is because it isn’t social. Let’s recall that Google page rank is the original manifestation of the social web. Building a system of relevance on user reference places user exchange at the center of search. If Google is asocial then Facebook is just a profile directory.

Furthermore, I don’t think that the difference between Google and Facebook is collecting data vs. connecting people. I would argue that data is value in both cases. The difference is the form of that data.

Link data and activity data are two sides of the same coin: user exchange. If Google’s success is any indication, the potential for monetizing Facebook’s activity data is immense, but the case for that potential to exceed Google has yet to be proven.

Twitter is in the process of rolling out a long-awaited Lists feature. I wrote about the importance of social segmentation a few weeks ago and so it’s great to see that the folks at Twitter are keeping up with blog.jakerlevine.com. If you’re reading this, no thanks necessary – I’m fine with stock.

Segmenting the data we consume into ‘buckets’ is a useful feature for those of us suffering from information overload. In this way, for example, I can keep the data relevant to my job at TheLadders.com separate from the data relevant to my immediate social circle. From a productivity standpoint this makes a lot of sense. Otherwise, at 10am on a Tuesday when I’m trying to get up to speed on chatter in the online recruitment market, I would be forced to wade through comments on the latest episode of Gossip Girl. Similarly, when I’m craving that juicy nugget about Chuck’s outfit from last night’s episode, the last thing I want distracting me is an article on some recently released labor statistics. Let’s get our priorities straight.

However……while a built-in feature like Lists is a step in the right direction, Twitter (and many other equally guilty social web services) is missing a key ingredient of the successful social segmentation soup: segmented syndication.

The web, like the real world, is a big place. In the real world, we play different roles at different times. If I showed up to work with the same persona that I go out with on Saturday nights, I would likely have a hard time holding down steady employment. If I treated my girlfriend the same way I treat my co-workers I would likely have a hard time keeping a steady girlfriend. Needless to say, if I acted towards my roommate the same way that I act towards my girlfriend, I would lose all street cred.

Facebook ran into this problem a few years ago. And LinkedIn solved it for them. Given Facebook’s user base and core functionality, it became clear early on that it is not a suitable environment for professional networking. Facebook did not allow its users to finely segment data consumption and syndication (meaning the Jake I showed to my friends is the same Jake I showed to employers), and so it eventually ceded a significant (and high-end) market to another service. One could imagine a LinkedIn style professional networking tool built into Facebook: imagine having two profile pictures, two biographies, two sets of photo albums – one for your friends, and one for potential employers.

I’m not arguing that this was or would be possible, only that this example is representative of a general trend – that users beg for a social web that mirrors offline interaction, where they have the ability to express a complex and multidimensional personality, meant for different people at different times.

So what does segmented syndication look like? Let’s start with Lists. If I create a List called JakeGGFans, that includes only those friends who like watching Gossip Girl, wouldn’t it seem natural to be able to message that group exclusive of the wider audience? It would certainly spare some embarrassment. On the other hand, rather than bore my friends with the latest BLS survey, perhaps I might want to message @JakeTheLadders only those coworkers that might find the survey interesting.

With 20MM users, the ball is in Twitter’s court. But the longer they wait, the greater the chance of a LinkedIn competitor emerging that satisfies a desire for a new kind of social segmentation. Oh that’s right, Yammer.