What gets left in their wake is a a bunch of fledglings, many will die off, others will grow a little, and a select few who are able to find real solutions will mature.

Until that happens, it’s up to the users to be creative and find their own solutions. This example made my head spin:
http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/2250

Meanwhile, I’ve experimented with using IRC within a social network (Ecademy). It failed because IRC is too geeky for the mainstream. And web-embedded IRC clients are universally horrible. I’ve had much more success getting the members to use Skype Public Chats and while they are great they are also closed and stuck inside the Skype proprietary/architecture wall.

As for moving profile and friends data between social networks, good luck. I reckon OpenID profile exchange and sync is still at least 6 months away but it is coming. Sadly, FOAF is looking increasingly like a dead (write only data) end.

1. There is no way to establish identities across various networks. So when you sign up for the new Iguanaster.com social network, it has no way to know that you really are the “chris” from MySpace. This may be solved by OpenID, but there’s a long way to go.
2. There is no standard way of exchanging social network information. FOAF is the relevant standard, but no one seems to be doing it anymore. But more important is:
3. Terms of Service that prevent automated reading of data. So even if Iguanaster.com was willing and able to scrape your friendlist off MySpace, it simply isn’t allowed. Newer networks like those of del.icio.us and Twitter are open, so hopefully this trend is reversing.
[and... 4. It's just easier to build a site as a silo, so they do!]

Here at Lijit we pull together your various identities and the content you create, but with the more modest goal of making it all searchable. Our infrastructure also allows us to ingest multiple networks; right now this includes your blogroll and delicious networks.

In any case, our auto-identity finder is fun: http://www.lijit.com

(Love the chris.pirillo.com/live …. keep it going!)

On one hand a lot of community sites are aiming to bring people together around a central theme or idea. myspace.com was all about music, corkd.com is all about wine-lovers, giveness.com is all about those that want to give to a charity while shopping (cool idea by the way). Keeping that focus helps your chances of connecting with like-minded people. It also means you can offer tools that are unique to that focus, like corkd’s ability to recommend wines or giveness’s ability to suggest products to buy via Amazon, which in turn benefits a charity.

Once you make those connections though you are now left with that communications issue. You already have a blog, a comment system, three IM names, two IRC channels and 8 forums you watch… now you have yet another set to monitor? That also means more passwords, more user names, more sites to remember.

I feel RSS has been a great step towards a more interoperable web, there are many sites I’d never visit if it wasn’t for having an RSS feed. What we really need is an IM and commenting backbone similar to RSS. Something vendor agnostic and simple. While I’m a huge fan of IRC it’s something only a very, very small percentage of the social networking crowd even knows about. Plus, setting up an IRC server isn’t nearly as easy as setting up a comment feed or even grabbing an off-the-shelf live chat package. I notice a lot of sites allow you to list your Yahoo, Messenger, ICQ, AIM, or (network of choice) user name, yet those only facilitate one to one communication.

Twitter could probably come close to a new type of backbone, as it’s basically the MySpace commenting system minus the actual MySpace. The biggest issue of course with Twitter is that it’s, well, Twitter. It’s a site, not a standard, so at any time they can decide to start charging, block their network to outside users, crash or get bought-out.

Hmmm…

Jaiku is helping by aggregating your various sources together, but still….