I broke my month-long boycott of Facebook today. Within 45 minutes, I scheduled my account for deletion. Good riddance, I say! Instead of using that turncoat social network that ignores the people who allow it to generate its revenue, I turn now to this site, the various services I use around the web, and last (but not least) FriendFeed, which does an excellent job of pulling it all together.

The next stop is more work on building a distributed social network, which will allow anyone with a website, anywhere, to connect with others as strongly as they can on the portal social networks. There’s already a lot of good work toward this goal out and available on the internet right now. The trick is to consolidate the various little projects into a cohesive whole, a suite of standards, specifications, and APIs that any site can provide.

The goal? To be able to use this suite to provide a look at any person in the distributed network, the way you want when you want, and the way they want the rest of the time. Confusing? Yes, at first. Think of it this way, though: When you look at a connection of yours on your site, their profile info would have a look matching your site, as your site is pulling the information it wants to display. When you go to your friend’s site, however, her information will appear in a way matching her site.

Actually, that’s just one example in an infinite sea of possibilities. Beyond the ability to link to other people and share information, social networking remains pretty nebulous (were it not, there would only be one). I’d love to get together with people interested in building the next wave, the distributed social network. Early December seems as good a time as any (I’d avoid November due to NaNoWriMo), and hosted here in Toronto. If you’re interested, let’s get something started!