Social Networking Interconnects

To date, most social networks have been silos. You go to MySpace or Facebook or LinkedIn to connect to your social networks. But these social networks don’t really exist outside of those domains, except via email alerts.

Longtime readers know that I’ve been a huge fan of MyBlogLog because it allows me to create a social network around my blog (which is now 674 members and growing every day).

I’ve also been a huge fan of last.fm because it connects to my iTunes and uses my music listening habits to form my social network.

And, of course, I have last.fm and MyBlogLog widgets on my left sidebar to connect my blog with these services.

But in the past 24 hours, I’ve taken it a step further. I’ve added last.fm and MyBlogLog to my MySpace page. Now you can also join my MySpace community via MyBlogLog instead of via friending me on MySpace. That’s pretty cool and is the latest feature in a string of new features that MyBlogLog is rolling out. You can also see my most recently played tracks on my MySpace page via last.fm, something I’ve had on this blog for the past year.

Steve Poland talked about this over the weekend at TechCrunch and called last.fm and MyBlogLog his "favorite web services". I agree with Steve, they are both doing some very interesting things.

Some people think of last.fm and MyBlogLog as "social networking for adults". And I agree with that. But I don’t think that’s going to be the case much longer. Last.fm has taken off among my kids, the Facebook and MySpace crowd. They love checking out what their friends are listening to, recommending new stuff, and listening to neighbor and similar artist radio.

The question is whether MyBlogLog will be next. Will the teen crowd decide that a "portable" MyBlogLog community is better than their friends list on MySpace? Will the ability to see who is reading your MySpace profile page at that moment be a hit with the MySpace crowd? Not sure. But it’s possible.

I do know one thing. MyBlogLog seems to be taking off. The number of contact requests I am getting via MyBlogLog is going up every day. I don’t think the MySpace widget is the reaason, but it surely doesn’t hurt.

What this all points to is the de-portalization of social networks (hate to use that word again, can’t someone come up with something better?). We are seeing services build interconnects between social networks. That’s an important trend and I think we are just at the beginning of it.

#VC & Technology