My biggest concern with a lot of the technology that we have in place right now does, in fact, revolve around the issue of privacy. Of course, everyone is comfortable with their own level of privacy; however, I specifically remember whenever Facebook began to grow I became a little weary about having photos available online. This wasn’t because I had anything to hide, but it was because people in my extended network – people that are friends with my friends that I don’t even know – could see what I was doing. That doesn’t sit well with me, so I greatly welcomed the ability to maintain “friend lists” on Facebook. Essentially, these lists encapsulated exactly what I want out of my social networking services: control over the information that I publish and share.

To that end, I used to be pretty skeptical with all of the various network services that were popping up. It’s a bit overwhelming at first, but whenever you take time to educate yourself about the various services and what each offers, then, to me, it’s all about finding your niche. I’ve practically been absent from Facebook for months, but I use Twitter practically every hour simply because Twitter offers what I want out of a networking service – it’s not pictures and videos, but it’s short pieces of conversation, interesting links being shared from friends, and ways to connect with people that are involved in things I am interested in (be it music, software development, blogging, exercising, whatever).

Finally, the last thing I wanted to comment on was your thoughts about how far will we take social networking. If I recall correctly, Boost Mobile had a service that would allow your friends to see where you are (that annoying “Where you at??” slogan) that behaved very similar to what you’re talking about. Google Latitude now allows you to do a very similar thing. In my mind, we’ve got the crude building blocks in place to do exactly what you’ve discussed – at this point, it’s all about writing some software against the various APIs and publishing it to the desired platform. For example, write an application for Facebook that takes your status and applies it to your Google Latitude account which already notices where you are because of its native location-based service. Just a thought.

I guess the biggest thing is to make sure control over the information that’s published is left in the hands of the publishers – not the service providers.

Tom