Why did everyone jump on the myspace/facebook bandwagon? Because the Internet is great, but fundamentally we’re all people who like to relate to other people. Myspace made it easy for someone to create an “identity” for themselves on the net, without having to know how to set up a website. Facebook made it even easier and brough Web 2.0 cleanliness and speediness, with the ability to share short updates and comment on everything.

At base, both are simply a way for people to 1) set up a unique identity on the net to associate with everything, and 2) connect with other verified identities. And 3) not have to worry about updating information on those other identities – in other words, it’s like a big, shared address book where you don’t have to manage the contact info of everyone you know, because they all do it for you.

Unfortunately, all these advances require you to sign up with a specific company, and hope that you’re with the most popular one so you are connected to all the people you want to be connected with. Whereas, with email, it’s a commodity standard. There’s nothing exciting about it. You can go to any service provider anywhere and get email and an address book. And for Instant Messaging, there at least *exists* an open standard, Jabber, which Google uses for their chat network.

So. OK, how would one take the advances that social networking sites like Facebook have given us, and make them a commodity standard that you can obtain from any service provider?

1) advanced email with modern speed, interactivity, chat and commenting … OK, well, Google Wave seems to have that covered, being an open protocol that will be able to be installed and run anywhere, just like email servers are today. And it seems some of the complained-about features could be turned off, like “see others type,” etc.

OK, but if I still have to manage my contacts list, how do I really interact with other verified identities? How do you have a sense of a shared space of friends and acquaintances that reflects the real world?

2) distributed, shared addressbook with OpenID identities … in other words, let’s say you’re using Google Wave in five years. You have an account with your ISP (Time Warner, AOL, whatever), and they provide email, except now it’s a Google Wave server. But what to do about that static Contacts list?

Let’s say it’s really an “Internet Friends List” and that you add people to it by adding their OpenID rather than just their email address. You add the OpenID, and your Friends List verifies the ID with their OpenID service, and lets them know. They likely do the same, and you’re linked. Now whenever they move or need to update stuff, they just do it locally, it propagates via the OpenID service, and you don’t even notice.

Something like this is, lo and behold, in development as “Knowee,” and while I’m sure there will be others and maybe Google will come up with something of their own (or just buy something like Knowee), it’s a sign that it’s an obvious idea whose time is coming.

Just like on facebook today, except, you can use whatever providers you want for the Wave interface, your OpenID, and your friends can all use whoever they want, and no one has everyone’s information. And we’re all chatting and inviting and posting pictures and commenting, etc.

OK, well, no one has everyone’s information, except Google, that is, because Google knows everything and always will.

And there’s still one issue … on facebook, if you want to find that long lost friend, you just search for their identity on facebook. But what would you do to find someone for your contacts list? Well, in the old days, we’d just Google to find someone, and it generally worked. But perhaps there will be a way to search OpenIDs for people at some point. Hmm.