I think somewhere along the way I had misunderstood the whole social networking software movement. I had been thinking that all of the applications were trying to run oneservice that everyone would sign up for, but the recent proliferation of services makes it clearer what’sactually going to happen.

In the future, everyone will have his or her ownsocial software application, and then try sending out invitations to their friends to have them join it. Everyone’s worried about the services being centralized, but with five billion of them sprouting up, we’ll becompletely decentralized. It’ll be just like our email address books!