Remember the Web, circa 1995? The “walled garden” portals such as AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy and GEnie were still going strong. Then this crazy thing called the Internet came along. In 1995, the Internet was pretty fringe. I remember going to one of the first “Internet World” conferences in 1993 and thinking: you know, there might be something to this Internet thing. But at that time commercial interests were strongly aligned with the more commercial online portals. Politicians in the U.S. were talking about building an information superhighway, but the prevailing wisdom of the time was that this would be realized through interactive television, following a similar business model to cable TV or the online portals. In these portals, you were able to send email, but only to people on the same system. If you wanted to consume content, play a game or buy something, you could do this only with commercial partners of the portal. If that model had won out, the information superhighway would let you buy a pizza from your TV, but only from pizza restaurants with agreed commercial contracts with your interactive television provider. But events were already in motion that would sweep those models away and would lead the birth of a new medium: the Web.

Fast forward nearly 20 years and I am getting the same feeling I had back in 1993. My spider-sense is tingling. That is because I see a similar pattern emerging in the growth of the so-called social web.

The growth and success of social media is clear. People want to make use of social media to share, communicate and collaborate. But these social services exist as islands on the Web. A Facebook user can’t “friend” someone on LinkedIn, send them a message or invite them to an event. If you can perceive the “status updates” of your friends across social networks it’s only because of pre-existing commercial partnerships. I can build my social graph in one place, but I can’t easily take that graph with me around the Web. The vision of the social Web is that all services you use on the Web should be able to have a social component, and that this social component should be open, as open as the Internet itself. It should be possible to create meaningful relationships between users of social systems with no a-priori knowledge of each other. For that to happen, social features need to become part of the plumbing of the Web.

This shift towards openness is already happening around us. The big social networks like Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn are in the process of opening up. An “Open Stack” of protocols and formats is emerging including Activity Streams, Portable Contacts, OpenSocial, Open Microblogging, OpenID, OAuth and XMPP. Last year, I helped to create something called the “Social Web Incubator Group” in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to study the emergence of the social web and come up with some concrete recommendations for aligning the standardization efforts in this space.

Meanwhile, Vodafone R&D has been working on some prototypes and projects that take social media and the social Web to the next level, projects which we will be talking about shortly on this blog. The first of these is OneSocialWeb, which is getting its first airing at the Fosdem open source conference in Brussels this weekend. More on that and our other social web projects soon.

Why should you care about any of this? Because even though the rise of social networks has already changed our experience of media and the way we communicate and share with each other, you ain’t seen nothing yet.