I've been thinking lately about what might happen in future of the world of things such as Facebook. The site is now incredibly popular, and used by a majority of my friends. We communicate on it (despite my preferring bog standard email) a fair amount. I think that it's actually a great thing, as it allows you to keep in touch with people in a more fluid way that avoids the kind of "I really must write back to them" thing which I always used to have with my French pen-friend.

But where next for the Facebook crowd? I really find it hard to believe that the site will continue for ever, and when the next thing does come along, will we all have to rebuild our networks somewhere else? I had an interesting conversation with Simon "Sixball" Hammond recently, in which he expressed a preference that ideally all this kind of communication took place via a medium which was owned and controlled by yourself. I agree. I'm one of those people who always keeps emails (I have them going back to 1998), and can easily reference a conversation or find out when the last time I emailed someone was. This is one of the reasons why I don't like Facebook - all my messages to people are on someone else's machine somewhere, and I can't get at them easily to archive them. If Facebook went bust, it's all lost to me. With this in mind, I was interested to read this blog post, suggesting that the functionality of Facebook (and I suppose Flickr, LinkedIn and the rest) will eventually mature into open protocols. For the less techy minded, this means that the choice of service provider, or where the data is hosted doesn't matter, rather like email. In other words, choose the photo sharing site you like best, or host your own, and you can still share, communicate and engage with everyone else.

Open protocols are indeed great, but what happens when they become "too" popular, if such a thing exists? As with many other computer-literate folk, I have a loathing for HTML formatted email. I won't get into all the details of it here (I'm sure a search of my contributions from my email address on gmane.org would show up my thoughts on the matter), however I also stumbled upon this blog post today entitled "Email Is Not A Platform For Design". The author provides a rather different take on the usual argument about the use of what is one of the internet's most mature protocols.

So, is the future of all our favourite Web 2.0 start-ups indeed a convergence into open protocols? I certainly hope so. And if so, will they be used as intended? Furthermore, in an open and organic online world does it matter?