For those who aren’t rabid Mozilla users, Mozilla Messaging has landed. This sub-org of Mozilla dedicated, at first, to Thunderbird is potentially able to kick Facebook right in the client. The implications of this are pretty enormous. I’ve said to several people over the last couple years that the one key technology that everyone seems to overlook insofar as innovation is email. It occupies a majority of people’s internet existence and its interactive framework set the precedent for all the social networks and other applications we’ve seen so far. Social networking apps like Facebook essentially reposit and make public your contact list - this contact list plugs into several other application that provide service - but the most important being text-based communication!
Thunderbird has the potential to complete disrupt this by eliminating the centrality of a website and allowing all Thunderbird clients to communicate in a P2P network. So people on your Thunderbird list can have access to the same functionality as Facebook but it has the advantage of a dedicated local client to leverage all the capabilities available to say Outlook or iTunes. I realize Flock sort of does that by integrating access to several networks. The key difference is that Flock accesses proprietary systems whereas Thunderbird implements open protocols (IMAP and POP3).
By essentially eliminating the need for a single monolithic middle-man we could have many social network service providers being able to integrate seemlessly with a variety of clients - the most viable and advanced being of course Thunderbird.
Mozilla could literally become the market leader in social networks by integrating open standards into its communication tool Thunderbird.
Social networks don’t dictate WHAT you send, they structure TO WHOM you communicate with. Thunderbird has handled email very well and Thunderbird 3.0 looks to improve on it immensely by adding calendaring (a major reason I still use Outlook and Evolution).
OpenSocial provides some impetus but it’s still built around the idea of a centralized network authority that enforces and reposits the social connections of its users, it’s the identity authority. If instead users could use a single identity integrated into Thunderbird to access a myriad social network services that share a common identity protocol (say, OpenID) we could kiss the days of ad-driven, profit focused crapware systems like Facebook goodbye.
If Thunderbird implemented systems for say, trust or interest networks, you could have information intelligently self-disseminate! Now THAT would be incredible - the information that I’m interested finds ME!
PS - I’ve reclaimed by blog from my server’s auto-blog roller. I’m using WordPress 2.4 and hope to upgrade to 2.5 ASAP. Various widgets will be finding their way onto my index page - enjoy.