Is it time for standards based Online Social Networks?

Recently there was an article in techcrunch on VisualPath, another online social networking site. Reading the article itself and the comments posted there, revealed some of the common issues/hurdles in moving real life relationships to online social networks.

Obviously there is a huge advantage in maintaining my personal and professional network online. Especially if it provides me way to remain in touch and find new contacts as I change jobs and travel to different countries. On a personal note, there is always that joy of getting back together with that classmate with whom I haven’t spoken in 20 years.

LinkedIn, Orkut, MySpace, VisualPath.. present a few attempts of moving the relationships online. Not to mention the emails that I have been getting recently from Namesdatabase or Tagged. Even though some of these have existed for years now, they don’t seem to have grown out of the infant stages. Even though, these services grow in number, they still remain attempts with glaring issues that make it hard to move relationships online.

Just thinking aloud, I wonder if the problems are technical or just the result of war between the software giants to attract user community into their own products. Doesn’t it seem similar to the browser war that made it difficult for the standards to be adopted.

Why can’t the online social networking service be similar to email service? What I mean by that is, I can be registered with my preferred email service provider and be able to send mails to friends or business contacts that use a different email service provider. Yes, email service is based on a standard protocol implementation. So, why not provide a standard for online profile.

Though, I have no solution to offer I strongly believe that the day is not too far when the Web (with its collective intelligence) will reach a stage when real relationships are effectively modeled in the Web (the result of collective intelligence). At least now we have OpenID that seems like a step closer, yet to be adopted by everyone…