First off, I'll state that I'm not getting onto the "let's tear down Facebook bandwagon". I have a tempered attitude towards the changing SocNet landscape (as much as I do enjoy a well placed tirade). There are a lot of people predicting Facebook and Zuckerberg's demise, but the fact is there are a lot of smart parties at that table with an interest in not imploding. It's not just Zuckerberg's to lose. I'd rather talk about more fundamental forces, largely external to Facebook and the other SocNets, that will contribute to change.

In short, I believe that SocNets have acted as the training wheels for social networking. They have allowed us to see the value, explore the possibilities and develop the foundation for a broader and distributed social network and online experience in general. We're about ready to take off the training wheels and begin riding like big kids.

There are a slew of trends driving us towards this new social order. Some standouts:

privacy awareness - ISP-level behavioral tracking was first and now consumer advocacy groups and the U.S. government are looking to tackle the rest... this along with high profile media storms, will force users from their natural complacency and drive this as a material issue,

data awareness - as we see the decoupling of media and data in online advertising (enabled by exchanges, DSPs and data vendors). People are becoming increasingly aware of the value of pervasiveness of their data as well (NYT article),

an online experience increasingly dominated by apps - Facebook got this rolling and the iPhone really drove it home,

and even some inter-platform discord - Google's PageRank potentially upset by Facebook's Like button (CNN article).

In concert, we find some key enablers for change... a maturing cloud and app infrastructure, a variety of open standards and trusted online payment platforms.

I'm sure there are a bunch of grass roots groups looking to provide frameworks to decentralize social networking - the Diaspora Project (donate now) has gained some attention over the last week and express the core philosophy very clearly and succinctly. But there will be more to this story. Where things finally settle will be a fusion of these exciting ideas with an economic model that works. And I think the most game changing aspects will emerge at this interface.

A couple of questions come to mind for me: what will this sea change look like and how will we get there? I'll make a few suggestions in this post and may flesh them out in future posts. One thing I'm quite confident about is the central roles data and the user will play. In order for this to work, the freshly privacy aware user must control and feel confident that their data is theirs - we all get that. But the really critical piece will be how the user is motivated to be a cooperative player in the economic ecosytstem they have been largely kept out of. We have kept the users in a childlike state as this ad-based economy swirls about them. They like free, but they hate ads.

It's time to bring them into the fold. They are the missing link. We need to pull the wool from over their eyes and make them full members of this currently unholy trinity (content, consumer, advertiser).

The first step, as noted, is giving the user control over his or her data - UGC and behavioral. The second will be to give them an incentive to relinquish and replenish that data. That incentive will come at a certain loss of innocence. The user will come to realize that nothing is truly free. The trick will be to find the right balance between what to give up and what there is to be gained. Definitely some precedents for this kind of user engagement from social media virtual currency to youtube's advertising share with creators.

So as a data vendor, I'm not thinking about how to bridge the advertiser and the publisher (who currently controls the data). I'm thinking about how to bridge the advertiser and the user (who creates the data). Whatever comes of Facebook's privacy fiasco, the gears are in motion... data to the people!