Murray Turoff wrote:
The standard design philosophy currently being used in many social network systems is to encourage the user to sign into the site and duplicate functions like exchanging messages in different formats.
The duplication goes beyond message formats and exchange -- one may have different image or video collections, identities/profiles, reputations (formal and informal), etc. in each system. Perhaps we will see standards that let us abstract this sort of thing and associate it with a user independent of the system being used.
The addition of groups that social networks finally recognized (they existed in some systems in the 70's) as a key valuable addition to communication systems will spread and be better integrated in message services.
I used EIES in the 1970s -- a group of around a dozen people conducted a "Teleconference on Teleconferencing" over a period of several months, but, as I recall, EIES was a "walled garden." In what ways did it interoperate with other BBS or messaging systems? (There weren't many things to interoperate with in those days :-). Larry Press