Michael Clark has written up some fascinating ideas about the need for more open social networks. While I agree that this an extremely important area, I’m a little more concerned by the fact that social networking sites don’t have much incentive to share.

I’m reminded of the fact that it took (in the web world equivalent anyway) a long, long time for Microsoft and Yahoo! to allow users to start sharing contacts on their instant messaging platforms. I certainly applaud both companies for making the move — but there are still many other instant messaging platforms that aren’t part of the Microsoft-Yahoo! interoperability framework.

There are lots of very legitimate reasons for this — privacy being the number one concern as Michael points out. I don’t necessarily want some shady upstart instant messaging program having all my vital data. Yet privacy shouldn’t be something we have to sacrifice in order for interoperability to work.

The ‘just another social network’ phenomenon, however, has another twist to it. Those that run these social networks are only secondarily concerned about openness, and in fact, more concerned about competition. While a site like Facebook doesn’t really have much in the way of major competitors, this only encourages more niche sites to form.

For example, sites like LinkedIn offer the professional social networking take on things, and it seems that lately, there’s a social network for almost everything. Yet like most things web, standards are usually set after the fact. Let’s just hope that principle of openness doesn’t get lost along the way.