Join me tomorrow, May 22nd at noon Eastern Time in a Skypecast for a discussion of "Skype and the social mesh. How can we make Skype more social?" I'm going to keep my fingers crossed for whether it's really going to work.

If I have to join one more "social" group or build one more list of "friends" I think I'm going to scream. I already have MySpace, Twitter, Xing, Gather, FriendFeed, and of course Facebook where whenever I do anything like join a subgroup or establish a connection with somebody it becomes news for all the other people who claim to be my "friends". I feel sorry for them for my lack of discretion. Endlessly, we are querried with "What are you doing now?" or "What's your mood?" Well hey, I'm sitting here in my pajamas waiting for my dog to die. Satisfied?

Seriously, every time I blink it seems somebody wants me to join another social network like LinkedIN. Enough is enough. What would be the point if the feeds and threads of conversation of even the most illustrious persons or family members I might choose to follow are no more illuminating or less banal than "I'm going to go take a shower now." There is such a thing as too much information, and OMG why don't they just partner-up with each other so that joining one is tantamount to joining all?

The social model these new services offer is vastly different from the social model that preceded it in Internet history. The new social model is one in which you acquire "friends" and then the threads of conversation that you can see or join are generated from those relationships. Participation is usually offered on an all-or-nothing basis where granting status as "friend" is giving an opportunity to expose every thread one's consciousness... and there are very few spam filters.

The Internet's older social model, if you want to call it that, is one in which you join a defined thread of conversation such as a mailing list or a public Skype chat and then if you wish you can contact individuals in that conversation as need or opportunity arises. All things considered, I sometimes think I prefer the older model. Maybe it's just because I'm old, but it seems to offer safer and less frenetic social connections. The "cc" line of an email, Usenet and Mailing lists were an invitation to a conversation but not necessarily an invitation to intimacy. They became somewhat more social with services like Googlegroups and Yahoogroups because then you could exchange files or open up "instant messaging" threads. But the concept was the same.... topic centric as opposed to "friend" centric.

The problem with the old model was that you couldn't easily follow a participant from one conversational thread to another, so it wasn't really a social model at all. It was a learning model, and it was very good at distributing information. Social networks like Facebook are trying to duplicate that informational efficiency with interest-oriented subgroups and with applications.

The early joiners to Facebook were school kids. They met each other in class or on ball fields or in summer camp, and when they changed their physical social environment by going from highschool to college and then to their first job, the relationships multiplied and became a rich social fabric. Facebook and its clones were merely the means by which the social fabric was maintained. That generation of kids is all the better for it. Hurrah for them.

The question I have is whether members of my generation will ever use these social networks in the way our children do. Can they ever become a natural extension of our regular lives, or are we just going to use them to look for love and money in all the wrong places as it were? The social fabric they offer us is too often a thin content-free veil, polluted with spam or even fraud and rarely able to offer a framework for learning or valuable communication.

So what's the answer? As we all know, the most intricate and rich communication environment on the planet is Skype. This will sound horribly grandiose, but I propose that Skype, with its secure, reliable, and seamless integration of text, voice, video, filesharing, screensharing, payments, and more should become the center of new social order on the Internet.

In this Skype utopia, let's have a system where people can join public Skype chats or Skypecasts in order to familiarize themselves with the content and the participants of these public conversations. And lets then allow people to follow a participant from one public conversation to another as a function of getting to know the person before actually becoming his "friend". And lets expand the Skype "profile" to accommodate (optionally) more types of information, more links, and embedded files. If Skype itself won't do that, then let's create a web-based alternative to the Skype profile, one that has all the rich information, plus links into other networks. And let's create gadgets whereby an individual can aggregate all his public skype messaging into an RSS feed, possibly via Twitter.

One man's dream.