You are already forced to trust your email provider so there would not be any further privacy concerns with such a solution.

Otherwise I agree with the obvious choice of protocol stack that Google is advocating.

semanticmail.org

It is easy to agree on the argument that companies are creating silos. Of course they are since fundamental drivers for business is to win market place with their offering. For some reason these silos are considered as bad thing. As an solution, for alleged problem of silos or “total domination”, web community is trying to standardize the social networks.

To me it does not make too much sense. Social (Inter)networks are places where people communicate and have conversations in context of the Social Network. Analog of early days of mobile communication where people could not call from one cellular carrier to other have nothing to do with social (Inter)network world. You can join almost any community if you want you. More proper analogue can be found from social (realworld)networks.

You are most likely to have totally different type of conversations with your friends 2AM in night club than with the same people during coffee break on a working day. There is no need to standardize and have means of transferring all conversations, actions, status updates, of previous evening of Night Club social (realworld) network to Work social (realworld)network. “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”.

In a similar manner there is no real(time) need to share conversation of Facebook “cocktail party” social (Inter)network to LinkedIn “work place” social (Inter)network. Social network is a place. Some stuff is relevant only in certain places.

Clubs, restaurants, work places, parks, public places and private places are de facto silos. It is not bad thing to have clubs, everyone is not interested in hanging in a park, some of us want to go to slow food restaurant for others faster is just ok. No standards are needed, just freedom to select where to communicative, where to have conversations.

And yes if you want to have conversation with tribe man in Congo silos can do that as well. Just enter the Tribe silo and keep the conversation live.

As last: My contribution to social network silos is an other short url generator http://1d.fi this time dedicated for sharing the location. This entry was written here: http://1d.fi/19M2rXREUm

J.A

Perhaps it looks like a Usenet store and forward model, and a user subscribes to a social aggregator service as part if their Internet service. Perhaps Google has addressed this.

“The best way to get a sense of where the Buzz API is heading is to take a look at http://code.google.com/apis/buzz/. You’ll notice that the “coming soon” section mentions a ton of protocols—Activity Streams, Atom, AtomPub, MediaRSS, WebFinger, PubSubHubbub, Salmon, OAuth, XFN, etc.

What it doesn’t talk much about is Google. That’s because the goal isn’t Google specific at all. The idea is that someday, any host on the web should be able to implement these open protocols and send messages back and forth in real time with users from any network, without any one company in the middle.”

It’s worth reading the whole conversation thread.

I’m very keen on the technical aspect of this (well, I’m supposed to be if I don’t want my PhD advisor to kill me for never fininsh that little projet) — but I love how you seemlessly connected it to translating features, and I’m eager to see Open Standards for translation too.

What would be cool is that you actually find an innocent victim of that idea (if it could be some obscure Asian language site, all the better) to demonstrate both that your intentions are to turn Social Web into somethign as diverse as e-mail clients, and that they’ll be great surprises on the way.

Don’t forget the later part for Open Standard: cooperation and non-zero-sum-game are great, but surprise is the magic spark that will help us sell the story to mean finite-game VCs.