A global social network

Like most people I'm sure I find myself coming up with dozens of ideas for different websites. Useful little things that would really help me and, hopefully, other people. To date I've not developed the expertes to fully impliment and deply any of these, but I often find myself nether the less going through the whole design process. Practice makes perfect, right?

For almost every idea I find myself needing to impliment some social network or another. People need to be able to find friends, manage their status with them, apply some attributes to them, send them messages and interact with them in different ways. And every time I find myself thinking "Who is going to manage a social network just to send them a recipe/file/picture/phone number/whatever?". If it was a comprehensive, well built service like flickr, then yes. But for my little start up project? No.

And so every time I find myself wishing that there was a popular social network system with a decent API that lets me as a developer attribute the data I need and the user have the power of what information goes where, and who they are friends with and how.

Some websites allow you to enter your username and password for an IM account and it will find which of your contact list are already signed up to the service. Which is great for large websites, but not so much for smaller websites whom no-one trusts.

Some popular social networking sites provide an API to interface with their social networking system. Which is great, except I don't know of any that is used by any popular sites. While it is still a bonus that people who happen to use that site as they don't have to add their friends, everyone else does. I know a lot of people who don't have a myspace/facebook/flickr/lj. Why should I limit myself to only streamlining a small proportion?

Maybe I could use all the API's to allow the vast majority of users a streamlined experience. Which is currently the best solution I can think of. But this means a lot of work trying to find a way to integrate all these services.

Even then you are limited in what you can do. I have to impliment a large number of duplicate features outside of these services, such as PMing or any form of management with these services.

What would be really helpful is if someone could come along and design a service that allowed people to manage their social networks, as well as allowing developers to create their own services that interact securely with the social networks, sharing data and allowing the user to cut down on the amount of work they have to do managing their friends. Then they need to convince some big name players such as LJ, myspace and facebook to sign up.

A man can dream.