Competition is healthy. This is the idea that capitalism is or or less based on.

The idea is that if there are two companies competing for customers or sales, they’ll keep on trying to out do each other — in the end giving the consumer the best possible result Of course, not everything quite works out the way its planned. There’s trusts, there’s price fixing, and there’s a million other things wrong with an Ayn Randian capitalism.

However, the basic idea still applies — competition will help keep the companies in a field innovative and and on its toes. The lack of competition allows companies to rest and to possibly provide a less-than-optimal produce. The companies, however, would like nothing better than to have zero competition and not have to worry about anyone else stealing their customer. The average person, though, should like competition.

So the problem with Facebook, and social networks in general, is that the nature of the businesses tend to stifle competition. People are attracted to the networks with the most people and tend to avoid the networks that have less people, thus maximizing their chances of finding friends that use the network. This difference in attraction just keeps on snowballing until, finally, one network dominates the others. We see this today with Facebook and how everybody uses it while relatively few people use other networks. In addition, the snowballed difference makes it hard for other people to get into the game. We saw this when Google Plus flopped, despite it having many solid features that rivaled that of Facebook.

The question is, is it possible to make a online social network that can encourage competition?

This would be greatly beneficial for the consumer in that Facebook would have to be more careful in the changes they push out and force them to continuously try to out do their competitors.

One way to encourage competition is to have all the potential social networks share common data about users — that is, the website we visit would become merely different skins for a unified set of data. It is somewhat similar to email in that the protocol is all the same, but we can use the technology through many sites.

Thus, your photos, your friends, and your personal info will all be stored in some universal form, allowing all your friends using different front-end websites to see your profile.

This idea even has the added benefit of allowing researchers an easier way to gather and use data. Of course, it has the downsides of possibly being more vulnerable to privacy issues and forcing social network sites to find a new revenue streams.

It turns out, there was actually an effort to do a similar thing earlier. OpenSocial. Unfortunately, it seems that it never really got off the ground, possibly because Facebook was already too popular.

You can find more info about open social here, at their http://docs.opensocial.org/display/OS/Home.