I saw some great discussion on Facebook answers by Mark Zuckerberg and Shervin Pishevar (two respected gurus). I had to weight in since this is an area that I’ve been research and developing products for close to a decade. It’s a great discussion that can provide a roadmap to the future. The world is changing and it’s very disruptive across both technical platforms and business models.

The discussion is What is Social Networking (implicitly the discussion in about the future). Here is great commentary by Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, Shervin Pishevar, founder of Social Gaming Network, and me John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE.com.

What is Social Networking?

Mark Zuckerberg founder of Facebook weights in:

I think that the future of social networking isn’t another website like Facebook, but instead that almost everything we do online will become social in some way.

For example, the last generation of games was played on Xbox and Nintendo, but many more people now play social games with their friends online. In the next few years, I think we’ll see social versions of every major application online — everything from shopping to news.

I basically think that almost every application is better when it’s designed to be used with your friends, so I’d bet that this will be a big trend in the development of social software and the internet over the next five years.

Shervin Pishevar founder of Social Gaming Network and angel investor writes

I would take it one step further from what @Mark Zuckerberg said. The future of all physical objects and locations is to be socially connected- a physical graph of interconnected objects and people and referenced with location, time and contextual relevance. So not only will everything online become social but everything offline will go online and become an important part of our social graphs. When 1) people, 2) places and 3) objects seamlessly become part of our social graph and experience we will reach optimal efficiency in searching, connecting, understanding and gaining further value from each others lives.

My Angle – It’s about new architectures, applications, and data ..

@Mark Zuckerberg and @Shervin Pishevar chat about what Social networking is. It’s about what the users want it to be with new data types that provide a sort of new way to provide contextual and behavioral “flavors of life”. As I say on my Facebook profile “the value of social networking is in the eye of the beholder”.

The value of social networking will be determined by the combination of the personal orientation of the individual + the overall aggregate data from their affinity around them (friends, family, news, events, etc). The selection or consumption of content (the interaction of the user) provides a new kind of “gestural” validation (or data) that increases the value over time. It’s a ongoing cycle or as I’ve blogged in the past – Innovation Cycle (as seen in the mobile and app market).

If the web page was web 1.0 then social is web 2.0 – the web page was dumb but the social web is smarter. With the new data types and constructs like graphs etc – we now can see the benefits of “meta reasoning” emerge. This is now happening and will happen for a sustained period and only get smarter.

With new data and meta reasoning the web is truly personalized and in a new way. Machines can become cognitive for individuals and provide benefits from real time to on demand. Obviously the new paradigm around mobile is a great proof point in this regard.

It’s just the beginning and will continue to disrupt from software applications to database architectures to network design and storage.

The future is unwritten. We cover this like a blanket here on SiliconANGLE.com and SiliconANGLE Labs where our motto has been since founding in 2009 – Where Computer Science meets Social Science.