It does not matter whether their users number 1 or 100 million, whether their niche is live video or texting or even if their demographic is serious post graduate networkers or precocious tweens exclaiming 'OMFG did you see what happened on Gossip Girl'. All social networks once stripped of their layers can be distilled to one governing raison d'être 'No man is an island'. They are the global village, the small world or what have you to the nth degree. But while they purport to be connecting the world these builders of bridges were themselves locked into a mode of operation which confined them and their subjects in isolated citadels that discouraged interaction and forced users to start from the ground up if they wanted to join another different social community. It sort of defeated the whole purpose, creating massive isolated islands in a sea of social discourse. But it seems the times are changing, the drawbridges descending: the notion that one has to log onto each individual site in order to access specific parts of your social life is giving way to a new web based paradigm. Three of the big guns, Facebook, MySpace and Google, have all made moves in the same direction announcing very similar developments for the coming weeks which will change the rules of the game.

MySpace, the doyenne of social networks accounting for nearly 74% of all traffic to such sites according to Web intelligence firm Hitwise, announced on May 7 that it will make it easier for users to share data with other sites. Their 'Data Availability' initiative allows members to make their profile info accessible from eBay, Twitter, Yahoo and Photobucket. Ostensibly the goal is to give users more control over their info by letting them choose what can be shared and with whom. From one place they can manage their stats, photos, videos, music and other tidbits that they would ordinarily have to update and post on each service they are enrolled in. MySpace would serve as a sort of mission control for their online activity and all changes they make there will be reflected on the partner sites.

For example the MySpace Data Availability tools would enable users to flesh out their universal Yahoo or eBay user profile with data from their MySpace and in addition their default Yahoo Messenger settings would take a cue from the preferences on their MySpace interests and music. If they were also on the SMS based service Twitter their friends could be updated as to their whereabouts and get more profile info than is currently available.

A day later, following on the heels of MySpace's announcement, came the announcement of 'Facebook Connect'. Facebook is the second largest social network with 15% of the pie; there are currently 24,000 Facebook applications, 350,000 developers on the platform, and 70 million users who have installed an app. Touted as the next phase for developers of applications for the open Facebook Platform, or the new version of their API for third-party websites, it will enable developers to build apps that connect to Facebook from other sites and enable users to port their identity, photos and friends list securely to these other Web sites while retaining control over what data is being shared. This secure sync of Facebook profiles with any partner Web site lacked only one thing at the time the announcement was made: more official partner websites.

Users will have the same kind of control as they have for applications on the Facebook Platform, meaning they will have total control of the permissions granted, dictating whether sites that agree to host Facebook data get to see basic profile information, including users' pictures, names, friends and photos. Users will also have the ability to authenticate, enable and connect their account to an outside web partner without compromising their privacy. User-generated news site Digg is an initial partner; using the new service a Facebook user can, for example, easily see on Digg.com which stories his or her Facebook friends dug.

Not to be outdone Google, which last month beat Yahoo! as the number 1 American web destination, jumped into the fray with Friend Connect which aims to help users add social features to ordinary websites without the need to write code or to become social networks themselves. It also gives them access to other applications developed through the OpenSocial initiative. Visitors to a Friend Connect enabled site will be able to view, add and interact with existing friends on hi5, Orkut or Google Talk (originally Facebook was among the partner sites). According their press release 'any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming; picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community'.

Friend Connect uses OpenID, oAuth and Open Social to let users log in to their favorite apps using a trusted ID provider and then access their friend info from those apps while on another website. This could be any website that has integrated tools from the Friend Connect gallery and pasted the iframe code onto their page. Without the need to become actual social networks, sites can have the same social and interactive features which form the backbone of the Web 2.0 movement. This means more compelling content, more engaging user experiences, and increased traffic and lingering time on a destination site – all of which translates hopefully to more advertising dollars. What is of interest to advertisers – because let's be honest it is all about ads in the end – is that it frees their brands from the confines of a single network allowing them to jump from Twitter to MySpace to Yahoo making for more efficient dissemination of a message. Also using technology like Google's Friend Connect, advertisers will be able to easily integrate social tools into branded websites. As with the other data portability solutions users can share their activities on Friend Connect sites among their social networks. The service launches with a couple of prefab applications such as ratings and posts with more to come.

All this sharing of information raises the ugly head of data exposure and privacy, reflecting the on-going debates about OpenID. Facebook for one is being particularly careful with authentication and stressed that user security will be of utmost. And with good reason; the company does not want a repeat of the public relations disaster that arose from its mishandling of the Beacon advertising launch. Hence the suspension of Google's Friend Connect access to Facebook user info citing violation of its privacy policy. According to a statement on Facebook's Developer page Friend Connect allegedly redistributes user info to other third-party developers without the user's knowledge in direct violation of Facebook’s privacy standards. It goes on to state that this is a temporary situation and will be lifted as soon as Google complies with their TOS. A further olive branch is the assurance that they are in talks with the search giant and hope that users will soon be allowed to share data when and where they choose to do so. MySpace says its initiative is an opt-in feature, but admits that data portability tools may create new ways for less scrupulous members of the online community to misrepresent themselves and conceal their identities while targeting their victims.

The data portability push is in response to site owners’ complaints of the difficulty in becoming social friendly. Though all three companies now belong to The Data Portability Working Group, an alliance whose stated goal is to create an interoperable social Web based on common, open standards, they developed their solutions independently of each other. They all suggest what many technorati have long predicted: that social media services would spread throughout the web rather than stay self contained. So while in some aspects the big three may still be playing a cloak and dagger game of spy vs. spy against each other in this capacity they are on the same wavelength. The Berlin Wall came down and ended the cold war so one can only hope that scaling the walls around social networks may usher in a similarly new era in Web 2.0.