So why have I been thinking about social networking again this week? Oh, I don't know. Partly, I suppose, because all those end-of-year lists are starting to come out, and the subject has made so many of them in terms of 'tech things most talked about,' 'tech things most improved,' 'tech things most becoming a part of the public's lives,' etc. And it's partly because I find myself starting to use the instant-message (or IM) capabilities of my cellphone more and more; the last three people I've gotten together with, in fact, I communicated with mostly through IM instead of voice, which is an unusual but growing thing not only for me but for a lot of Americans. (And by the way, I always laugh when I see blogs confusedly asking why Americans haven't adopted IM nearly as quickly as Europeans have. The answer is real simple, people - voice rates for cellphones are 600 percent higher in Europe than in America, because the governments there still own the phone companies and can charge whatever the hell they feel like. So Europeans have had to adopt IM faster than us solely for financial reasons - that's it, no more complicated explanation needed.)

And I also admit, I got into a conversation the other day about my goofy little Jason Pettus Instant Locator™ (or JPIL), found elsewhere on this page if you're reading this from the website or mobile version - about what a fun little addition to the site she thought it was, even if on its own it wasn't worth visiting, and how she wished I would post just a little more photos there than I do. And I agree, it is a fun little thing to have, because it's so easy to do from my mobile device, so inspires me to just put up fun little photos and updates whenever I find myself in front of something interesting, 24 hours a day. And it really has worked a couple of times now as the joke title suggests, with a friend seeing I'm at a particular coffeehouse, for example, and being by the coffeehouse themselves, and popping in expressly because they knew I was there.

And this is the part I find most interesting about the various social networks I belong to - the endless Dodgeballs and 360s and Friendsters and MyTribes and MySpaces and PixPulses, some of which are genuinely kinda cool and some of which are uninspiring - is the ability for you to broadcast little updates via IM from your phone, and have them instantly sent to the cellphones of all your opt-in friends, via IM as well. What a fantastic thing that I so utterly wish I had had as an undergraduate, man! Take this, for example - that at the city where I went to school (Columbia, Missouri), for some reason there was this really long, really well-established tradition of going out on Wednesday nights, so much so that the bars and clubs were more crowded then than on weekends, meaning that all of us went out as well. And current undergraduates don't need to be reminded of this, of course, but maybe old fogies like me do, that a big college night to go out doesn't just consist of going out - we would all get started at like fuckin' 8:00 back then, starting to hang out at each other's places in small groups, drinking and toking and listening to the college radio station (KCOU, invariably being DJed by a friend), the host of the get-together trying on outfits and all of us giving critiques. Then finally around 10:30 or 11, when you're already half-lit and have been hanging out with friends for three hours, would you go out to the clubs, and drink a lot more and hop from place to place and dance and flirt and all the crap that goes with a college night out. And then after the bars closed we would shuffle from sidewalk to sidewalk, desperately trying to find out about a post-bar party, and then we'd hear of one and head there, and it'd be either fake or real, at which point you'd drink and smoke and dance and flirt some more.

So how great would it have been back then to have an IM-based social network, which could've enhanced all these different points in the evening? It'd all start in the late afternoon, for example, right after classes, when you might post a message that says, "I'm having people over tonight for a pre-Dance-Party thing, BYOB." And of the 75 or so people in your direct and enhanced network who receive that message, maybe ten decide to come to your place for the thing; and you all laugh and toke and drink and whoop it up, and of course all of you are running around taking photos of yourselves on your cellphone cameras and sending them back and forth with all the other little groups of ten people currently dotting the city. Then all the little groups finally meet up at the clubs, more synchronized this time now of course because of the IMs, and you spend the evening snapping little photos and sending little updates from bar to bar, and already beginning to discuss where the after-bar party might be, and flirt with strangers across the room via cellphone chat. And then of course the bars would close, which is where maybe the social network becomes its most valuable; a lot more talk about where the after-bar parties might be, actual photos from the party location, to prove either it's real or fake, little multimedia updates back and forth if (God forbid) there were two or more parties on the same night (which would sometimes happen, especially on big weekends like Homecoming).

In fact, about the only thing I don't like about social networking is the centralized nature of it all, because that takes all the fun out of it; because let's face it, it sucks to have to maintain six or seven different accounts at six or seven different centralized networks, which is what you by nature have to do if you want to reach 100 percent of your friend base. How great would it be, for example, to create an account in Friendster, and to have that account automatically be detected and instantly adaptable into the networks of Dodgeball, MySpace, MyTribe, 360, PixPulse and all the others? And I admit, the creation of the JPIL was not just a fun experiment, but also a working prototype for exactly the sort of thing we're talking about - a decentralized social-networking system, each account individually hosted by a different personal blog or other website, connected through powerful technology that already exists. And so far it seems to be working, and I'm wondering when it might be that others start picking up on the idea.

The "idea," of course, is to tie the whole thing together with RSS, which of course is a perfect technology for linking together social networks. Because it's an open format, first of all - anyone can adopt it, anyone can build software for it, anyone can build hardware for it if they so wanted (as that widely-forwarded RSS toilet-paper dispenser joke last week proved). Second, it's free - developers don't have to pay a licensing fee to build the software, so can release the software for free as well, which most do. And third, it has a wide adaptability - it can be sent to a news reader, it can be sent to your email account, it can be sent to a desktop Widget (like Mac Dashboard, Yahoo Konfabulator, Google Desktop, etc), it can even be sent directly to a cellphone through its IM capabiliities. And so an Instant Locator (or IL) is at its heart nothing more than a blog, with its ability to accept text and multimedia files, with an RSS feed chugging along; it's simply presented to the public in a different way than a blog usually is.

Now, granted, the IL as it currently exists is still a little technical in nature, and maybe not all of you would know enough about programming to put one together at your own blog. But what if you could get one of the major type engines out there to adopt it? What if LiveJournal or TypePad or Blogger, for example, suddenly gave all its members the power to add an IL to their account, and with just three or four steps have not only your cellphone married to it but a small display and RSS feed showing at your blog page? I bet a lot of you would adopt it, right? In fact, let's say that the 50 or so people I'm connected to right now through all my various networks all decided to close down their network accounts and start an IL instead at their personal site. All I'd have to do, then, is one afternoon run around to those sites for one time only, and type my cellphone's SMS address into the RSS subscription window; and then suddenly I'm having all the real-time text and multimedia from those ILs coming in to my phone, just like it was before when we were all belonging to all these different services. And then I could just continue sending out updates through my own IL (the JPIL, that is) and have it reach everyone in my system at once, versus transmitting it six or seven different times before, in the six or seven different proprietary ways each former network demanded.

And even cooler, this is a lot more adaptable than previous centralized systems, to tailor it for the specific way that specific person likes to receive information. If you hate all those fucking IMs always coming into your phone, for example (and I admit, even I get a little sick of it sometimes), you could have them all sent to a Widget on your WiFi laptop instead, especially if you're a heavy laptop user who's always out at the coffeehouses. (In fact, you could quite easily build a WiFi-based physical locator into that Widget, and suddenly be offering the same power that a centralized place like Meetro does - to have your IL actually detect where you are geographically, and where your friends are, and automatically alert you if a friend is closer than three blocks away. But unlike Meetro, the system is friendly to those just on cellphones as well, or in other situations where they couldn't run a proprietary Widget.) Or if you're just a casual friend of that person and are only interested in their whereabouts in a casual way, you can always do what most of you currently do with the JPIL - check it out only when you're at the website, giggle and think about what a nice small little asset it is for the page, or maybe even add its feed to your news reader and occasionally check it out that way. And so suddenly you'd have no centralized networks to worry about at all, or concern that some friends belong to one network but not another. And maybe most importantly, no corporate overlords either...who suddenly might want to start telling you what exactly you can and cannot post, or maybe start running goddamn ads in your posts, or maybe lose power suddenly for 24 hours, so that none of you can reach each other at all.

So anyway, some food for thought, I guess. And if any real tech developers actually do want to talk about this more, please always feel free to drop me a line; I'm open for anything from a casual discussion to a formal consultancy role.

Oh, and that reminds me of a question I received recently from a reader - that given how much I talk about tech issues here, and how closely I follow them, if I was ever disappointed or frustrated that I wasn't part of the tech industry myself? If I ever wished that I lived in the Bay area and was part of one of these cool-ass startups, and got to go to all those conferences and hang out with all those uber-hipster tech people and the like? And the answer is, well, no, not really, and this gets into this thing that business writers talk about a lot, and of which I've of course forgotten a certain bit of the terminology. But I basically see myself as more of an 'influencer' and 'connector,' as these business writers put it; what I'm good at, I think, and what I most enjoy doing, is simply getting people turned on to the ideas behind what I'm thinking about, and getting them to actually go out there, build them and use them.

And today's entry, frankly, is what I think is a really good example of this. Ultimately I don't really want to be on the team that's going to eventually create the actual IL option for TypePad or Blogger; I do want to be the guy, though, getting people at Blogger thinking about building such a thing, so that things suddenly get a lot easier for me just as a customer of Blogger. Or hell, you know, one of you smartypants third-party developers instead, I don't care - and I know that there are a lot of you smartypants third-party developers out there reading this, because you people write to me all the fucking time. And for the other 25,000 readers of this site who aren't Blogger employees or third-party developers, I hope you'll simply go out and start talking amongst yourselves - to leave comments in message boards about the subject, or talk about it at your personal blog, or hell, bring it up at dinner parties, whatever. And that's ultimately what I want my little role in it all to be, and not as an engineer or programmer or usability specialist or marketer or whatever.

And besides, I don't think I could handle that Bay-area startup lifestyle very well, to tell you the truth - where you gotta get that impressive apartment to impress all your friends, and suddenly be all into Simple magazine and know how to pick a good wine and have to attend endless picnics sponsored by Flickr. Oh, and I'd have go get some Doc Martens again, and I'd have to get fancy haircuts, and I'd have to collect those artsy-fartsy erotic books from Taschen, God, it just seems so exhausting. So, no, no TechnorOdeDeliciFlickricious startup lifestyle for me, I think; better for me to just stay in Chicago, be the weirdo hardcore little intellectual I am, and simply convince all those techies to do my bidding. I will eventually take over the world, people! Too bad it has to come one fucking conversion at a time.

Yet another sign of what this country has become, under the "leadership" of George W. Bush: Fundamentalists have somehow managed to turn even Christmas into something ugly, hate-filled and judgmental. Wow. "In this season of giving, sharing, and fellowship with all humanity, we Fundamentalist Christians would just like to remind you - fuck you if you're not a Fundamentalist Christian." Happy holidays, indeed.