Socialmediaworx

The new social networking platform of tomorrow will be the internet itself.

Both Yahoo and Google are working on strategies to overlay their own social networks over their web services – email, IM, photosharing and others.

Check out this Wired article about Yahoo’s efforts:

Yahoo’s ambition isn’t to make a stand-alone social network to compete with the Facebooks and MySpaces of the online world. Photo management, blogging and private communication are offloaded to other properties in Yahoo’s stable. It’s not integrated right now, but Yahoo says Mash will eventually become a layer on top of its various web services — tying them together with a social glue.

“We see it one day being integrated into other spaces across the Yahoo network,” says Yahoo’s Terrell Karlsten. “Eventually, it will become a feature inside other services. For example, it’s possible that you’ll log into Yahoo Mail and see your profile along with all of your friends’ profiles in your contact list.”

In other words, Mash isn’t the platform, Yahoo is the platform.

And HipMojo has this to say about Google’s social networking efforts, including the rumors of a potential Facebook purchase:

From 2003 onwards, people kept asking whether Google would become a portal, whereas they should have been saying: “Look, Google is becoming a social network”.

After all, email is the biggest connector of people, and as such, the glue that holds a social network together. No wonder Google is adding improvements to Gmail.

But there is much more to Google’s identity as a social network these days, the transformation, in fact, began a few years ago. Acquisitions like Picasa, Blogger, YouTube and product launches like Gmail, Calendar and Docs changed the way Google interacted with its user base: now, a lot of users are signed in to Google as they surf the Web. When you are in Gmail, until you sign off, you are technically in Google’s network that includes all of its products, but also all of your searches and surfing patterns. The purchase of Urchin amplified this.

In fact, a real social network is open, and there is no more open ecosystem than Google, that is the Web. Facebook will be opening up soon because it finally realized that it cannot be the social utility it strives to be and remain closed.

This is probably nothing new to those who follow Google’s every move, but one reason why Facebook wants to open up more and more is that it probably realizes that its closed network hurts it a lot more than it hurts Google.

In fact, Google could very well not need to buy Facebook because it’s already a bigger social network than Facebook.

The next social networking platform of tomorrow won’t be Facebook or MySpace or the next application that contributes to our BSOS - the next social networking platform is the internet itself.