YASNS for YASN invites. Not unlike this tribe, for example.

I sense a great need.

>>but are global sites such as Tribe the place to be discussing these? Surely more local forums are more appropriate? What am I doing here? <<

what Ive really come to enjoy about tribe is the aggregative quality.

The reality is that its not so much a global site.. it is primarily a west coast site that has blead out into the global connections.

But in tribe I can successfully participate in local tribes simultaneously with global groups - ideologically specific groups.. etc. I like that, I like that a lot.

Let me embed youtube videos into my posts and I wont no what else to do with myself!

I'm actually keeping my eye on what's happening in a few areas. First off, social network sites as we know them are turning more into features of all sites, important features mind you, but indispensable features none-the-less. USA Today's jump into this area, PeopleAggreator, Ning, Cisco, Elgg, et al, are just showing that the YASNs as we know them may be hangouts, but your profile will soon become fully portable. Enter, Identity. There's lots going on there, and now that OpenID is being crowned the winner for the universal login mechanism, we may begin to see the separation between one's profile and one's identity. The ability to have multiple profiles for the diff environments I want to hang out in, but the single identity for more easily managing my multiple personality disorders :)

The there's stuff going on in the whole Attention economy meme. Sure, the rhetoric is about me controlling my info, but the fun stuff is getting to meet or know people by what you have in common w/them. Whether that be sites we surf, stuff we buy, places we hang out in. Any of these parameters will reviewable by anyone I allow. In some cases, you may even want to subscribe to ME. Watch what sites I surf to and spend time on, why?...because you care about what I'm paying attention to. Imagine if you could follow your celeb of choice to see what they were doing online? Given how far people are going to get attention, whether it be reality TV, YouTube or elsewhere, the Channel ME isn't far behind.

Interesting stuff will also continue to happen in the recommendation space. While I'm not so keen on the social search stuff that's being bandied about, applying this tech to serendipitous purchase recommendations seems to work nicely. Note the success of a couple of Tribe's co-founders, are having w/Aggregate Knowledge.

Needless to say, I'm seeing some actual beneficial uses with solid revenue models to support some of these social models. These aren't the stuff you hear much about as purely Web 2.0 and they're not just widgets. It's the beginning of blending what's been learned with actual beneficial uses. One other example here is seeing how Slashdot voting mechanisms are being applied to corporate objectives (note Dell's recent deployment for new product prioritization). The U.S. Patent Office is also going to begin experimenting w/some of these new voting models. We've only scraped the surface of the real revolution :)

Maybe the Next Big Thing isn't yet another new disconnected service running in isolation from all others, but simply a common protocol that allows existing services to be integrated cooperatively.