When the first computers were being developed, every functional aspect of the computer had to be programmed into every program.  Want your program to use a keyboard? You would have to program your punch-cards to handle this.  Want to output to a printer? You have to do that too.  Eventually, machines became powerful enough and the computer science sophisticated enough that the handling of these basic aspects of the computer were handled by the operating system.  It managed the system so that users and programmers could focus on the higher-level operations that they wanted to be doing.

Right now the social web is in very much the same position as those early computers.  Ways to share information, links, comments, pictures, videos and more are unending.  What are you thinking? Post it to Twitter.  Want to share pictures of that crazy party you had last weekend? Post them to Facebook. Email them to your friends. Want to share pictures of your cousin’s first child? Go on Facebook.  It is getting almost too overwhelming to figure out how to share it all. Want to tell your friends where you are? Check into Foursquare.

Part of the complexity is that different social networks are built around different types of sharing, but the deeper complexity is that human networks are not like relational databases.  We don’t share our weekend experiences with our boss and neither do we share our work details with our family.  Some of this is because of actual privacy concerns, but more often it is simply about which people in our lives care about which aspects of our life.  My technical musings on Python are just noise to my family.

What is needed is an operating system for our social interactions that can actually help smooth over these various different systems.

Right now the internet functions as this system.  It enables the sharing and, via its various technical protocols allows us to share data between our friends.  However, getting the system to work in a human way rather than a technical way is the next large challenge.  In a sense we have the operating part of the system, but not the GUI.  The GUI smoothes over all the technical aspect’s of the computer and allow its power to be harnessed in a very human way.

Very little progress I think is being made in this direction.  The more successful projects like Facebook’s Facebook Connect, Twitter’s OAuth and OpenID seek simply to unify your identity around the internet.  More ambitious projects like Disqus aim to unify types of behaviors (in this case, commenting) across different services.  There are hints of real high-level SocialOS apps with projects like Diaspora, Pip.io, Facebook’s Connect and OpenGraph, as well as services like Google Buzz, but none of them really make interacting with people in cyberspace feel as natural as physical space.  They feel more like social interactions that are squeezed into the mold formed by relational databases and API requests.

Part of the problem is that it is really uncertain just exactly what a system like this would look like.  We are not always sure ourselves where we want and so encoding the nebulous nature of interactions into literal code is an extremely complex enterprise that requires people who understand, not just computers, but people.