Design the Perfect Social Networking Application

The list seems never-ending sometimes. As soon as one social chat/mini-blog/advanced IM site gets established, another comes along adding a little something new to the options, hoping it’s enough to bring everyone to their site instead. And that’s not counting the feed aggregators like Twirl and Snitter.

When Twitter was down, I realized something that (to me) was rather amazing. There really wasn’t a total Twitter replacement around. No site could honestly claim to be better than Twitter (if you don’t count ZobZee (which is “like Twitter but Awesomer”) but beta keys are hard to come by for it, I’m still waiting for mine).

So here’s my question. What elements would the ideal social networking application have? What things are there that you can’t live without or wish someone would hurry up and add? What would your ideal business network communication app look like? Your ideal personal one?

Here are the things I think are necessary, based on the social networks I’ve used.

• Can be accessed from cell phone
• Limit to number of characters written – short and sweet works well
• Can be accessed over IM
• Ability to respond back and forth infinitely to carry on a conversation
• Ability to see responses to conversations
• Option to see all friend responses, even to people you don’t know – like Twitter has
• Option to block anyone who wasn’t a friend seeing responses directed primarily to you – so you don’t have to worry about people you don’t know joining in the conversation
• Option to set conversations as private
• Easy to get set up and start using, fun options can be discovered later
• Easy to compare follow/following lists (StumbleUpon has one of the easiest lists I know of)
• Link to see threaded conversation
• Two “follow me” addresses…one that is instant refollow and one to add fans that can be followed later.
• Easy transfer of your friends lists from other sites
• OpenID use
• OpenFriends use – okay, this hasn’t been created yet…but it should be. You and your friends add each other once, and then any site that you both are members of will connect you with your friends who have already joined without you having to add all of them individually. Anyone who wants to create this, I’ll be glad to explain further how I see it working. I think it would be an awesome tool!

This is all I have so far. So now I need your help. What items have I left off that are needed to create the perfect social networking application?

PS If you’d like to follow me on any of the social networks I mentioned (or any others), I’m Teeg almost everywhere and Teegers if a site isn’t enlightened enough to allow 4 letter user names. If you can’t find me listed, feel free to send me an invite.

If you’d like to add me as a friend, here are my pages on the sites listed above: