Interestingly the same Economist article quotes David Ascher (head of Mozilla Messaging) as saying that “e-mail in the wider sense is the most important social network.” Part of my hypothesis is that we’re going to see a convergence between standalone email and instant messaging clients and the web browser, with the ability to spin off apps in their own windows where appropriate. Probably a good topic for whole other post.

Oh, and WordPress understands pingbacks so if your blog is set up right you should be able to do exactly what you said, i.e. post on your blog and have it show up here.

Right now my contact list is my address book in Thunderbird. TB2’s address book has one field for “Web Page”, no IM addresses, no social site usernames, etc. so it needs a lot of enhancement. Contacts need to be shared between browser and mail reader and calendar. (However, I want my contacts strictly private, no way do I want Facebook and other services reading my address book.)

“He provides access to his data”; isn’t that just his existing RSS feed?

Also, I’m not sure a browser feed is better than a mail feed. A subscribed RSS feed in Thunderbird has the notion of read and unread. Maybe a continuous stream of your contacts’ activities appears in the browser sidebar, while organized feed folders appear in your mail client, and marking Read or Ignore in one updates the other.

(Another missing piece is universal Trackback support. Why do I have to come here to comment on your blog? I should just post on my blog about this post and Trackback should link them. Neat idea, but Blogger/blogspot and apparently WordPress don’t support it.)