In the past few years we’ve all gotten used to a pretty incredible phenomenon. Online social engines gather phenomenal popularity and become the talk of the day, at which point the companies behind them also achieve phenomenal billion dollar valuations. Of course, it’s no big secret why companies behind services such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. are worth billions: it’s us, you and me.

Consider that the average social network is a rather simple web application. Take Twitter for example: a lovely idea, implemented in Ruby over a period of just a couple of months! How does it get to be worth over $500 million? Again, the user base.

What’s the problem you wonder? My problem is that we’re letting these corporations own us outright. By supporting these services we’re granting them ownership of our most precious information, instead of putting this information in the public’s hands — in our own hands. If that sounds socialist or, god forbid, communist, I assure you it is not. I am one hell of a capitalist, but I do believe in certain things being public. I think the kind of information stored by social networks cannot and should not belong to one corporation, and the idea of it being acquired by some even bigger corporation for billions of dollars sounds absolutely absurd.

The solution? Start a powerful, generic, non-profit social network infrastructure that relies on a 100% open-source engine, where the servers are donated by corporations and by the public, just like Wikipedia. This service will be used for storing everybody’s information, and will have a completely open API to allow anyone to create their own service around it.

IM service? Just build applications and use the open social server for the accounts. Social network? Just build the web application with endless creative possibilities, and use the open social server as the underlying engine.

The immediate benefit to us is that despite offering a potentially endless variety of features, all services would share the same login information (single sign-on), the same friend list, and possibly the same content (pictures, files, etc.) It would be your one true online persona. Just look at the countless sync tools we have nowadays that attempt to connect the various networks together, to bring some unity to your countless online personas — why??

Where would business opportunities come from you ask? From the applications that would be created around this system. You could create brand new applications that would have completely different look and feel and functionalities. The important point is that your user account, data, friend list, etc. would always be kept on the public servers.

This reminds me of the mobile number portability acts passed in most countries. Instead of letting mobile operators own us by owning our phone number, legislators wisely decided to let consumers roam between operators while keeping our phone numbers. Needless to say, this is hugely beneficial to the public because it makes operators work harder for our business.

Now I ask you the following: How big of an effort is it to distribute one’s mobile phone number vs. how much effort it is to build your online persona, collecting friends, building profiles, etc.? I think it’s not even comparable.

Building a profile in a social network is often an incredibly time consuming task. Let’s put this information somewhere safe, where we can make the most out of it in the long run.