By now if you’re human and happen to be connected to the Internet, you’ve heard of Susan Boyle, that awkward, strange, overweight woman from Britain’s Got Talent who dazzled the world when she gave a stunning performance of I Dreamed a Dream from Les Misérables. Beyond the utterly astonished reaction of the judges and the audience during the performance, what was more interesting obviously was the online response. With nearly 100 million views and counting, Susan Boyle must be one of the fastest rises to popularity the Internet has ever produced.

But that’s all old news. The real question is: why? Sure, she’s a great singer, but she’s not that great. I mean, there are countless other unknown singers who sing amazingly well, I really don’t think that’s the issue here. The issue is that the audience and judges in the show so clearly misjudge her due to her appearance, and that while watching the YouTube videos, every single viewer of that video had the exact same reaction while watching it. In a way, this video should be titled “Watch How Your First Impressions Don’t Work”. I think the real fun part about that video is to watch the stunned faces — stunned by their own misjudgment.

I recently read Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, and I find Susan Boyle’s case to be living proof of his theories. In case you’re not familiar with that book, it talks about how people should (and can) make quick judgment of situations, and how these judgements tend to be more accurate or just as accurate as long term studies conducted afterwards. Gladwell contends that our instincts might be far more powerful (and certainly faster) than our conscious intelligence. Of course, Gladwell explains that our ability to perform these kinds of snap judgements is limited by our prejudice and predispositions, which is exactly what happens in Susan Boyle’s case. Our deeply ingrained stereotypes tell us one thing about her, yet our eyes and ears tell us something completely different. It’s just a powerful demo of stereotypes working on an almost universal scale.

Additionally, we are amazed by seeing how it happens to everybody else (audience, judges) at the same time. Bottom line, this is a fascinating little social experiment that reveals, yet again, just how stereotypes can be misleading.

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.