The great thing about social networking is it allows us access to a wider variety of people, resources, and ideas that are a great boon to learning.  The problem with it is the amount of time and resources it takes to build-up your own social web, access, and review it. 

Wouldn't it be great to be able to go to one portal on the Net and access everything you have accumulated?  What if that portal could collect and more efficiently sort the data to narrow down the search for relevant information, which was delineated by you own interests?  A couple of ReadWriteWeb articles tackle this very notion. 

In the article, Semantic Web Wish List 2009, Richard MacManus (January 7, 2009) highlights some trends he would like to see emerge on the semantic web.  Although most suggestion have a distinctly commercial bent, the most interesting ideas he cites are from researcher, Zoltán Andrejkovics (NOTE:  I think NLP stands for natural language processing):

1. Smart notes; easy to find/browse notes, using NLP search.
2. Smart RSS; automatic article-collecting app based on my own interests.
3. Mind writing; using not only words, but 'thought' objects, that the NLP engine puts into words.
4. Assistant; 'my mirror', learns from my words, behavior on the net, and supports my work, handles calendar, etc.
5. Smart bookmarks; works like smart notes (para. 4).

An example of this is an improvement on RSS feeds, which allow you to pull-in data from your favourite web sites into an aggregator like Google Reader or Bloglines.  Personally, it takes me a long time to mine the large resources I collect to find the right information nuggets.

A blogger like Stephen Downes writes a lot of blog posts on a wide variety different topics.  I view the titles of the postings in Bloglines and if I think the posting might be on a topic I'm looking for or interested in then I will click the title and read it.  But this is totally dependent on the writer including appropriate titles for his postings and this is only one of many blogs that I follow. 

One example of what Andrejkovicsis is proposing is a smarter RSS feed that pulls-in data on topics that I have defined as my interest and sorts them as such.  I could have in one area of my interests several articles from various bloggers and it is all sorted by my interests.  Currently, searching the feeds that come into my aggregator is a hit and miss venture and requires me to search in several different topics, whereas smart RSS could automatically sort the feeds into these areas of interest for me and by learning my habits could intuitively gather collections for me.

Another ReadWriteWeb article, Could This Be Your All-in-One Social Network? by Marshall Kirkpatrick discusses Marc Canter's (CEO of People Aggregator) idea about collecting your personal, social networking, presence into a Distributed Social Networking (DiSO) entity.  Essentially it would "aggregate and integrate our activities, data and social connections built up on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter and our personal blogs" (para. 3).  The article uses the dashboard analogy, where the dashboard would not only handle all your social apps, accounts, and feeds, but would also track your accounts and update your status on several different sites.

The DiSO sounds like it would be an extremely useful and efficient tool for the Personal Learning Network (PLN),  Personal Learning Environment (PLE), and ePortfolio.  This, combined with the smarter applications called for by Andrejkovics, could be a powerful combination if it were to ever materialize.  Will it ever happen?  Let's just say the flip cell phone is oddly reminiscent of the tri-corder in Star Trek.  Anything can happen, but I am still waiting on the food replicator.