MySpace has spammers, FaceBook is a walled garden, Google has privacy issues, Twitter is unreliable...and so on.  Each major social networking site has something wrong with it and, despite their unique appeal, could easily have its market stolen from it by a better (new) social networking site.

So what would the perfect social network be like...?

The perfect social network would be an open platform that allows itself to integrate with other platforms and websites.  Despite this, there are a vast range of easy to manage security settings that allow users the choice of varying degrees of privacy.

Users should be able to make some parts of their profiles "public", some "private", and limit who of their friends sees what of their profile.  What we are going for here is perfect scalability of security and privacy settings.

Along with this open platform approach, the perfect social network would have very restrictive spamming controls.  Among these could be a "flagging" system where a user can flag another user as a "spammer".  Admin will then investigate the flagged user and come to a decision.

Another anti-spamming law would be the total blocking of links outside of a certain portal within the platform.  Within this "link-posting portal" in the platform, before users have even seen the links, the platform should ping the destination and come to a decision as to whether it is a spam-link or noth.  Built into this "link-posting portal" users could vote for each individual link, thus turning this anti-spamming device into a value-adding aggregator of sorts.

Within the platform, the perfect social network should have integrated communication formats.  What I mean by this is that the basic "public postings" (wall in Facebook), psuedo-emails, and IM are part of almost every social network...but no one integrate them.  You should be able to have a live conversation (IM) in public (wall) and hide parts of it (email), flag or star some of it (archiving and documentation) and even "tag" pictures, places, websites, and users in it (linkage).

Now...and here comes the controversial suggestion: the perfect social network should not be owned by anyone.

The colloborative platform ("wiki concept") should be applied to the network with users value in the network (via other users votes for them and their frequency of posts etc.) giving them greater admin responsibilities in the platform.  While the core platform should be unable to be changed, the social network should be as far as possible self-regulating.

While all our current social networks are dictators, the perfect social network actually embraces the Western worlds free market principles and applies a self-regulating democracy to its operations.

Other factors that need to be mentioned in these loose thoughts on the perfect social network would be:

• It would be free,
• It would have unobtrusive advertising (if at all),
• and it would be light on bandwidth by using thumbnails of pictures (clickable to go large), etc.

In conclusion, the perfect social network would be scalable in its approach to security and privacy, with strong emphasis on self-regulation as a control for both spammers and for the organic growth of its users changing needs.  Although there are serious challenges (like how privacy and user admins interact...) in the wiki-social network concept, if it could be built then I reckon it could have a good chance of blowing the current competitors out of the water.