For a change I made my prediction public on the blog unlike my mostly private observations of many other technology trends. With facebook said to be valued at 15 Billion USD, social networks are flying high on the radar screens. Now Sequoia Capital's 7 million investment into Minglebox looks like a possible future winner.

Just after I quit my previous employer, I and my friend wanted to create a generic social network platform usable by applications as diverse as CRM, Sales Channels, Company Intranets, Hiring to generic social network updates to new services agreeing to allow social network access to their networks on a trust propagation model. We even agreed on a list of 12 social networking startups possible over the next 12 months. The only catch was that the Social Networking OS we had was a bunch of API's and not a live userbase we could use, we agreed that we don't don't want to build another orkut and it seemed too pointless to build an API that the big guys won't be using a standard of social network updates from small guys and give up control over their data. Now here comes facebook almost 14 months later with a platform backed by strength of user numbers and long line-up of partners.

After Blogging and P2P the next wave has already begun. Social Networking. Social Networking sites are now blooming by dozens.
The older dating or alumni sites could do well to adopt the generic relationship model that a Social Network offers.
Social Network: When viewed from the perspective of an individual its a weighted graph with other individuals as nodes and paths having their weight equal to the trust. And trust is inherited through this network.