I stumbled across this bit of philosophy at the Mark Pincus Blog, where the founder of Tribe.net suggests an inversion of the current closed networks, based on open profiles (a la SocialPhysics.org?):

how will the peopleweb happen? along with my vision of the revolution of the ants, the big portals will all succumb to their audience's desire for openness and transportability of online identities. people will no longer choose to invest in a profile that is locked into msn or friendster (or tribe). just like email had to be free and compuserve lost out to aol, so too will profiles. we already have this with blogs. my company, tribe.net, will soon be launching open profiles which will let people compbine elements of their blogs with social and community networks. this will occur with virtually every site, where users will decide who has access to what, whether it's by degrees of separation or group affiliation. this wont be decided by my company, friendster, linkedin, yahoo's new thing etc...

what will the peopleweb enable? well, imagine a future where the network acts as one database. you will tell the web that you are single and what your dating criteria is. your dating profile will only be shown to those people (so no more daily humiliation of your sisters and friends snickering that you describe yourself as a tall dark handsome romantic). kinda unhappy with your job. no problem. tell the network you're available for jobs paying over $150k, vp level, and maybe you want to limit to a few companies or block them. wanna organize a poltical revolution without leaving your home? just tell the network you are into 'emergent democracy' and 'legal revolution' (possibly through group tags) and you will automagically be connected with all the other archair revoultionaries.

So we will all becoming unlinked from today's style of networks, when we can instead inhabit our own nodes and become networked through tools that help us find other likeminded souls. But we wouldn't be forced to have ten thousand tinny fragments of our digital identity spread all over the Internet: music preferences here, sex preferences there, business bio yonder.

[pointer from Fred Wilson]