Remembering the Future

First, be extremely careful about privacy issues. . .

If possible, find some other way to call the connections between people "friends" -- maybe even use a unique trademarkable term. There is some power in the emotions behind the word friends that helps with the virus-like nature of social networking software, but I think in the long term it is a bad idea. . .

Someone's profile needs to express the richness of who they are -- it also needs to change and grow and flow over time, so make it easy for people to annotate and grow over time. . .

Be very careful of the design of rating systems and reputation systems. They are extremely difficult to design well, as they too often can be gamed, or fall into reciprocity such that they are meaningless. . .

Figure out how to use RSS everywhere for input and output. . .Combine all the above with good innovative RSS and optionally Atom. . . Do a great job for those who don't use RSS and those APIs to use email instead

Offering intentional groups . . . Better ways to organize groups of groups. . . Lots of group management support. . .