On April 22, I'll be participating in a webinar with David Daniels from Jupiter Kagan, David Hendricks from Datran Media and Greg Selkoe from Karmaloop.com.

One of the things I will be talking about are the similarities between the way social networking is evolving and how email evolved. While there are some things that are different and/or better this time around, there are many aspects that are the same. It's like watching the remake of a movie when you've seen the original. The actors are all different but the basic story is the same.

Just before email really opened up, we had a number of separate, proprietary networks that looked a lot like social networks of today. There was America Online, Compuserve and Prodigy (okay lets not forget eWorld). Each service a walled garden - users of the same service could send emails to each other but not across different providers. Each service had similar, but slightly different capabilities - for example some allowed the sender to "withdraw" a message after sending it as long as the recipient had not viewed it yet. Others had pictures or styled text.

Then slowly they opened up and allowed their members to send messages outside their service. This was a huge win for users, even though they had to give up some of their fancy features in favor of the "lowest common denominator" solution.

Jump forward 20 years and we see striking similarities. The names are different, but the rest is the same. Now its Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn instead of America Online, Compuserve and Prodigy. Originally closed networks, all 3 have opened up more and more to messaging with outside users. Facebook's platform and OpenSocial both promise to bring standardization to social messaging. It's only a matter of time before you can send an email from Hotmail directly to a Facebook user or from Myspace directly to an AOL user.

Possibly more significant is how deliverability and reputation are evolving similar to email. Social networking marketers will have all the same deliverability challenges as in email, only this time the receivers get more user feedback and are building smarter reputation systems from the start.

Already, Facebook uses a combination of implicit and explicit user feedback to build a reputation for applications and decide how many of its newsfeed notifications actually show up for users. Just because you send a notification to a user's minifeed doesn't mean that all of her friends will see it. Facebook looks at how many active users your application has, how many "thumbs up" you got and how many users blocked your messages to determine how many messages they let you deliver tomorrow.

Applications with lots of users can send lots of messages. New applications are throttled while they build reputation. Applications that get lots of complaints in various forms are penalized. Does this sound familiar?

From a technical perspective, high volume senders will need to customize their solution for different social networks. Just because both networks have implemented OpenSocial doesn't mean that they will work exactly the same. Yahoo and Hotmail both accept SMTP connections, but sophisticated senders customize the number of IP addresses used, number of connections per IP address, number of messages sent per connection, header content and other factors to optimize delivery for each receiving domain. We can expect to see the same technical optimizations for the various social networks. And just like email, we can expect to see them change frequently!

It's not just technology. Email ISPs also have different business rules and quality standards. What permission level is required to send email? How many messages are too many? How many complaints are acceptable? What's the best way to resolve problems? In the same way, different social networking sites will have different best practices for messaging to their users.

As much as it is the same, I'm optimistic that we will be able to learn from our experience with email and avoid some of the same mistakes. Already its clear that social networking sites have better user feedback than with email and are using this to build more sophisticated reputation systems. The email deliverability community should be working together with the social networking community to make sure the new reputation systems have sender feedback, dispute resolution and transparency built-in from the beginning.

You can download the PDF or watch the slideshow with full audio from the webinar.