The Social Web Directory

Last week, Myspace and Facebook both announced the extension of their platforms to the web in general and acording to Mike Arrington, Google will be making a similar announcement on Monday night. These announcements mark a trend toward the abstraction of social features as whole on the web. Over the past 12 months we have seen the launch of a number of social platforms each containing their own application directories.

Now that many of those features will be extended outside of the platforms I’d imagine that we will see these directories begin to display all external facing applications. The closest thing I can think of that mimics the functionality of this theoretical directory is the Web 2.0 directory created by Orli Yakuel and Eyal Shahar.

The idea of a social web directory is similar to the concept of what Yahoo! originally launched as, a virtual web directory. Having the ability to categorize all websites that leverage social data is extremely useful. While most of these sites focus on communication, practically any website can leverage social data. I’d imagine one of the first tools to leverage the new Facebook, Myspace and Google external social platforms will be a MyBlogLog competitor.

Can you think of any other interesting uses of the recently announced Myspace Data Availability initiative, Facebook connect and Google friend connect?