I attended Optimization Lunch today with a co-worker for a SWIG Roundtable on testing and optimizing key pages using Analytics.  While I saw some similarities between Usability Testing and Web Analytics (a convergence of sorts), it suddently “hit” me where the future of Conversion Marketing and Social Networks lie – it’s in the Social Graph.

Why do I say that?  In flash, it came to me.   Here’s what I saw.

Most business entities (companies, corporations, for example) are building sites and want to covert or inform visitors – jumping on Social Networking, Social Media and User Generated Content might seem like the right next step.

However, people are also saturated with having to put the same information in multiple places – so much so, they don’t want to join every social network they come across, they can’t even handle the social networks they belong to now – there are so many demands on our time and attention.

What I think needs to happen, is not more Social Networks, not more filling out of information in disparte sites, but less.

For example, everytime I order something from Amazon, it should communicate with my Facebook or MySpace account – any time go to a site and fill out a form, and it has a social networking component to it – it should connect, via a module, to the Social Graph.

Not more Social Networks are needed, but less.

What’s needed, instead, is Social Networking as a Service that all sites plug into – that’s where we’re going – that’s the only future that makes any sense to me.

How fast we get there – I don’t know – it seems Tim Berners Lee‘s Social Graph is the right direction (again) – we need to create applications that pull in the Social Graph, and write back to it – so the Social Graph becomes a repository for our lives and activities.

Does that create a threat to our privacy?  Yes and No.

Yes, it does, if the Goverment can get a hold of it and control it – and it will want to do that – and should not be allowed to control the Social Graph of anyone.  But, on the positive side, having one place that is authorative, for your social graph, makes it much easier to prevent mistakes and inaccuracies in your data that, currently, are spread all over the place.

So, that’s what I think – our future – the future of Social Networks – is as an online service for applications writing to and pulling data from the Social Graph.

Now, lets start making it happen.

There’s a Facebook Photo Album of the Pizza Party I attended last Thusday night in Santa Cruz at John Marshall‘s house – it was great – maybe I should have stayed longer (I only appeared in 1 photo, #49 of the album – below):

The party was a “who’s who” of the Search World, both Paid and Organic.  In a way, I’m both an insider and an outsider to it – but I really appreciated John and his wife’s hospitatlity in inviting me.

By the way, I posted about the SES Party in Santa Cruz last week, along with two videos I took which suppliment the John Marshall Photo Album nicely.