Earlier today, I turned up Saumil Mehta's short list of private label social media sites, which included the assertion that "social networks are commodity features". This is exciting because as social networking functionality becomes widely available, sites will have to refocus on what's really important — their core content, community, and context — to differentiate themselves.

Blogs and RSS are a great example of this phenomenon: excellent, free software has generated explosive growth and increasingly valuable content. Crappy soft journalism and entertainment from big media networks was really just proof of concept (people want to read and watch stuff) that is quickly being replaced by insightful, niche content. In the same way, huge, pointless social networks that encourage members to collect "friends" the way emo kids collect piercings will one day be recognized as proof of concept for truly valuable contextual communities. Private label (AKA "Roll your own") social networks will power this transition.

It was also sweet to see KickApps listed first in Saumil's list. There are actually quite a few lists of RYO social networking solutions out there, and it's sometimes strange to see KickApps listed on them because we're more social media than pure social networking, the difference being that we include some strong UGC functionality that isn't always present on social networking sites. I'll have to write more thoughts on social media — which is also being commoditized — later. In the meantime, here's my obsessive del.icio.us list of social networking sites (the RYO sites tend to be the older bookmarks).