Contextual Sharing (and the new social network that figures it out) will kill Facebook. I'm convinced that contextual sharing is the next evolution of social n

Contextual Sharing (and the new social network that figures it out) will kill Facebook. I'm convinced that contextual sharing is the next evolution of social networks, and I don't think FB is in a position to pivot towards it. Contextual sharing is the idea that in real life you have multiple, often separate social circles (work pals, college roommates, siblings, friends, grandparents, frat brothers, etc.), and that social networking 1.0 (i.e. facebook/twitter) doesn't account for this very well. You really want to share stuff only with specific groups, but this is hard to do on existing sites. This leads to all sorts of real pain points, many of which are becoming unbearable for some users: i.e. you don't want your boss seeing photos of you drinking, or you don't want your grandmother to see that racy link you just posted, so you suspend your FB account. Even though Facebook has a crude groups feature, this doesn't come close to addressing the fundamentally flawed orientation of the network: one, big pot of 100 to 1000 casual acquaintances, as opposed to dozens of partitioned ~2 to 10-person real social circles. This idea has been exploding, recently: - Google Me (Google's soon-to-be-released last shot at social) is almost certainly going to be based around this concept of contextual sharing (as Google UX engineer @padday's recent slide show indicated) - Diaspora (the OSS project from NYU students that raised $200k this spring) announced on their blog that contextual sharing is their #1 interface priority - Frid.ge (YC '10) is built around this idea - College Only (funded by Peter Thiel) is a solution to the problem just for one context (college friends) - Groupme.com (betaworks) is an SMS-only approach And ALL of this projects came to life within the past 3 to 6 months! Next-generation social networks will mirror our offline social experience more closely by shifting the focus from a giant network of "friends" to private, micro-networks that mimic real friend groups. I think this change is significant enough that Facebook will be unable to pivot without alienating their huge user base. Also, one of Facebook's main competitive advantages has been the fact that it is a network good with high switching costs (e.g. in order for a new site to be as good as facebook, you need to convince all of your 800 friends to sign up for the new site too). If the future of social networking really is contextual sharing, though, this barrier becomes much lower (if it continues to exist at all), because if you really just want to share with your 'real' friends, then convincing these small groups whom you know really well (your best buds, or your roommates, or your sibilings, or whatever) to try out a new site is actually pretty trivial. Thoughts? Full-disclosure: I'm thinking of building a contextual sharing tool of my own, because I think it's so damn exciting. Would love your feedback.