VentureBeat

Updated

We interviewed Tony Perkins about his upcoming Stanford conference this week, and he’s got some interesting views (or here) about the bubble in China and online social media companies.

We also found out about an ambitious project he’s about to unveil, called GoingOn — but won’t be fully launched until fall. Apparently, he has worked hard on this with help from Valerie Cunningham and Marc Canter. Click on image to see screenshot. As a member of Perkins’ existing AlwaysOn site, you’ll be able to expand your AlwaysOn profile with a personal page and a bunch of new tools. Within that same page, you’ll be able to pop up the profiles of people you’re interested in contacting, or, yes, dating — and as we understand it, GoingOn wants to be able to do that seemlessly from other sites, including Friendster, Tribe and so on. It will apparently let you post blogs, photos, video to multiple networks and outside sites, too.

We haven’t played with it yet, but the idea of full interoperability with member profiles of other sites is interesting. The others have been fairly closed; GO’s platform will be an open standards platform.

We’re not sure how they’ll pull it off. Being interoperable is not entirely new. That’s the vision of SXIP, a Vancouver company we last mentioned here. They sell a product that allows the same user name/password info to be used across many networks. SXIP is trying to get it adopted as a Net-wide standard. The only problem, we’re told, is that it hasn’t taken off, that very few people have bought it. So if Friendster/Tribe et al aren’t using it, how will this work? Maybe GoingOn can jump-start it somehow. SXIP is still a young company. There’s also Ping, of Denver, which does something similar.

Anyway, GoingOn users apparently will be able to create or join multiple AlwaysOn-like networks internally. They will be able �bake in� outside web services e.g. Flickr, del.icio.us, Bright Cove, Rojo, and your Skype, and IM buttons. Apparently, your photo will glow if you are on any GO network, so people will know you are signed on. You’ll have a toolbar that follows you, too.

You can also include external blogs you have, as well as you get your own GoingOn blog that chronicles all the posts and comments you�ve made on any GoingOn network.

You’ll be able to maintain… (more)

and share complete audio, video and photo media gallery. Your profile settings allow you to set your privacy levels so you can limit what people can see (e.g. Only your �friends� can see certain photos). There’s apparently much more, which we didn’t have time to get into.

The driving force behind this is a belief Perkins says he has in the future of media: “I believe the world is breaking up into millions of media brands, in a world we thought was going to end up in the hands of Rupert Murdoch.”

“We believe we�re going to go through a major transformation. I think a lot of the Web 2.0 companies, they�re kind of last year. There are these silos. Orkut has been taken over by Brazilians. Friendster, everyone filled their profile out and went away. LinkedIn has become a big pain in the ass for people. The common interest in content is what creates communities.”

The ideal web experience, Perkins continued, is one where you should be able to carry around with you things that are important to you. That�s what Mozilla is all about in the browser area, he noted. Perkins says he wants to allow the user to create a network environment where “you as the operator can have a hand in building that.”

Perkins tell us the first version of all this will be unveiled at the AlwaysOn site. Eventually, though, he�d like to spin it out as an open source version, where users can manage their own network.

Perkins is hosting a private showing of the project at a lunch on Thursday during the Stanford conference: “We’re inviting hard-core members of the blogging community to shoot holes in our plan,” Perkins says.

We’ll report what we find. Meantime, any thoughts? We want to go with appropriate ammunition.

Update:
–Canter unleashes here.
–Canter continued
–JD Lasica on GoingOn

Update II:

–Here’s our report after the lunch about GoingOn’s funding, etc.