Great thoughts from Dave Winer based on an open question from Ponzarelli. Since the conversation is fairly short at the moment, I thought I would add my own thoughts on the concept.

Ponzi asks how many social networks is enough? Dave responds that we only need one. The true question becomes: which one?

The problem is, to put it succinctly, there are no really good social networks available right now. At least in my opinion. What do we have? MySpace. Facebook. Is that it? Other systems provide some semblance of social interaction and are considered by many to be social networks. Twitter. Digg. YouTube. But they aren’t truly social networks.

A good social network needs to be first and foremost a content provider. What? A content provider? That doesn’t make sense for a “social network”. Well, actually, it does.

Consider MySpace. MySpace is a good friend collector. But that’s about it. Hardly anyone on MySpace actually blogs, and those that do don’t blog much worth reading (I’m overgeneralizing, I know, but the point is valid for a greater percentage of MySpace than you may think). They can coordinate events, leave messages, overdesign their site, etc. But amongst the teen crowd that hits the site, it is less a social network and more a social status symbol. If anything, the site serves as a jumping off point to organize real-life social interaction. Which it does well, I admit. But MySpace doesn’t act as a social network so much as a friend map.

In my book, that fails as a social network. Why? Because a good social network should also work to keep you socializing within the network itself.

Consider Facebook. Facebook is a good status updater. You can update various aspects of your life, and the system will notify your friends what you’re currently doing. I can see that my cousin has just ended a relationship, a friend has just seen a really bad movie, and another friend has posted some new pictures. Sure, I could probably see all that stuff on MySpace, too, but Facebook makes this sort of data easy to create. It’s the beginnings of content, and Facebook is much closer to being a true social network than anything I’ve seen so far. You can still collect friends, but now you can do much more with them within the confines of the social network itself.

But once you’ve collected those friends, and you’ve updated them on what you’re doing, then what do you do? Now, you need to provide quality in-depth content, and you need the tools available to make that content work.

Once again: why a content provider? Because your friends and family cannot live on bread alone. I can only stand so many short bursts of mini-info (minfo?) from my friends before I simply have to pick up the phone and actually hold a conversation with them. The quick and simple bare-bones info, but not really info, pieces of metadata can become exasperating and meaningless. My friend is in love, he’s out of love, he saw a movie, he added an application, he posted some pictures, he posted a video. On, and on, and on. I can only put up with so much of that before I require some meat–some detail–to remind me that I have an actual, honest to goodness, connection with this human being.

Connection. Conversation. That’s what it’s all about. Not collecting friends. Not posting minute minfo (I’m going to start loving that word, I apologize in advance). But creating an actual social interaction on the web.

So, pulling all that together, I have to admit that my ideal social network is a blog. Or, at the very least, a system of interconnected blogs. Which, as you may or may not realize, we already have. To a certain extent, of course. Not everyone has a blog these days (though it may seem like it). But it’s the best way for a constant, flowing, dynamic conversation to take place on the web.

The tool that could potentially bind it all together? Twitter. Post a blog on your WordPress blog, and your Twitter account gets automatically notified and updates your Twitterfeed. The Twitterfeed updates your Facebook to show a new blog has been posted. Instead of being a status indicator, Twitter could become the glue of a dynamic social network. Dave sees the potential, too. I think more developers need to get on board and put together the tools that combine the basic services into a full-fledged social network that everyone can get behind. We need some people to start creating some glue.

But the blog is the center. It is the content provider. Twitter is the tool that distributes the content to the available channels creating the social network infrastructure.

It may not seem like a revolutionary idea, but if that’s the case, how come there’s no automated dynamic network there yet?

I’ll tell you this: I’m not the one to build it.