Over the last five years I have been asked countless times: “Steve, what’s the next hot online community?” It seems as though everybody is on the lookout for the successor to MySpace, Twitter or Facebook. Nobody, even in a difficult economic climate, wants to be viewed as a latecomer.

Perhaps as a defense mechanism to avoid being wrong myself, I now give a boilerplate answer that I believe can last. In short, the next big community is not a single destination. Rather, it is going to be everywhere. To paraphrase Forrester analyst Charlene Li, social networking is becoming “like air.”

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The DataPortability Workgroup announced Tuesday that Google, Plaxo–and the big surprise–Facebook will be participating in discussions on how users can “access their friends and media across all the applications, social-networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.” This couldn’t have come at a more perfect time, especially given the flap over Robert Scoble scraping Facebook.

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