One thing is already certain in 2008, social media and user data is migrating from disparate sources and networks to more centralized schemas. Imagine how much time you have invested registering for 4 different social networks (Facebook, Bebo, Myspace, Orkut) and 2 different social blog communities (Mybloglog, BlogCatalog) and 3 different social book marking tools like (delicious, stumbleupon and digg). That is a tremendous amount of personal data, usernames, passwords and profiles that need updating and tracking. This is where companies like Zoolit, Spokeo, meeCard and SocialThing come into play. SocialThing just received 300K in funding and has emerged from techstars with high hopes as the “killer app” of 2008.

SocialThing among other startups allow the storage of profile information in a consolidated format from multiple social networks. This information will update across your social networking profiles from there. One killer feature is being able to stay updated with friends across multiple networks and being able to transport friends from one network to the next. For instance, if I have 300 friends in Myspace I can take them into StartupAddict and fill my StartupAddict Rolodex avoiding repeating friend requests all over again. The trend is gaining tremendous momentum and there is room for more players. The right startup will do for social networking what Meebo did for instant messaging.

The portability of data in 2008 is moving at lighting speed and many bellwethers(Google, Verisign, IBM even Yahoo is reported) are porting to OpenID. Reason 103 from my choice in Drupal for SA 2.0. Drupal 6.0 will have OpenID support and has been in the works for most of 2007.OpenID and DataPortability.org to gain major support.

Quick 2008 trend Recap:

(1.) Startup social network aggregators (like SocialThing) will fight for the #1 spot as the goto “destination” or “portal” for all of your social profiles.

(2.) Opensource is big business in 2008 from Facebook to Google open is in and cool and opensource code will allow rapid development by thousands of developers.

(3.) OpenID will become a ubiquitous gateway for individual users, allowing us to traverse multiple social media properties as easy as browsing a basic webpage.