I've been watching Marc Canter's Broadband Mechanics for awhile now. Marc's had more public fits than starts with Tribe and Ourmedia. But, Marc's got some awesome ideas for allowing users to transport their social networks and the content they create wherever they want to transport it. Even better than his ideas, Marc is one of the most persistent bastards in the blogosphere.

His latest efforts have been around People Aggregator, which is best summarized by Raju Bitter:

A social network web service So what is the PeopleAggregator? The PeopleAggregator is a social network web service. The idea is to download the code and set up a site and users can come to a hosted site and click a button and start their own network. These networks will interconnect with a common vocabulary. That vocabulary will be things like

* I want to send a message
* I want to join a group
* I want to create a relationship
* I want to post content

The PeopleAggregator is a social networking tool with the following features:

* It's a traditional social network.
* It's a meta network making it possible to spawn your own networks/groups with the click of a button.
* There will be a downloadable version of it which you can set up on your own server.
* It will contain external web services for Mashup with existing services.

One important thing is the availability of web services for moving the data, relations and networks/groups in and out of the system. Why do we need such a functionality? Well, we put energy and time into building up networks and groups of friends, co-workers, business partners and all the people we are dealing with. The digital data we create in that process belongs to us and not the companies running the portals we are using. But what happens if we move from one supplier to the next? We own the copyright of our digital data but can we make sure that we take everything with us when we leave?

Here's a bit more from Marc.