There are an increasing number of social technology conferences, like this one, and anyone who has been reading about web technology in the last 12 months has been reading about the thousands of applications launched in the last year on social networking sites, such as facebook and, more recently, MySpace.

From a high-level perspective, it’s all about information.  Information that flows as data, from the social applications to the servers run by the people who own the application.  Information being data – data about people, data about actions taken by people, and in many cases data relating to monetization.

One way to look at the data interactions is shown in the social application data architecture diagram below.

Non-technical readers can look at this diagram as food for thought: do I know where my data is going?  Will my data be safe?

Technical readers and entrepreneurs can go beyond those questions and ask: what will create a leap of usefulness – and business or social opportunity – in recognizing how this “data footprint” can be leveraged to profoundly change our interactions?

With social applications being about a year old, the chart above will be very dated in another year.  (Additions expected: LinkedIn is projected to have social applications later this year.  White label social platform kickapps supports OpenSocial, and ning does as well.) 

And, over the course of the next year and beyond, the promise of implementing new and unique social data flows will present challenges and opportunities.  While this may or may not be a series, there will be more on this to come in future posts.