Blogging. Vlogging. Flickr. Twitter. Folksonomy. Mashup.

Often, the terminology of the Internet obscures more than it reveals. One word that seems to have clung onto its meaning despite the odds is "Address"; in both actual and digital environments, it refers, intuitively enough, to a place you can go. Every building has an address; every website has one, too.

As web 1.0 blossoms into web 2.0, though, this is starting to make less sense. Today, the Internet isn't about delivering content to a person, it's about letting users leverage sophisticated interactive platforms to build their own library of content. Web 1.0 was about getting stuff from me to you; web 2.0 is about us sharing stuff with each other.

Okay, so today's web is about social groups. The problem is that through this lens, the idea of an "address" starts to unravel pretty quickly. In real life, I can go anywhere – to any address – with my friends. On the Web, though, there's only a few places I can go with my friends. They're called social networking sites; MySpace and Facebook are probably the best-known examples. On those sites, I can see what my friends are up to, share notes, pictures, and status updates, and generally hang out in a virtual community. But let's say I want to go over to a different address – say, this page of poems about dolphins. (My reading habits are none of your business!) I can go, but my friends can't. There's no social networking, no features aimed at building an interactive community around that content. It's just a page of stuff. Lame.

The tension between "you-to-me" sites and "us-with-each-other" functionality is real. Emerging bands have started using their MySpace pages as their official band websites; they can host all the normal content you'd expect to find, but also allow others to build a community around that content through comments, linking, friending, etc. Facebook has taken a somewhat different path, allowing users to import their interactions on other sites (say, buying movie tickets on Fandango) so that they become part of your ongoing social feed. Last week, I bought tickets on Fandango, and Facebook automatically figured it out, and notified all my friends, and all my wife's friends. Setting aside the amazing creepiness of that fact, there's still something big to grapple with: If web 2.0 is primarily about "addresses" that people can visit together, doesn't that make about 95% of the Internet woefully inadequate?

Leave it to the golks at Google to resolve the paradox:

To socialize these days, hundreds of millions of people every month visit networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.

But what if the Web itself operated as a social network?

Google announced yesterday another step in what its engineers see as that inevitable evolution. A new, free service from the Mountain View, Calif., tech giant will allow any Web site to become a social site.

Any Web page, whether it is devoted to curling or pizza or a folk singer, could allow visitors to meet and connect with "friends" who visit that site. Like any such major network today, a Web page using the service could present users with the names and pictures of friends and potential friends. Those people could then post messages to one another.

The announcement from Google comes at a time of ferment and speculation over how people will meet and fraternize on the Web.

"Ferment and speculation," indeed. The idea of being able to embed social networking into any site has potentially revolutionary implications. More on what this means for government in an upcoming post, but as they say, watch this space.