Google has sponsored a project at the Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute to “rethink and reinvent online social networking”. This was largely to overcome problems with its Orkut network.

“Directed to help improve the online community orkut, the project’s scope was not to simply redesign the interface. Our team considered how online social networking could bring greater value to users, especially for ages above twenty. After initial brainstorming and research, we chose to focus on the effects of a new model for online social networking: a unified social network that, as a service, provides social data to many other applications.”

Socialstream, as the network is called, is able to “draw content from a variety of sources. Socialstream would be based on a unified social network (USN), a single network that provides social data to other sites as a service. A service model allows many social networks to be linked together, letting them share both content and the nature of the relationships of the people who use them.”

This idea is to allow users to centralize information about contacts on different social networks in a single place — assuming, of course, that the other networks have an API and don’t act like walled gardens. Socialstream uses data from blogging and photo-sharing sites like Blogger, Flickr and Picasa Web Albums.

“Socialstream emphasizes improving social connections by making it more efficient to communicate with, share with, and view the social content of all the people in a user’s online social network. Socialstream provides a compelling user experience because it aggregates content across many different networks so a user has a single location to discover new content and communicate. The goal of Socialstream is to present social information in a way that ties it to the person who posted the information, and not the site from which it came.”

This could be an interesting project to watch.