Before everyone was on Facebook, everyone was on MySpace; before that, everyone was on Friendster; archeologists are still digging for what came before that. This raises the question: what’s next?

Relationships are maintained through various social conventions that are basically equivalent to primates picking lice out of each others’ fur. Before social networking, you could only carry on relationships with a few people, mostly who were geographically close to you. Facebook allows you to maintain a larger number of relationships by doing stuff like sharing photos and writing on walls. But unlike the old ways of keeping in touch, social networking allows you to just maintain relationships at their present level without gradually improving the quality over time.

Facebook helps a little with face-to-face interaction by managing events. But compare creating a Facebook event to poking someone. The event is a much more formal activity with no chance for spontaneity. What is the F2F equivalent of a poke or a wall comment? And can social networking do that?

Consider hanging out at a coffee shop by yourself: if any of your friends are in the area they should stop by. It’d be rude to send everyone you know a text message. You could set your Facebook status to “Jared is at the coffee shop, come say hi”, but no one will see that unless they’re at home (and there’s too much noise in Facebook statuses to check them by phone).

The answer is geosocial networking: social networking that is aware of geographic locations. Every time I’m in a location where I’d like my friends to know, I tell the networking service. And every time I’m near one of my friends who’s broadcasting their location, the networking services lets me know.

There are already geosocial networking services that are interacted with via text messages*, but the thing that will really make them take off is when every teenager has a phone with GPS that can display pretty maps (eg: iPhone). Then Facebook is dead and your social life will flourish.

* I’m rooting for BrightKite over the US-only Loopt and Whrrl, the racistly-named GyPSii, and Dodgeball, which got bungled to death by Google.