Scott Kveton

OpenID is well on the way to being the defacto standard for identifying yourself across the Internet. With that settled, people are really starting to look hard at the next things we can do now that we know who everyone is. My favorite one (and one of the main reasons I got into this OpenID stuff) is portable social networking.

Social network fatigue is getting worse with every new site that comes along and it doesn’t have to. I should be able to sign up for a site with my OpenID and be prompted to import my contacts/friends accordingly. Ideally I could import them based on some criteria or tag; friends, colleagues, co-workers, etc. In the very near future, you won’t go to social networking sites to interact with your friends … every single site will have social networking built in.

There are a couple of solutions coming down the line. Tom and the folks at Barnraiser have been working on a portable social network solution that is based on OpenID. Videntity and claimID have also been working on ways to share contacts based on XFN. Both of these solutions adhere strictly to the limited format defined for XFN. These solutions suffer from the fax problem; faxes weren’t interesting until everybody had them … so how did they take off? There are also several other efforts as well.

Brian Oberkirch has some really great posts on portable social networking and I really like his approach: “let’s outline a series of use cases from the user’s point of view”:

The ’social network fatigue’ problem stems from a few things:

• Need to re-enter profile information for new services
• Need to search and re-add network contacts at each new service
• Creation of yet another login/password to manage
• Need to reset notification and privacy preferences for each new service
• Inability to manage and add value to these networks from a central app/work flow

Coming from the OpenID world, I tend to see that as my hammer looking for nails. OpenID today has SREG which does provide 9 fields but this is a stop gap to what users and sites really want. Attribute exchange is also an interesting possibility as its directly linked to OpenID, will most likely be included in all of those libraries out there supporting OpenID and gives you the flexibility of sharing just about any name/value pair you could imagine. Define the name/value pair with a schema document (not necessarily for the faint at heart) and you’re off an running. I like the simplicity of attribute exchange but people in the community are shying away from wanting to couple this too closely to what OpenID does as its core strength; authentication. Also, attribute exchange doesn’t solve the portable social networking component although I imagine it could be hacked up to do so. OpenID just doesn’t have what it takes to solve this problem natively today unless we burden it with a lot more complexity.

It looks like Brian and company are really going to take a run at this and I for one would love to help. They had a meetup last week to talk over the possibilities. I think this is the perfect set of folks to get this going; if you need any OpenID love guys, just say the word and I’m all over it.

Out of that meeting came a basic roadmap and action items. What’s interesting about this approach is that its simple, has plenty of room for growth, leverages existing standards and IMHO, helps OpenID focus on its core. I’ll be keeping a close eye on this for sure.

I would also like to mention that there is going to be a conference on data sharing the first week of September. I’d love to get folks out to that to talk more about ways we can get this thing moving forward and cultivate some early adopters. Hope to see you there.