Portable Social Networking

Interesting morning today. Did a podcast with Brian Oberkirch on trends in ‘07 and what to look for in ‘08 with respect to digital identity, portable social networking and activity streams. While I’m on the call, I get a twitter (see insert) from @dan_mcweeney saying “Why won’t the OpenID guys just add onto their server the ability to ‘friend’ other OpenIDs?” This I get at the same time as seeing a tweet from @kevinmarks talking about URL’s are people too. Moments later I see another tweet from Kevin talking about Scoble and his recent run-in with Facebook. Talk about the perfect storm for data portability.

I said it on Twitter this morning and I’ll say it again:

@jkuramot i still hold that the single most interesting thing about OpenID is that you prove you own a possible service end-point.

Yes, I just blockquoted myself … ha! None of this stuff is going to proliferate because its open, because it has an awesome community, etc. Its the data stupid. If I can prove that I own the URL (and guess what, its actually me and I’m a person) now I can do all sorts of interesting things there. Put my friend list there. My activity stream. My updates. Contact information. You name it. Plug in a little OAuth love and now I can start talking about having sites talk to me when I’m not in front of my browser. Wowzers.

The fact is, data wants to be free. It doesn’t care about Google or Facebook, etc. Users will do interesting things with their data and trying to stop them is like trying to catch a fly with a set of chopsticks. My lord 2008 is going to be fun.

Update: I’m not the only one thinking along these lines.

Its amazing what you can accomplish with a bunch of people in a room … :-) I’m at the Data Sharing Summit and I just led a discussion on “What is the (stinkin’) problem?” The gist is this; what is the problem we’re trying to solve with all of these formats, protocols and solutions we’re hacking up and presenting here this weekend.

Fortunately, we had a great group and got a nice list of use cases that we think describe the problems we’re trying to solve:

• Profile and registration data: How do we quantify and manage profile data across lots of different sites. This is your first/last name, email address, avatar, etc. All of these create your profile.
• Profile update push: I’ve updated something in my profile and now I would like to push it to all of the sites that use this data. New email address? Great, push it out to all of the sites (or IMHO - get it from on place all the time).
• New friend on A, update on B: If I have a new friend in my entire social network, it should now be available to me on any site I visit. New friend on site A, it should update that onto site B. Yes, there are oodles of issues with this; what if I only want to be friends with this user in the context of site A … well, we don’t have an answer for that yet … you’ll have to wait for v2.0 … :-)
• eVite problem: In what can only be deemed really poor brand mojo, we have the eVite problem. Let’s say I want to invite a friend to an event. I have to give the event site, let’s say eVite, the email address of my friend. My friend might not want me to do that or trust the site I’ve given it to but its out of their control. This falls under management of your personal assets and quite honestly, would be like your friend posting your phone number to a sex chat discussion room … you might not want all of *those* calls.
• Share resources once, available everywhere: When I post a video on one site, my friends should see that where ever they are. I shouldn’t have to post on YouTube, Blip or Yahoo! … post it once and people should see it where ever you are. The same is for basic status information (Twitter, Pownce), birthday notices, etc … any resource you might want to share.
• Where did I put that?: The majority of users just use the Internet. Its a mash of a whole bunch of sites and users put content all over the place. How do I quickly and easily see where I put what that I touched, edited, added, uploaded or modified? This is a toughy in my opinion but there was general consensus its a good one.
• Consolidated messaging: This could possibly fall under the ’share once, share everwhere’ category but I do think this merits a separate entry. I don’t want a gazillion messaging systems on every site. I have a Flickr inbox, Yahoo, Gmail, Zooomr, you name it. I don’t want to visit every one. Let me get to a site, any site, and see my messages. This is akin to my belief that you shouldn’t go to social networking sites; social networking (the one that you have) should be a function of every site.
• Friend decay: I dated this girl once … it was a one night stand. She added me as a friend on Facebook. Years later, we don’t talk and probably never will.* How do I decay that relationship so it doesn’t show up as prominent or even valid in my social network? * - I made up that bit about the one night stand and Facebook but you get the idea.

Alright, so its not much but its definitely a start. Lots and lots of work to be done here folks but clearly once we know the problem, its that much easier to start working on the solution … :-)

Seems like this portable social networking stuff is catching on … after my post last week, more feed surfing reveals I’m not the only one talking about it (that point goes in the ‘duh’ category):

Brian Oberkirch is continuing his awesome tear with post after post in his portable social networking series.

Marc Canter gets in on things (yeah Marc, we know you’ve been talking about this since the dawning of time) … :-) … I’m looking forward to the Data Sharing Summit in September.

Dave Winer even chimes in with another view of somebody who’s been there, done that.

You know you’re onto something too when Wired does an article about it.

Finally, we get Fred Wilson argues that open social network is probably pointless for the average user. Drilling down in the comments you see Winer’s great rebuttal.

Its coming; in the near future, you won’t go to social networking sites to interact with your friends. Social networking will be a feature of every site. Powered by open standards that enable control, privacy and ease-of-control of personal data streams, the applications that are about to emerge are truly going to be phenomenal.