Approaching a Unary Social Graph
Start reading anywhere about Tim Berners-Lee’s early Web pipedreams and you see semantic web and the emergence of data as the only resource worth bothering about. What data truly matters? Personal profiles matter. A lot.
Today, you can belong to any of a number of social networks and Web 2.0 services and what to you do first off? You enter the same personal data you provided the last time you joined something.
There are several things wrong with that. After the fact, the user or member has little control, and no idea of what they ‘look like’ to admins and others scanning or looking into that network. Plus the data in those networks goes out of date – and the members have to backtrack on that for each network joined (and forgotten about) to update individually.
Bah, humbug. We won’t get to the semantic web so long as applications think they own data.
What would be the advantages of a single social graph? Uniformity is a big one – all the data the user wants to make available to any SN will be there. Members can check off what they want to share or hide, using the Mother Ship as a reference. Efficiency is another, it will be much quicker for users to sign up for the latest fad, thereby lowering the bar to adoption. Visibility is a biggie for the user – what if I want to know what Facebook reveals about me? I should be able to see my profile in an editor window, and see such a view for every SN I belong to.
Also, perhaps members want to flex their personality for each service they join… the Spring Break persona for MySpace and the college grad persona for LinkedIn. And in the same breath what about control over who can see your various profiles?
Every so often, users would receive a reminder to review their data. Changes radiate out into each SN they belong to.
One obvious win will be for corporations to manage their employee data. A large company might own a dozen social graphs – all replicating much of the employee data and with no common view or update capability. Hard drives are cheap but human toil to verify the currency of data is not.
Right now there is a sort of format war going on among the major SNs – think VHS vs. Beta or Blu-Ray vs. Toshiba – Facebook, MySpace, Flikr, LinkedIn and a dozen others ‘own’ the most user profiles. Some apps are setting themselves up as plugins to Facebook for example to lower the bar to adoption and promote uniformity of data. Perhaps one of these will overwhelm the space and become the de facto standard. Or not.
The focus of this discussion so far has been uniformity and maintenance of user data, and a facility to join new social services without re-creating yourself by hand. But what about managing your various friend lists?
I for one think the friends management should take place within each particular service, e.g., MySpace. While it may be powerful to extend friends lists across networks, working with growth edges will make more sense to most users if controlled from each social context. Many people find it desirable to have multiple personae so a bulk importer might seem dangerous. A “friend” in one space may not be desirable in another (think LinkedIn vs. MySpace). Also, with mass import, blocking hostiles and other micro control of the list for each network would be required, which could lead to user errors and misunderstanding of what is going on.
Who should or could own a central profile store? The largest existing networks have the best shot if they can open the box in a secure, user-controlled way and allow users to export data into the format of any other service. Traffic would be the key, and with high volume and user trust, various services would see it in their interest to work toward shared or compatible formats.
A few related links:
http://etailology.com/blog/archives/116
http://microformats.org/wiki/social-network-portability
http://www.wired.com/software/webservices/news/2007/08/open_social_net
http://notsorelevant.com/2007-08-02/portable-social-networks-a-vision-becoming-true/