Apparently, it is not only the invisible ones like me who want to make social networks interoperable. Brad Fitzpatrick, of OpenID fame, has put a proposal for social network interoperability by developing and maintaining the social network graph as a community asset. The graph will act as public information about relationships a person has, which could be read by social networking applications when you login with them. While it is going to be some effort to digest the proposal completely, it seems to address the problem that you will not have to repeatedly declare your relationships. I see use of microformats there.
Dare Obasanjo had earlier come up with his proposal of using OpenID to make the applications interoperable. I think it targets a bit different problem of having to identify and maintain multiple profiles.
Unfortunately Dare ends that post explaining why the proposal will never happen. He in fact cites a good reason in his follow up on Brad’s thoughts. He calls it a social network aggregator. He is skeptical because most of the talk is coming from social network owners and developers rather than the users. Is the fatigue not real?
I think it is. I am terribly tired of maintaining my accounts and profiles in so many social networks and along with maintaining the list of friends. But I am more tired of being forced to create an account with every application to befriend someone there. Meaning, I cannot connect with a friend who is part of Facebook without being a member of Facebook. This, I think, is the core reason of the fatigue. New social networking applications keep coming up, and you end up being members with all of them. I also include the likes of Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce here, they are pretty handy in creating your own network.
The solution according to me is that they should be email like. I can send an email from my GMail account to someone on Yahoo. This interoperability can help us reach outside our toolbox. The tools I use are for my preference, my friend might have another toobolx according to his/her preference. But today, our reach is limited to our tools. In my opinion, we need a protocol, a standard so that I can befriend someone in another network. Of course this is purely out my need as a user, not as a social network owner or developer. But I guess that is what Dare is looking for.
I am sure there will be ways in future when they will be portable, it has started to happen in IM. Just like Yahoo! has inbuilt support for chatting with Windows Live Messenger users. I wonder why they do not accept Jabber, which is an open protocol. Of course there are multiple messenger applications like Pidgin, Kopete, Adium, Meebo, but they are not effective as Jabber if it gets adopted. I think Brad’s and Dare’s proposals are more on the line of these multiple messenger applications. In my humble opinion, we need a Jabber for social networks. What do you think?
August 19th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Interoperability is something that I bet you will come into plain view within the next couple of years. I know I have wanted it for quite some time. It would be awesome to have one site that aggregates other social networks and brings them all together. (eg: unified friends list, each “friend” has a set of icons for what networks they are a part of, etc)
It would be awesome to get social networks to find a common API to use to interact with each other without destroying their original potential. (eg: Foo could see that Bar is a part of Facebook, Friendster, MySpace and Pownce. He can view each separate profile but wouldn’t necessarily be able to interact wit that profile without having an account himself. Signing up for an account on the list of enabled sites would be simple.) I could go on an on with various concepts to make sites interoperableS(sp?), but these just name a few (In fact, this just inspired me to write an entry). Well written!