InterNetwork
Why does every single social network community site make you:
- re-enter all your personal profile info (name, email, birthday, URL etc.)?
- re-add all your friends?
And why do you have to:
- re-turn off notifications?
- re-specify privacy preferences?
- re-block people you don’t want to interact with?
Brainstormed by Daniel Burka, Eran Globen, Brian Oberkirch and Tantek Çelik, Social Network Portability, an emerging article at microformats.org, is an attempt to begin tackling these problems for good. Big- and little-d designers, you can help.
Tags: socialnetworks, portability, microformats, standards, social network portability
Filed under: Community, Standards, Tools, industry, links
30 Responses to “InterNetwork”
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I gotta say I completely agree, and I’m glad somebody important is saying it.
Maybe it will finally get noticed.
It is a start, but it doesn’t go far enough. I still have to port all my friends with me. Importing their contact info is great, but if my friend doesn’t use xyz.network, it doesn’t matter. In that case, all I’m doing is giving a different company great ways to nag my friends to sign up for another service.
What is really needed is an API for the different networks to talk to each other. So I can message my friend on facebook from myspace. (You know, if I actually cared). I’d say the chance of something like that actually happening is pretty close to nil.
If something like this were to work, it would give emerging social networks a better shot at attracting and by extension keeping new members. Especially since I don’t believe people will stop making social networks any time soon.
Doesn’t that open up a giant can of worms when it comes to spam? I can imagine people building these massive networks and then re-selling them to highest bidders. It could trigger the end of social networks.
If you’ve created this service where everyone is creating profiles that they can then port over to multiple other social networks, you’ve basically got a metanetwork going. That’s a mighty tempting platform to put to use for more than just translation/portability services.
I’d prefer it if you could keep the file on your computer as a favelet or something (it would have to be secure or encrypted). That way you could control who had access to it. Sort of like a long encrypted password that has all of the information in it ready to go.
I can’t help thinking that we should be learning from our mistakes…
If information is not supported in the microformat, will systems create their own proprietary formats? Will this create a situation similar to the web-standards problem we face today?
Some sort of system that allows you to port over your friends would be a great addition to the social network world. It would really help any new site build users more quickly.
I can think of a lot of other instances where this “portability” concept could be applied …
Said another way, perhaps the value isn’t in the connection itself, but in all the space surrounding the connection. The connection by itself is inert and dumb. What I want to do is exchange photos or find a job or meet up with friends at a bar. So the value might be in media or search or contextual information.
Perhaps the mainstream SN companies are barking up the wrong tree altogether — I’m not frustrated by my ability to make connections, but instead by my ability to make meaningful connections and maintain them over time. That’s the hard part (I can “connect” with a department store clerk but it’s fleeting and meaningless).
Standardize the connection, open up to the full power of the network, and build value around the connections that exist.
(I wrote more on this topic a couple of years ago.)
This was something I was thinking about for a while, because I’ve found trouble with getting friends into new things beyond myspace (to things such as Facebook or even Pownce). I dreamed up a concept for a service managing all your connections from one central location, then automatically transferring them to where ever you need them, but the idea seemed so over my head that I haven’t thought about it since.
I don’t particularly like the idea of social networks anyway. Apart from dealing with managing a site, how is signing up for a profile at “myfriendsbookr” any better than my friends and I having sites/blogs and then talking across them?
I think you are on to something there. A little Java and some Web Services could make it happen. The hard part would be getting Facebook, MySpace, etc on board.
as a second thought on the previous idea, the web services/java based thing could also develop an API for the developers of SN’s so that they tie into it, and say I have an account based on the previous mentioned api, it could automatically build me in as a registered user of the new SN.
So originally I sign up with flickr, I can use my movable account at myspace, or facebook, etc, but then someone builds a new SN that supports the API, I can go there and sign in like any other place. 1 user name, 1 password, hundreds of sites.
Looks like its time to start designing.
I have thought of this feature before and would love to see it happen! For now, at least the autofill feature of my Google Toolbar simplifies a lot of the process. Too bad it can’t remember all of my preferences!
For security reasons?
I agree with Justin on this one. Lack of portability is not the main reason why I only chose one network (XING) — in my case, it’s convenience. Doing this came with a price: I don’t have any contacts from the US on my list because the service started here in Germany.
It’s the never-ending story of something done right too many times…
One thing i’m waiting for is for site based messaging to go away. There isn’t much stupider (IMO) than getting an email notification that you got a message on some website. There are plenty of reason to implement messaging within a site, but none of them have the best interests of the users in mind (again IMO).
I find it incredible that I fill in the same information in every single I find on the Web. Whether it is a social network or signing up for Tech Support at some company to joining a discussion list/forum.
While some browsers offer an auto fill option natively or through plug-ins, I still cannot believe that no site (at least one I have found) has yet to allow an import of the users personal hCard.
To share friends between social networks, without inviting spam, I think there needs to be a unique identifier for people other than an e-mail address. (E-mail isn’t a unique identifier in any case, but that’s another problem .)
Even a one-way cryptographic hash on e-mail addresses would let the user identify his or her friends by one or more encrypted e-mail addresses each. The social network he or she is transfering to could have a reasonable shot at saying “yup, that person is here. You are now friends/mortal enemies/whatever you were before.”
I see no reason why the (major) social networking sites would want to implement this. It would only make it easier for people to abandon their sites for the latest one.
While that would be great for the users, you have to come up with a system that Facebook or MySpace would actually benefit from, or it won’t be useful.
I’m so glad someone is tackling this issue.
In my opinion it’s hard to implement all these functionalities. Maybe there are no technological barriers but you understimate that each social network prefer mantain ownership of some data. I prefer to see the problem as the optimal trade-off between sharing and sustainability.
This concept really excites me!