Social Network Portability

Sit back and relax. Imagine a world with totally free online open platforms. You have one single secured online identity with completely decentralized social networks, without proprietary and competitive platforms, where your "social graphs" as a whole are fully portable, likewise your address books, IM accounts, phone numbers, and so forth.

Right now most of the online social network businesses are following a particular "lock-in" plan. There are thousands of options from of which you, as a user, are required to choose one or more. Because of this, there is  strong competition between them; as a result, there are various unique features that aren't global and universally supported by all of them. Each of them is based and runs on a totally different platform.

Therefore, you end up with multiple accounts just for the sake of trying out new things, deciding which one is better, or because of social needs (e.g. friend Joe is a member of XYZ but Smith is happy with his ABC social network; I'm "forced" to have accounts on both XYZ and ABC if I want to keep up my friendships with both of them).

Portable Social Networks is the answer to our struggles! In layman's terms, this is akin to getting the most out of them, benefiting from their unique features, being able to port our data throughout each network, and, all in all, creating combined value. This cannot be done with proprietary platforms - you cannot connect different dots proprietarily.

Since the above scenario represents one of the current generation's hassles, trying to develop a solution is the way to go. A few companies tried to develop their "own" solution to fix this. Facebook and Netvibes UWA are some examples. Their services are unquestionably successful, but the worldwide "social graph" dilemma isn't fixed at all.

As you'd expect from the search engine, Google is going about this their own way, having developed and launched OpenSocial. It is a set of common APIs for building various social applications with the freedom of interpolation through various networks. This means accessing the feeds and friends of numerous social networks (on which the support is incorporated) via the same APIs.

Want real-world examples of what OpenSocial APIs are able to do? Since its launch, a lot of websites have incorporated them into their design. Examples could be: sharing interests, hobbies, books, places, holidays, dreams, videos, images, notes, news, entertainment, but also making online transactions with friends worldwide easy.

Summing these up, with OpenSocial one can exchange profile information, social graphs (list of friends), and feed-like broadcasts (news, events, etc.) through different platforms. Once these APIs are implemented (standard HTML and JavaScript) then the code works the same everywhere for everybody, unlike Facebook, which works on the basis of a proprietary markup language, meaning that the code is unusable outside of their network.

"Think of the web as water. Proprietary platforms based on the web are ice cubes. They can, for a time, suspend themselves above the web at large. But over time, they only ever melt into the water. And maybe they make it better when they do."

- Anil Dash

Furthermore, OpenSocial was created with a maximum flexibility approach. Hosts can set their own policies; everybody can tailor OpenSocial to their own needs. More than a few huge social networking sites have taken advantage of these APIs: Orkut, Hi5, Friendster, Oracle, Ning, LinkedIn, Salesforce and Viadeo, just to name a few.

Nevertheless, the problem of social network portability perplexity isn't solved yet. OpenSocial is merely an aggregation solution, but it is an extremely valuable start. Social network portability also requires ID authorizations and a standard for privacy. But we are still a long way from global social network decentralization.

Decentralizing identities and reducing the number of accounts were OpenID's main goals. This lightweight system identity system allows users to use the same password and usernames on multiple websites without affecting security and privacy. Decentralization plays a crucial part in Web 2.0's evolution because it empowers users by putting control (of their own identities) back into their own hands.

The bottom line is that we all need to realize that interoperability is a must on the Web platform. Over the years, there have been a few unique solutions that can be considered steps toward the "opening of the global social network." There are action-based feed open aggregators; and there's OpenID but also OAuth, which is a web protocol for delegated secure API authentication. It's all about granting limited temporary access.

Moreover, combining all of these services and creating one working solution that would interconnect the dots by creating decentralized social graphs on an open platform is a concept that originates mainly from Brad Fitzpatrick, even though umpteen different approaches are being taken because a lot of people have been working on this lately. We'll see...

"Either social networks will keep their walls up to force individuals to choose, or they will open up in the hope that they'll get the customer even if their competitor does, too. History suggests it'll be the former followed by the latter. For those sick of maintaining multiple profiles, let's hope the players work through the cycles quickly."

- Jimmy Guterman