Do You Want One Social Networking Profile to Rule Them All?
There’s talk lately of the social graph problem: “people are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site.” One proposed solution is to create an open, interoperable representation of our social relationships on the web. Web apps would use this unified contacts store instead of building their own. But is the “social graph problem” a real one for most people? Might the average Internet user be better off with a distributed and fragmented online social graph?
Facebook, of course, would like to solve the social graph problem by becoming the de facto friend database for every application. And a number of startups are aiming at the social aggregation space. For example, socialthing! presented their vision of an aggregated and enhanced social networking application at last week’s TechStars event in Boulder. Their goal is to free relationship data from silos in order to expose it to advertisers and marketers.
I use social web apps fairly heavily and yet I don’t feel overly burdened by having to maintain relationships across the various services. In fact, there are some benefits to each service having its own representation of my friends and followers and acquaintances and colleagues:
- It’s more like real life, with shades of difference in interaction and relationship. You probably don’t interact with every one of your acquaintances in the same way or with the same intensity. A LinkedIn contact means something different than a Facebook contact, which is something yet again different from someone you follow on Twitter or Pownce.
- It gives you more privacy. You might want to share certain aspects of your life only on LiveJournal and others only in the professional setting of Xing.
- It makes it harder for advertisers to exploit your social activities. While it’s true that you can benefit from targeted information about products and services you might like to use, there’s also a benefit to keeping your social interactions less easily monetized.
A unified social graph may benefit early adopters who want to try every new service, people who have thousands of “friends” online, and marketers trying to insert themselves into online social lives. But the benefits are less obvious for the average Internet user, who might join into just two or three social networks online and maintain only tens of contacts across those networks instead of hundreds or thousands.
Do you want a unified representation of your social life on the web? Why or why not?
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I do not want a universal linkage for the reasons you point out, especially to lower the risk of a spam melt-down that drags myself and my peoples down, and also to keep my people compartmentalized. Sure, it reflects my control-freak suchness, but it also seems more polite to my contacts and friends, ie not spider them out without permission.
There’s nothing to prevent a unified profile graph having all the characteristics you describe. This can be about increasing communication and privacy capabilities, within the unified environment that is the (Semantic) Web. Consider what the blogosphere would be like if the Web at large had divisions like those found between social networking systems – e.g. this blog could only be viewed by Californians…
Hell yeah. My social activities should be like my email, one place to go to, one place to publish things. Friends can still belong to different groups and I can share different information with each group. There is no reason why I should have to log in to 5 different places, manage 5 different profiles, etc. For me, with friends and family around the globe, it’s not an option to just use one social network.
In order for this unified system to work, we do need a different infrastructure than we have today, where each network is closed in itself. Who knows, it might just need a simple invention like Trackback or RSS were for blogs to open things up.
Danny: I agree, it could be about increasing communication and privacy, but I worry that it will be about the exact opposite. I didn’t mean to imply that I’m happy with the siloes that are services like Facebook and LinkedIn, just that I’m worried about what the alternatives might be.
The idea of a single (commercial) repository of MY social information is pretty scary. I suppose many people would be fine with it, assuming protections like being able to allow fields on a host-by-host basis.
I have to say I’m not a big fan of the explosion in social networking, in part because it has thrown us back to the days of AOL-ilke silos. I know I’m a bit of a luddite in this respect, but to use email or the phone, I don’t have to publicly declare any personal information at all.
Yes. It’s called a blog. Add links to your profiles on the sites and you’re all set.
Anne, thanks for the mention about socialthing! for sure, but I’d like to make a few distinctions here.
First off, we’re not exposing relationship data to advertisers. The data we’re “exposing” about users is on a case-by-case basis where the end-user opts in to an API use case.
Essentially, we’re taking your online relationships and synchronizing them across the networks. Now, in some instances, you won’t want that to happen, like say you don’t want your Facebook friends to meet up with your LinkedIn contacts, well, we give that option to split things up like that. The key use is that we’re trying to merge these disassociated social graphs together.
I’d like to contrast your point about these disassociations being more like real life. I’m not friends with John, for instance, only when I’m at the local coffee shop, and the mall, but not when I’m at the party down the street. I’m simply friends with John. In terms of business contacts, it works the same way, just in different venues. So we’re giving you the opportunity to synchronize those contracts across all the venues you so choose, so that you can continue to interact with them no matter what website you’re on.
As for privacy, our privacy controls are inherited by the parent site, meaning that your privacy isn’t being compromised with any of these sites you’re choosing to integrate with each other. Also, the profile that you build based on the services that you’ve integrated, has privacy controls attached to each specific part, so if you want to keep specific info away from specific contacts, or groups for that matter, we give you that ability.
As for the marketing standpoint? The end user isn’t being exploited in this case. The information about a user is being kept very tightly sealed, and we are very in tune with a user’s privacy. Advertisers will simply be able to target a demographic, not individual users. It’s like reading Bicycling magazine and having ads about bikes targeted at you. That magazine has profiled you as a biker, and thus displays ads accordingly.
And lastly, when it comes to the usefulness to the end user, people that use just one or two sites may only see certain benefits from our platform, which I won’t disclose until we release. A real use for them is when a new site might come out that users want to go to. For instance, when a lot of people started using Facebook recently, the users would have benefited from a platform like ours because it makes their information and their relationships portable, to the point where they would have been able to get in with a built-in friend base.
It’s basically a layer that sits above everything and allows you to control and view what goes on in the underlying parts.
I agree with Junger when he points out that the key is the blog. By using the an individuals blog as the hub it is easy for them to publish their profile information in a microformat or an FOAF file. Use XFN linkages in a blog roll to point to friends which can easily be verified because the friend would need to have you in his list also. That confirms a connection. But having links to friends is only useful if you have information to share that they would want to consume. It’s about the conversation which can take the form of a blog post, a video, a photo, a list of bookmarks etc.
That’s the great thing about standards…everybody has there own.
Why not have one ring (Google) to control all others, the problem is that I doubt there will be a single truly open standard unless it’s some sort of FOAF/torrent set up.
As part of my “Getting To One” simplification I am removing multiple or overlapping web applications. In order to have a single profile and control what people see when they google me I have set up a website containing what I want to show in public and use this address in anything that needs profile information
Hey, If you use social web fairly heavily, I’m surprised you haven’t mention the new social aggregator- 8hands.
I actually agree with most of the things you’ve written, and yet I find this app extremely useful.
The main problem of things like socialthing is that it pretends to replace the existing social networks.
As you said, a Myspace friend is different than a facebook friend, and the average user would like to keep these networks but it doesn’t mean that a social aggregation is not in need.
The best thing about 8hands is that it aggregates your friends into a single spot on your desktop! that’s way better than an online page. plus, it keeps all different social networks in use and clearly separates the friends by their social network.
Maybe you haven’t heard of it yet, since it’s alpha, but it solves all of the problems you’ve presented in this piece.
If it will function as outlined by Matt Galligan I would be interested to try it out. Apart of that I have no problem to have 5 “social” tabs open in my browser. A nice (but somehow geeky) way would be to publish one’s “lifestream” as initiated some weeks ago by some programmers – a good example how to do this you’ll find at Manuela Hoffmann’s Blog (but it’s in German).
I’ve been banging on about Social Network Fatigue for some time. And there’s already someone out there who could take the pain away.
I’m pretty sure OpenID could do a pretty good job of creating an open, secure and portable profile format. Certainly something better than FOAF.
It’s taken some time, but we’re finally seeing people take this issue seriously…
Personally, I’d love to see a bunch of these tools combined so I’d only have to log into one place. Half of the sites I have membership to are for a single friend who uses that service exclusively. On the other hand, having multiple profiles allows me to separate my personal and professional lives, though for a web worker that line becomes more and more blurred each day.
@Johnny Drama
8Hands is a great app and great concept, but it being tied to the desktop presents a few problems:
None of the information is portable, and you won’t have a good idea as to the true “social graph” which a user would then be able to take with them to new sites.
Finally, the actual use case isn’t portable, meaning that unless I’m on my own computer and using the 8Hands app, I’m not going to be able to do everything from one view.
@everyone talking about FOAF and other open formats
socialthing! is going to integrate those open formats where it makes sense. OpenID is obvious, unless there is a better solution that comes out in the near future. FOAF is a possibility, we just have to see how we can best integrate it in our infrastructure. And finally, microformats like hCard and hCal make total sense. We’re also releasing an API that will take the FOAF thing a bit further, and it will also be an open standard. Our dev team keeps wanting to dub it “Open Relationship” but we’ll see how far that goes…
We don’t need another Social Networking site.to track all the other social networking site. This is getting Lame.
A site to keep track, or oversee, all the others? This is complete overkill. When it becomes a hassle to maintain, then too much energy has been put into it already. Would these people come to your aid, when called upon, if you are stranded with a busted car? Most would not. Social sites are just that. They should be kept apart. Not all of your friends and family are of equal importance in your life. Face to face is real.
This all sounds way too complicated…..I am going to go take a nap.
http://www.drunkenpanda.com
I’m not sure?
My Yahoo, iGoogle, etc. were all started to consolidate your web-1.0 in one place, and they are both unsuccessful in adoption rates. An aggregation of apps/content simply does not provide a better user experience.
The explosion of socnet sites has parallels with the dotcom boom, and aggregating something that is going to go bust is a really bad idea. What the world needs is a better, simpler app that addresses issues of compartmentalization, privacy, interactions, etc. in one place. First simplify, then enrich.
An uber-networking site is going to be dragged down into the socnet implosion. Apart from socialthing, there is a CMU Socialstream project also which you should check out (i am not associated with either of these)
Henri, I have seen the SocialThing!
If I were you, I would be afraid. It is very different from your offering.
Wayne- I wouldn’t be doing this if I was constantly afraid of competition- I have seen the Thing and I think it is very impressive.
I know the founders of Techstars and I haven’t met the guys at the Thing- I do apologize for indirectly calling Techstars “ripoffs” as they both have a lot more merit for innovation that I give them credit for…I have made it sort of a personal feud and its definitely out of character of me to bash my own Web2.0 contacts in such a public forum.
Call it envy if you will but I am very happy to test out my own team on their abilities with all the competition. For the record- TechStars is the real deal and anyone who gets to work with the founders are going to get more than what they would dream out of it as a young entrepreneur-
it would be great to find one great tool that will be able to consolidate all my social network accounts but there are dangers in doing that as well so if and when there is one, I would have to think twice before registering myself there.
i think it’s okay if you are not personally involved with your social media accounts but if you are filling all those personal information there then it’s quite risky..
It said AOL… NO!!! go away, yea that’s what I want my friends to see me with… AOL anything!
That crap is just about dead… let’s try not to revive it.