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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