How many times have you answered emails from different websites confirming the same friends? How many times have you joined a social network, added a few friends, and then gave up because your network wasn’t there? Do you even remember all your usernames for sites that you haven’t logged into in a while?
These questions are being dissected, and you can even contribute to the discussion. Just join the Google Group.
Saturday at BarCampBlock in Palo Alto, Brad Fitzpatrick, David Recordon, and Joseph Smarr gave a talk entitled, "Opening the Social Graph". Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerburg explained this concept of a social matrix to the world only a few months ago.
But the social graph has a problem. Fitz explains it simply:
“People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site”
But what if you want to be friends with someone on Twitter, but not on Pownce? Some companies have developed wonderful social graphs (Facebook) with huge audiences (MySpace), but there is no way to port that data across multiple networks, or ensure that the data is secure.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you signed up to a site like Facebook for the first time, and you had all your friends from other social networks on the first screen waiting to be added as a friend? What if you joined Flickr for the first time, and found out that 20 of your friends from high school have been posting photos everyday?
It’s a cool concept to me, and I think these guys are on the right track. There is a lot of work that needs to be done on the developer end of things so that the user barely notices a change.
The debate about personal and private data will continue, but I think we are moving towards a solution. The more forms we fill out on the web, the more we are accustomed to trusting a new social network. But, how many times have you read a Terms of Service?
Relationships in the real world will always overpower anything online, but we are getting to the point where we rely on social networks for all of our interpersonal informaiton gathering. All we need is some glue to merge it all together.
6 Comments
Personally, I like using different Soc. networks for different causes. Like I have tried something new with Pownce in that I add everyone–I found it to not be interesting otherwise. However, on Twitter, I only add back people who I know, same with Myspace. My favourite feature on any soc net is the Facebook Limited profile…brilliant!
Yes, I like Facebook’s limited profile. I also like Pownce’s fan feature. And you are right, each social network has a unique purpose, but I kinda wish my identity was common among them all.
interesting stuff homey
hardly interesting. im glad that im not working on such a boring thing. i mean who really uses these crappy sites like twitter, pownce, etc except a bunch of ‘my first webapp’ developers, pretend technology futurists, and failed media lab students.
this “boring thing” is still interesting to me
Yes, it’s true that even some social media junkies get tired of reg’ing and trying to stay on top of all sites.
I watch what others are saying about different sites if I don’t have the time or feel the need to try out a new site.
I DO like that there are different sites because they DO have different features, and NOT everyone is on all sites. For a true SM junkie 1/2 of the game is finding all their “friends” on all the sites. IF it just happened for you “growing” your social media networks may not be as much fun. Same reason people hunt, fish, grow gardens, instead of just buying food at the grocery store.
One can also leverage one network to have their friends add them, comment, etc on other networks.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Adam Nollmeyer
Phoenix, AZ