I’m not the only one thinking about portable social networks:
- Derek suggests a definition list of relationships, which I personally think is unnecessarily complex: the same information can be encoded in the
relattribute of a humble hyperlink. - Thomas points to some specific cases like moving from Myspace to Facebook: see? it’s not just about early adopters.
- Phil Gyford talks about organising a network into groups for selective portability.
There are some good comments on these posts ‘though I keep noticing the trend for things to get too complex too quickly. Tom Carden mentions FOAF but I have a number of issues with that:
- Publishing XML is hard, certainly harder than publishing HTML.
- Out of sight is out of mind. I’ve actually got a FOAF file here at adactio but I haven’t updated it in years. Invisible metadata rots.
A lot of people are talking about the need for some kind of centralised service (ala Gravatar) for storing a social network. But surely the last thing we need is yet another walled garden or roach motel?
I’d much prefer a distributed solution and, frankly, I wish Gravatar had gone down that route given its often slugglish ways. I realise that a centralised service is needed for people who don’t have their own URL but it should, in my opinion, be second choice rather than default.
In any case, I think we may be barking up the wrong tree with all this talk of needing something new. Personally, I don’t think the solution need be complicated it all. It’s within reach right now and it doesn’t require the creation of any new service.
Suppose, just suppose, that…
- my Flickr contacts page,
- my Last.fm contacts page,
- my Cork’d drinking buddies,
- my dConstruct Backnetwork
- and any other contact list on any other social networking site
… were marked up with XFN (update: or more importantly, hCard—see below). Now all I have to do is provide one of those URLs to the next social networking site I join.
Far fetched? Two of the sites I listed are already walking the walk. All that’s needed is for the sign-up form on the next fadsite I join to at least include the option of importing a buddy list by pointing to a URL.
Sure, it won’t work perfectly. People might have different names from site to site. But that’s okay. It’ll work good enough. It will probably get 80% of my contacts imported. And that’s a lot better than the current count of zero.
We don’t need yet another centralised service. The information is already out there, it just needs to be explicitly marked up.
Once you populate a network on one site, that information should be easily portable to another site. That’s doable. It isn’t even that hard: all it requires is the addition of a few rel attributes and possibly some hCard encoding.
Let’s not go chasing a complicated solution when a simpler one will do.
So here’s my plea—nay, my demand—to the next Web X.X social networking doohickey that wants me to join up:
- Give me a simple input field for entering a URL that lists my contacts.
- Parse that URL for people and relationships.
- Voila! I’ve added a bunch of friends. I may repeat from step one with a different URL.
- Markup my contacts on your doohickey in an easily exportable way.
Who wants to get the ball rolling? Why can’t this become as ubiquitous as gradients, closed betas, giant text and wet-floor reflections?
For all the talk of social media and the strength of weak ties, there isn’t much action being taken to really try to “harness collective intelligence®”. Within the confines of their own walls, these Web X.X sites might be all about social this and social that, but I want to see more sites practice what they preach on a wider scale… the scale of the World Wide (semantic) Web.
Update
Following on from some comments and Twitter chat, I wanted to clarify a few points:
Yes, social networks differ depending on context. That’s why I want the ability to point at more than one URL. If I join up to a new music site, I might want to point to my Last.fm contacts, but not my Flickr contacts. If I join a new site about food or drink, I’d probably want to point to my Cork’d drinking buddies, but not my Linkdin network. Or I might want to point to any combination thereof: Flickr + Twitter - Last.fm, for example.
The issue of whether the people you’re adding even want to be your friend is a red herring. That’s an issue regardless of portability. I can quite easily add people as my friends on Flickr who don’t want to reciprocate. The same goes for Twitter. Portability will allow me to add friends en masse but it won’t ever automatically add me as a friend to the people I’m importing: that’s still up to them.
No, this won’t move 100% of contacts from network to network. But it will move a lot. My user name is adactio on Flickr, Last.fm, Twitter, Upcoming, Technorati and Cork’d. I suspect a lot of people use the same user name across sites. For sites that use real names, there’s an even greater chance of portability.
None of this portability is irreversible, it’s just a shortcut. If I get false positives—people imported that I don’t want as contacts—I can just remove that relationship. Likewise if I fail to import some people automatically, I’ve still got the old-fashioned way of doing it by hand (which we all have to do now anyway).
Forget about XFN for a minute. The important thing is that I’m pointing to a page and saying, “any people listed on this page are contacts I want to import.” Now, there is no <person> element in HTML so how does it know which strings are people? Well, we need some way of saying “this is a real name”, or “this is a nickname”. We have that already:
class="fn"andclass="nickname". These are properties of hCard. So I guess it’s hCard usage that really matters. That said, XFN can added an extra level of granularity: contact vs. friend, at least. But I stand corrected: the really important formatting issue here is marking up “who are the people on this page?” rather than “what are the relationships on this page?” The URL itself contains the information that everyone listed is a contact.
Just take a look at these URLs:
- http://corkd.com/people/adactio/buddies/
- https://www.flickr.com/people/adactio/contacts/
- http://last.fm/user/adactio/friends/
A semantic consensus is already emerging across sites in URL structure:
http://site name/[people|user]/username/[buddies|contacts|friends]/
All that’s needed is to explicitly mark up any people on those pages. That’s easily done with hCard. All these sites have to do is edit a template. For extra relationship richness, XFN can help.