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Open Your Social Network or Face Wired’s Wrath!
August 6th, 2007 at 9:33 amSource:CenterNetworks
Update: Mashable Pete has a good writeup about opening up social networks.
Scott Gilbertson from Wired goes off today on Facebook and every other closed social network.
He begins with:
When entering data into Facebook, you're sending it on a one-way trip. Want to show somebody a video or a picture you posted to your profile? Unless they also have an account, they can't see it. Your pictures, videos and everything else is stranded in a walled garden, cut off from the rest of the web.
He continues:
Social networking should be based on open standards, just like e-mail. Some social networking companies are starting to build open platforms that allow your personal data to be exported and put to use anywhere you like. At this point, "friend" relationships remain unique to the social networks. The web still lacks a generalized way to convey relationships between people's identities on the internet.
I agree with Scott on this point. Imagine being able to trust a friend for any network. So if moo@moo.com is a friend, then any social service I sign up for will automatically associate moo@moo.com to my account. Would save Jason from declaring bankruptcy on the next popular service.
Scott concludes that anyone can create their own Facebook by combining a variety of "open" tools. He leaves out the fact that without users, the open network is meaningless.
One question for the average Facebook user would be, "how many other social networks they are using?" While some of us might be on every network possible, is the average non-geek doing this? I doubt it.
Fred Wilson also discusses the Open Social Network and agrees with my point above. He notes, "I wish it were so, but most of Facebook's traditional users (like my two daughters) don't care that their data is locked up in Facebook."
Think about the time and effort it would save if the friends piece was separate from the social networking tool. It would also save time when we de-friend a person. One click and they are out of the network of 20 social networking sites. There is a lot of power there. Scoble could probably sleep another 2 hours a night instead of clicking "add to friends, skip this step" 200 times a day.
