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Social Connections
Posted 28th April 2008 at 7:44pm by M1ke, tagged as Internet | Commenting Closed

There has been a furor of activity for many months now over social data on the internet. You just may not have noticed, as its been mostly confined to the blogs that have grown out of that area even existing, which could be a case of biting the hand that feeds, or that they honestly think there's a problem. My own personal view is that there is a problem, and the problem is the eponymous friends list. Pretty much every website these days has a friends list - anything that isn't journalism or large community oriented anyway (though even some forums have headed that way).

The purpose of these friends lists is privacy and sharing, two ideals which don't always sit together, but seem to be quite snug on the internet. The simple idea is that if you're putting something on the internet you want your friends to be explicitly notified (as opposed to the more implicit act of them reading your syndication feed). It also means that certain things can be kept private - your personal details shouldn't be left floating on any public pages, nor do you really want photos of you publicly accessible. Certain people may be fine with this idea, but if sites exist that run off it, the majority will unwittingly reveal information they wouldn't otherwise be shouting down a high street. So the proof here is that friends lists have important uses, and for the internet to be fun as well as safe we need these restrictions on our data. The question comes down to who owns them.

There are a number of sites that have transgredded the boundary from a social website to a social network. Whilst Flickr, Last.fm and Ma.gnolia all share various items of our lives (photos, music, bookmarks), they offer only a small range of social features - enough, but not to be used without their main function. Facebook, Myspace and Beebo are all about who you know, and how you know them. Facebook has become the current market leader (at least in England and the States) because if its slick design, clever ideas and complete lack of any competition because no one will leave. Whilst this is an excellent business model for them, I worry about how this will stiffle other sites - the internet has always bread innovation through competition but with Facebook owning a more complete "social graph" than any other site people use, will they really leave? It added "Applications" last year, which meant other sites could leaverage its connections internally, but nothing gets let out. People who try get their accounts banned.

Having to build a social graph on each site doesn't work. Having a single site that knows all the info doesn't work. A few months ago, thanks to Scoble, I discovered FriendFeed, a great little site that aggregates my content from various sites into one handy place. Its a great idea and an interesting way to change conversations in "the blogosphere" but lacks one of the two features of the social internet - privacy. There are a few options, but if it adds more it will just become yet another site that we have to configure and rebuild our friends list for. Its a cool site, but no solution. What is the solution then? I think I know it, though something of this magnitude would need a lot of people co-operating to achieve it. The core of my design is based around an internet standard since before the web - email. The idea is based around an idea similar to OpenID. Most importantly the home, will be able to be anywhere. Your social data, your activity on the internet, and it should stay that way. I'll reveal more tomorrow.

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